The real paradox is that we think that we see the world as how it is, like a camera does, when in fact what we "see" is reconstruction based on surprisingly imperfect visual perception and equally imperfect recollection of prior experiences.
… like a camera does :)
https://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/cameras-vs-human...
Dictionaries:
merriam webster: to perceive by the eye [1]
dictionary.com: to perceive with the eyes; look at [2]
cambridge: to be conscious of what is around you by
using your eyes: [3]
eymonline: Middle English sēn, from Old English seon (Anglian sean)
"be or become aware of by means of the eye; look, behold;"
and
It is attested by late Old English as "be able to see with the
eyes, have the faculty of sight, not be blind." [4]
[2] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/see
[3] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/see
Where does this "perceive" happen?
> merriam webster: to perceive by the eye [1]
> perceived ... attained awareness
Perception is part of the definition you provided. How do you come to call it not relevant now?
Does the eye of a dead person see anything? Is it like a camera that clicks in a forrest with no-one to hear?
The notion of eye mentioned in the definitions you quoted is to distinguish "see" from other senses such as "hear" or "taste." Even at a physical level, the eye alone is little like a camera. It has an uneven distribution of light sensors with spaces without coverage (optical nerve).
"The retina is actually a piece of the brain that has grown into the eye and processes neural signals when it detects light. Ganglion cells carry information from the retina to the higher brain centers; other nerve cells within the retina perform the first stages of analysis of the visual world. The axons of the retinal ganglion cells, with the support of other types of cells, form the optic nerve and carry these signals to the brain."
"Investigators have known for decades that there are 10 to 15 ganglion cell types in the retina that are adapted for picking up different movements and then work together to send a full picture to the brain. The study estimated the amount of information that is carried to the brain by seven of these ganglion cell types."
I was providing an answer to your question. The location of perception isn't relevant to the definition of the word "see". This conversation was about the word "see" applying to the eyes.
"I saw a cow outside" - "No, you perceived a cow. You have no idea what you saw because you cannot access that information."
Does this seem like a good definition of "see" according to you?
Of course that's not true.
> "I saw a cow outside" - "No, you perceived a cow. You have no idea what you saw because you cannot access that information."
No. You both saw and perceived a cow. You also thought the cow outside was too skinny for being a Chianina. We perceive things through the use of the senses, and then we interpret, discern, and think.
You perceived a cow through the senses of sight, smell, and maybe sound and touch but probably not through taste. Your sense of sight was used to see, making you aware of the cow in that way.
Why so much discussion about the basic meanings of words that can be viewed in a dictionary? I find it odd that on HN people want to debate the meanings of words, when those words are already well defined.
Are you saying that the brain interpreting signals from the eyes (real-time) cannot be affected by past experiences (i.e. interpreted)?
If that’s not what you’re saying then I’m not sure what your opinion is, feel free to re-state it if you want to have more pointless discussions ^^
Unlike a camera? ;)
> equally imperfect recollection of prior experiences
I guess we (humans) put our understanding of the world into the mechanics of the camera, so somehow I see the mechanics of a camera like a summary of human "recollection of prior experiences" regarding visual imperfection.
Cameras have higher overall resolution than the eye, as well as it being consistent across the sensor surface (unlike the eye). Eyes have pretty good dynamic range, but DSLRs are definitely catching up. Same with sensitivity. So I'm not sure whether I'd describe a camera as being all that imperfect.
But the point I was making is that we mostly navigate the world unconsciously believing that we perceive it directly via the light that hits our eyes. But we actually "see" an unfolding reconstruction that our brain pieces together from evidence contributed by our eyes and memories. If your vision is good, and especially when you're young, it's easy to be completely unconscious of the actuality of vision.
> I guess we (humans) put our understanding of the world into the mechanics of the camera, so somehow I see the mechanics of a camera like a summary of human "recollection of prior experiences" regarding visual imperfection.
Interesting question. I wonder if photography changed the way that people think of their vision - compared to previous methods of visual capture like painting or drawing? I suspect not but I don't know.
While it’s better at that than your eye, that is vastly different from perceiving reality over time. Which is, incidentally, the only way humans perceive reality.
The way you perceive a scene to large extent depends on experiences you have had immediately before that (as well as in all of your prior life), your mood, what the air smells like, whom you are with, and so on. If you sit in a grey room for a long period of time and step into a garden, the colors will jump at you. If you grew up in a small town and stepped onto a rooftop in the middle of a modern megalopolis for the first time, you might initially be stunned by the amount of detail hitting you all at once; if you lived and seen that image every other day for years, you’d be inclined to filter out a lot and focus on what changed. You would not be able to be tricked by your mind into thinking the moon is surprisingly large when it’s near the horizon have you not had the prior experience of seeing the same moon overhead. So on, so forth.
Furthermore, the “objective” light values captured by the camera are fairly useless by themselves. We have to trust bundled software, film manufacturers, or indeed our own skills to interpret those raw values in terms of display space, and hopefully produce something resembling what we have experienced in the moment.
As an aside, it’s often frustrating how some believe that the output of camera’s JPEG engine at default settings is how reality is. It irks me when someone characterizes a dull[0] photo as “true to life”, and a photo interpreted to make the most use of P3 color space as “edited”, implying that it’s no longer representing reality objectively. There’s no objective representation of a single moment in time and there’s no useful reference point here; both outcomes are “edited”, but perhaps in the latter case the photographer tried to convey how they felt in the moment rather than defer to the view of whoever engineered their film or camera’s JPEG engine.
[0] A film or camera engine, while designed by undoubtedly skilled people, is optimized to provide acceptable outcomes for most diverse scenes and doesn’t really know much about final output medium, and as a result the outcomes tend to make a very conservative use of available color space.
Addendum: and yes, I do suspect that this aspect of photography has influenced (and not in a way I would characterize as “good”) our perception of reality and how we think about our vision.
Cover one eye and look at something, then uncover the eye, and notice the added "depth" information. Personally, I don't observe the depth information from stereo vision in a way that I can easily describe in terms of a (single) photographic image.
Apparently the images from the two separate eyes are combined after processing some of the depth information. My consciousness does not seem to have direct access to the entire pipeline.
(I made some goggles to experiment for longer durations. Great fun.)
Similar things apply to face recognition, instantly comprehending words from letters, mathematical formulas (possibly only for trained mathematicians), and perhaps even fear of spidery images.
For example, he is able to show that our unconscious processes that are responsable for parsing text and numbers are able to assign conceptual meaning to words/numbers (ie "five" and "5" lead to the same meaning), before any conscious awareness.
Although my summary hardly does it justice (as I'm still half-way through reading it), I highly recommend Scott Alexender's book review on Astral Codex Ten[0], it gives an exhaustive overview of the book and the subjects it covers.
[0]: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-consc...
It sounds like you might be interested in experiments with deliberately redirecting your eyes. There's lots of interesting phenomena you can achieve by pointing one eye at one thing and another eye at another thing. Here's a paper of mine which can serve as a sort of stepping stone into this wide unexplored field: https://philpapers.org/archive/ALEDSK.pdf
Night Vision, Heat Maps, LIDAR, and Telescopic lenses can capture more of the world 'as it is' than humans could ever hope to achieve. It's why we developed them! :)
Cameras and their sensors are just different from the human eye. This doesn't make them capture reality "how it is", they just have different capabilities and they make different trade-offs. They are certainly different, but not necessarily "more real".
Cameras don't capture "reality".
An insightful link on this topic, shared previously here on HN, which is very illuminating: "Photography is not objective" [1]
[1] https://aaronhertzmann.com/2022/03/17/photography-is-not-obj...