Please read my post before commenting.
I’ve heard the elbow thing and the “what do you see behind you” thing a hundred times.
My thought process is that the optic nerve is essentially an HDMI cable. Whether it is connected to a computer that is turned off (a closed eye, if you will) or just completely disconnected (suppose you are missing an eye or something), the signal it sends to the monitor is the same: nothing.
The “monitor”, the visual cortex, as far as I understand, just constantly processes what the optic nerve sends. So if blind people don’t lack a visual cortex, and the signal that cortex receives from the optic nerve is identical to that of a regular person seeing zero light (assume closing your eyes means 0 light, disregarding light seeping through eyelids and whatnot), how can you say that blind people see nothing while we see black?
In: Biology
>the optic nerve is essentially an HDMI cable
Ok, what about an HDMI cable that’s cut in the middle or has one or both ends snipped off? Or one where the middle is so frayed that the internals of the wire are exposed? A lot of blindness (or partial/near blindness) is due to the optic nerve not developing properly or not making the right connections. The premise that it’s always a perfect HD cable that is always well-connected on both ends is incorrect.
>**if** blind people don’t lack a visual cortex, and the signal that cortex receives from the optic nerve is identical to that of a regular person seeing zero light
False premise. The signal that my visual cortex receives from my right optic nerve is not at all like what it receives from my left eye when there’s zero light.
On top of that, we know black because we’ve seen it compared to white and other colors. If we hadn’t, you wouldn’t. Without light, there is no darkness.
For instance, you know what it feels like when there are 20kHz radio waves around and what it feels like when there are 20GHz radio waves around, so when you disconnect the antenna that you have implanted in your brain, it must feel like 20GHz regardless of what radio waves are around in the area right? No? Of course not, because you never developed a sensor for radio waves and innate feel for the differences between them.
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