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You see 1 million photons per eye per second. A light buln generates 10^60 photons a second. Your eyes are ignorant the vast majority of photons, and if your

You see 1 million photons per eye per second. A light buln generates 10^60 photons a second. Your eyes are ignorant the vast majority of photons, and if your brain in it's current form tried to take on a greater number, such a feat would compromise your entire body from glucose consumption alone. So, yes, ignorance is responsible for you seeing what you need to see of the universe in order to survive.

Retra 10y ago
Most of those photons contribute no relevant information. But your argument is shit anyway: you suppose that having more powerful eyes would overload the brain, even though they both developed in relation to each other. If you had more powerful eyes, you'd obviously have evolved a more powerful brain to use them.
- emblem21 10y ago
  You've missed the point entirely, perhaps because of some misguided faith. How do YOU know what photons are relevant and which ones aren't? Did you personally train your brain into accepting only photons under certain contextual conditions that only you personally allow? No, you didn't. Two billion years of evolution did that for you when it determined how your neurons would be configured to form your visual cortex. And it did it without your permission. You are ignorant to the history of that evolution, and you are permanently ignorant to everything that evolution was ignorant of. Tell me, how many creatures evolve to have more noses? More ears? Scaling sensory organs horizontally is not a recipe for survival because it is neurologically expensive to support that naive type of scaling. Instead, neurology evolves by intentionally limiting the sample sizes of reality to near insignificance... and then shapes your behavior based on that. It's like me giving you a single pixel of something and you correctly can deduce a huge body of information from that to then determine what actions you can take. Your deductions aren't reality, mind you. They are models, and models are not reality. Thus, the ignorance you seem to think you can conquer if you just try super duper hard enough is a fundamentally permanent to the human condition. There is no such thing as "powerful" in evolution. All sensory intake and neurology is not just linearly relational... it is contingent upon neurology extrapolating MORE about reality from INSIGNIFICANT sample sizes with LESS energy.
  - Retra 10y ago
    If what you were saying were true, neither of us would even know what a photon is, let alone that they exist.
gjm11 10y ago
> You see 1 million photons per eye per second. One human retina has about 120 million photoreceptors. In reasonably well-lit conditions they will all fire many times per second. I think this figure is too small by a factor of at least 1000, maybe more. > A light bulb generates 10^60 photons per second. Back of envelope: energy per photon = Planck constant times speed of light over wavelength (there might be a factor of 2pi or something missing there) or about 4x10^-19 Joules at visible-light wavelengths. A typical light bulb might put out, say, 10W of visible light, or 2.5x10^19 photons. If it's an old-style incandescent, a lot of energy goes out in the infrared; let's be generous and say it's 2.5x10^20 photons. So this number is too large by a factor of at least 10^39. It's still true that the great majority of photons emitted by a light bulb don't affect what you see when you look at it. For instance, because most of them are emitted in directions that don't let them reach your eyes. It is entirely beyond me how it is useful to categorize this as "ignorance".

Retra 10y ago

Most of those photons contribute no relevant information. But your argument is shit anyway: you suppose that having more powerful eyes would overload the brain, even though they both developed in relation to each other. If you had more powerful eyes, you'd obviously have evolved a more powerful brain to use them.

emblem21 10y ago
You've missed the point entirely, perhaps because of some misguided faith. How do YOU know what photons are relevant and which ones aren't? Did you personally train your brain into accepting only photons under certain contextual conditions that only you personally allow? No, you didn't. Two billion years of evolution did that for you when it determined how your neurons would be configured to form your visual cortex. And it did it without your permission. You are ignorant to the history of that evolution, and you are permanently ignorant to everything that evolution was ignorant of. Tell me, how many creatures evolve to have more noses? More ears? Scaling sensory organs horizontally is not a recipe for survival because it is neurologically expensive to support that naive type of scaling. Instead, neurology evolves by intentionally limiting the sample sizes of reality to near insignificance... and then shapes your behavior based on that. It's like me giving you a single pixel of something and you correctly can deduce a huge body of information from that to then determine what actions you can take. Your deductions aren't reality, mind you. They are models, and models are not reality. Thus, the ignorance you seem to think you can conquer if you just try super duper hard enough is a fundamentally permanent to the human condition. There is no such thing as "powerful" in evolution. All sensory intake and neurology is not just linearly relational... it is contingent upon neurology extrapolating MORE about reality from INSIGNIFICANT sample sizes with LESS energy.
- Retra 10y ago
  If what you were saying were true, neither of us would even know what a photon is, let alone that they exist.

gjm11 10y ago

> You see 1 million photons per eye per second. One human retina has about 120 million photoreceptors. In reasonably well-lit conditions they will all fire many times per second. I think this figure is too small by a factor of at least 1000, maybe more. > A light bulb generates 10^60 photons per second. Back of envelope: energy per photon = Planck constant times speed of light over wavelength (there might be a factor of 2pi or something missing there) or about 4x10^-19 Joules at visible-light wavelengths. A typical light bulb might put out, say, 10W of visible light, or 2.5x10^19 photons. If it's an old-style incandescent, a lot of energy goes out in the infrared; let's be generous and say it's 2.5x10^20 photons. So this number is too large by a factor of at least 10^39. It's still true that the great majority of photons emitted by a light bulb don't affect what you see when you look at it. For instance, because most of them are emitted in directions that don't let them reach your eyes. It is entirely beyond me how it is useful to categorize this as "ignorance".