SteveKlinko wrote: ↑May 23rd, 2022, 7:44 amSince I like to study the Experience of Redness, I will quite often just look at my Visual Experience with the intention of finding something Red to look at so I can contemplate it. I have found that I don't really need to scan the whole Visual Image because Red things just automatically pop out and say Hey, Here I Am. I assume this is some subconscious processing that can detect Red Neurons firing. I didn't need to pay attention to see the Red parts of the Visual Experience before Seeing them. It's a little bit of an exaggeration to say that we cannot Experience the Redness without specific attention to a particular location in the Image where the Redness was. Also, if I am just Looking at my Visual Experience with no purpose in mind then I can see all the colors that are there without any special attention to any particular color. My Eyes will of course need to jump around a little to get the full Image but there could be dozens of Colors in that scan of a scene that I did not pay attention to but can report about the various colors. I Experienced the Colors without any attention to them. In any case, it is the Experience itself that is the important thing we should be exploring, regardless if we had great attention to the Experience or just casually had the Experience. What the heck are all those Colors? In particular, What is Redness? Science does not know the answer to these questions.
Any knowledge of experiences requires attention, so how can you possibly know that "[you] experienced the colors without [paying] any attention to them"?
Anyway, our impression that our visual fields are continuously filled with vivid colors is an illusion:
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"So the visual ‘world’ can be contradictory. [We seem to see impossible 3D objects.—
added] But is it also full of gaps? This isn’t how things
seem. Surveying the room, I have the
feeling of simultaneously grasping the clutter of walls, pieces of furniture, rugs, lights, computers, coffee mugs, and scattered books and papers. Surely my intuitions about my
own sensory experience can’t be wrong. Can they?
One much-discussed reason that you should be suspicious of your sense of a detailed and multicoloured sensory world comes from basic anatomy. The sensitivity of colour vision falls very rapidly, though smoothly, as we move out from the fovea (the dense pit of specialized colour-detecting ‘cone cells’ in the retina which your eye ‘points’ at any item of interest…). Indeed, outside a few degrees of where you are directly looking, you are close to being completely colour blind. The ‘rod’ cells that dominate most of your visual field can only detect dark and light. So the basic anatomy of the eye tells us that, except for within a few degrees of where we are directing our eyes, we are seeing in black and white. Yet, of course, we have the feeling that our entire ‘subjective visual world’ is richly coloured. This, at least, must be an illusion.
While we are on the subject of the retina, notice that cone cells are not just specialized for detecting colour; they are also specialized for picking up fine detail. It is for this reason that your eye directs the fovea onto the word it is currently attempting to read. Indeed, the sensitivity of vision falls rapidly, but smoothly, as we move out from the fovea; and the rate at which sensitivity declines is not arbitrary but is precisely calibrated so that, within the widest possible range, our perceptual abilities are independent of the size that objects project onto the retina. So we can recognize a friend in the distance, make sense of thumbnail pictures on a computer screen, or read a small font, but equally we can also recognize a looming face, make sense of close‑ups from the front row of the cinema, or read a giant billboard from up close. To be able to zoom in or zoom out requires that the smaller the region to be analysed, the more densely our visual ‘resources’ are concentrated.
To see just how sharply concentrated our visual powers are, look at the graph of visual acuity (Figure 3) – a measure of the ability to see fine details that is picked up with the well-known chart of letters of diminishing size beloved of opticians – and notice how precisely it mirrors the density of cone cells in the retina (Figure 2). But this observation implies that, not only is the visual periphery colourless, it is also extremely fuzzy. Surveying the room before me, I have the sense that the entire scene is captured by my inner experience in precise detail; yet this too is an illusion – whatever I am not looking at directly is an inchoate blur.
Elementary facts about the anatomy of the eye, then, contradict our most fundamental intuitions about our sensory experience: we see the world through a narrow window of clarity; almost the entire visual field is colourless and blurry. And, putting anatomy to one side, we can sense that some trickery is afoot by considering some of the strange visual images which directly illustrate the ‘narrowness’ of vision. Consider the strange ‘twelve dots’ illusion in Figure 4. There are twelve black dots arranged in three rows of four dots each. The dots are large enough to be seen clearly and simultaneously against a white background. But when arranged on the grid, they seem only to appear when you are paying attention to them. Dots we are not attending to are somehow ‘swallowed up’ by the diagonal grey lines. Interestingly, we can attend to adjacent pairs of items, to lines, to triangles and even squares – although these are highly unstable. But our attention is in short supply; and where we are not attending, the dots disappear.
The limited visual ‘window’ depends, to some extent at least, on where we are looking. Yet we typically have only the vaguest sense of which part of an image or scene we are looking at directly – we have the impression that the entire visual scene is simultaneously ‘grasped’ in pretty much complete detail. We sense that our imagined ‘mental mirror’ appears to reflect the external world equally sharply, across the whole visual field. Figure 5 makes our eye movements visible to us: as you direct your eye across the grid, you see a patch of white dots wherever you are looking. If you turn the picture 45 degrees in either direction, you may find the dots, both black and white, begin to sparkle more intensely. Our visual experience can depend, rather dramatically, on where we are looking – and we are certainly unable to ‘load up’ this entire image into our minds – even though it is actually very simple and repetitive.
Thus our visual grasp of the world is not quite as precise and all-encompassing."
(Chater, Nick.
The Mind is Flat: The Illusion of Mental Depth and the Improvised Mind. London: Allen Lane, 2018. pp. 39-43)
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- By iamstephanieejike
- By Sy Borg
- By Fanisa Ndhabambi