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
To see black you have to understand what black is. For someone born blind the concept of colour is non-existent.
Some partially blind people see light and dark but even then how so they explain what that is conceptually. Is dark black? Who knows? They can’t explain it because they don’t have a source to reference their explanation against.
It is part of the discussion about colour blindness. You might see red and green. I however don’t. I see shades of something that I refer to as red and green because everyone else calls it that. Sometimes I mix them up. Then it is discovered that I don’t differentiate between two light frequencies that are markedly different. That is Red/Green colour-blindness.
As a result I still don’t know the difference between red and green just as a blind person does not know the difference between nothing and black.
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