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
Sure let’s pretend there are digital computer signals.
1s aren’t coming across the channel.
0s aren’t coming through either.
Nothing is being sent or received. So that display just doesn’t exist.
Now go back to the elbow idea. In the case where nothing is Sending/receiving, you’re going to see similar results as if you were sending/receiving with the elbow.
It’s a bit of a head scratcher, but fully blind people simply don’t see. They lack the sense. A thing you can try is closing one eye and then try to see with that eye. Nothing happens, which is how fully blind people experience it.
Very thought provoking question. I think your last sentence answers it. You called ‘nothing’, ‘black’. You’re cognitively processing a color to something. Like his shoes are black. For blind people, everything’s black (at least as a blind person said once). She wasn’t seeing anything in a room with things. She called it black
How can you paint a picture if you have no canvas right?
Try to think about what you see out of your, say, shoulder blade.
Nothing, right?
Same for someone blind. There’s nothing there to even send “black” to your brain.
Seeing black would mean there was a visual stimulus. But if someone was fully blind from birth – there would be no visual stimulus to say that something is black.
It its kinda like variables in algebra. “x = 0” means that x has a value, and that value is zero. But if you say that “x = ” x has not been assigned a value. No value exists for x in that case. If my eyes do not send data to my brain – there is nothing to interpret.
Our eyes have a spot in which there are no receptors which causes a blind spot in our vision.
Search on google how to check for blind spot. But basically take your left and right ring finger 30cm away from your face so the tip of the fingers is on the level of your eye, close your left eye while with the right eye focusing on the left finger. Now move your right finger slowly to the right. At some point your finger is going to disappear. That spot where it disappears isnt black.. it just doesnt exist and your finger disappears.. its nothing.
There’s a sense called shmision that lets you detects shmotons. When people with this sense turn off their shmeyes, they only see shmlack (which is just the absence of shmotons)
Oh, you don’t have shmision? So that means you’re detecting shmlack right now, right?
Some animals can detect the Earth’s magnetic field to aid in their annual migration. Now describe how you perceive the magnetic field. You can’t because you have no sense of it. That’s how people who are born blind perceive visual information.
Mild tangent, I get migraines so bad I go partially blind and the blind spots are pearlescent.
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