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Comment by smokel | Hacker News Reader

I sometimes play with a simple experiment that I think illustrates this quite nicely:

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.

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You might be interested by the book "Consciousness and the Brain" by Stanislas Dehaene. In it, Dehaene tries to define Consciousness, based on a series of reproducible experiments designed to discriminate between conscious and unconscious processes.

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...

Your covering-one-eye thing works particularly nicely if you use it in a place where you can see the tops of lots of trees at various distances overlapping each other. Cover one eye and suddenly all those canopies become one depthless blob, like it's one gigantic treetop.

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

Side fact… ketamin has an interesting side effect. On ketamin your brain cant synthesis the image of both eyes and you are seeing both images at the same time. I tried it once … didnt like it. But this was one of the effects… and beeing confused as it gets

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