I cannot fathom seeing nothing as opposed to just seeing pitch black. An example I was told is “it’s like trying to see out of your elbow”. I still do not get it
In: Biology
You know how thermal cameras see heat? Now try to see that with your bare eyes.
Or try to detect magnetic fields the way birds can.
Or electric fields the way sharks can.
You can’t because you simply don’t have the organs for it. Far as your naked body is concerned, there is no such thing as a magnetic field. That’s what happens when you lose your eyes: there’s no more organs so in a stable state there is no such thing as electromagnetic radiation within the 500-700nm “ish” band. It just doesn’t exist.
Now that comes with the caveat that if you were once seeing, your brain will almost certainly detect the loss in sensation and do something goofy to try to make up for it, possibly by “seeing black” since that’s as close to “nothing” as we can imagine. But it’s just a phantom sensation the way amputees “feel” their lost parts.
What do you currently see from the back of your head? It’s not a “black void”; it’s just nothing at all.
it’s a pretty hard thing to understand since we process our vision pretty much 100% of our conscious lives, sighted people that is. the people who have been blind since birth have never seen anything at all, and black is just the absence of light. so it’s inaccurate to say they “see black” since they can’t see anything.
the best example i’ve encountered went something like “when you close both eyes you see black but when you close one eye your other eye sees nothing”. not sure if that helps you understand but it made something click for me when i heard it
When you lose an eye, the nerve is no longer receiving signals, so in the same way that a TV screen shows different things compared to when it’s not receiving a signal (static) versus when it’s off, you don’t see blackness out of the missing eye, you don’t see anything. Like they said, like trying to see out of the back of your head or your elbow.
Cover one of your eyes and Leave the other open. Tell me what you see in the closed eye?
Covering one eye surg it still open causes you to see black. Closing that eye makes you see nothing/no signal.
Have you ever gotten lost in a day dream? Like one where you were gone for a couple of minutes before snapping back to reality? If I asked you what you were seeing during the day dream you would say nothing. Your eyes were open, you weren’t seeing black. Your eyes just weren’t providing visual information that you were conscious of. Its like that without the need to day dream
Close your eyes and you see darkness, right? The inside of your eyelids.
Close just one eye, you stop seeing out of it completely.
When I was a kid I used to think blind people must see blackness because that’s what I see when I close my eyes, but then one day I realized that I don’t see blackness behind my head or beneath my feet or anywhere else I don’t have eyes. When you close your eyelids your eyes are still working, it’s just that all you’re seeing is the absence of light (darkness) akin being in a perfectly dark cave or the like. The experience of not being able to see behind you, for example, is from a lack of vision not a lack of light, which means you don’t even see blackness, there’s just no visual input at all. In order for you to ‘see’ darkness you must have functioning eyes, but if your eyes are scooped out of your head or whatever then those spots will revert to being like the bottom of your feet – no visual input at all, not even blackness.
Let’s if I can crack it down.
If you close your eyes, you see darkness. How dark it is, depends on the amount of light in the room. Even if you close your eyes, you still have some “light”.
But if there are no eyes to receive any form of light, then there is no darkness, there’s nothing. Nothing is not darkness or anything. Nothing is nothing.
If you lose an arm, you might get a phantom arm and sometimes feel your arm is there, but if you were born without 1 arm then all you know is 1 arm and nothing else. To the 1 arm borned person, there is no 2nd arm, there never was, there is nothing.
Fuck, I can’t explain it.
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