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I struggle with the idea you can choose your eyes and "see" things. Close my eyes and it's just just black (well, technically eigengrau but everyone calls it b

by riiii 2y ago

I struggle with the idea you can choose your eyes and "see" things. Close my eyes and it's just just black (well, technically eigengrau but everyone calls it black) I'd very much like to have that ability. It sounds like cheating!

schneems 2y ago
It’s not like: visual stimulus. It’s more like when you see something, that experience eventually translates into a picture in your mind. When I close my eyes I “see” black, but I can recall the face of someone I talked to last quite well. It feels like the same circuits as when I was there, but decoupled from the actual optical input. I took a Knowledge based AI course and one interesting thing was that perceptual knowledge (things we experience via sense) was the listed as the furthest from formal logic (knowledge) and the hardest thing to communicate. Even harder than abstract concepts such as “beauty”. So I don’t know if what I said makes sense. Hope it helps though.
- kodt 2y ago
  This seems to be very similar to the debate on internal monologues. No-one can seem to agree on what exactly they think it means.
  - riiii 2y ago
    The internal monologue is interesting. If you are taking, who is listening?
hbosch 2y ago
Nah, you've identified the problem and IMO it's quite philosophical. Like to me, what the person in this article describes is what someone else would call "seeing the apple". >She could think about an apple: its taste, its shape, its color, the way light might hit it. But she didn’t see it. Behind her eyes, “it was completely black,” Shomstein recalled. And yet, “I imagined an apple.” What is the difference between this, and what another person might describe as a hologram? There is no material way to confirm or disconfirm what someone says happens in their imagination. I can conjure an apple in three dimensions, I can rotate it in my mind with my eyes either opened or closed. I can imagine a wireframe of that apple, or multiple apples rolling down a staircase and I can conjure the physics of them bumping into one another and landing in a bruised pile. I am imagining that vividly, in full color and full holographic clarity, but I am imagining it right now as I type to you here. So... am I "seeing" it in my "mind's eye"? How would either of us know what the other meant if we said yes or no? To me, the person in the article is describing the physical reality (eyelids over eyeballs = darkness) as "seeing" just as much as someone else, say a math wiz, can close their eyes and see colorful geometry playing in spatial relationships with one another or a oil rig worker might start seeing slick black sludge on a piston. I don't see a point in creating taxonomies of imagination.
- idunnoman1222 2y ago
  It’s definitely different when you’re dreaming or when you’re falling asleep, I mean the vividness of one’s imagination so people are claiming they have the same level of vividness all the time it seems that you must take their word on this, no?

by riiii 2y ago

schneems 2y ago

It’s not like: visual stimulus. It’s more like when you see something, that experience eventually translates into a picture in your mind. When I close my eyes I “see” black, but I can recall the face of someone I talked to last quite well. It feels like the same circuits as when I was there, but decoupled from the actual optical input. I took a Knowledge based AI course and one interesting thing was that perceptual knowledge (things we experience via sense) was the listed as the furthest from formal logic (knowledge) and the hardest thing to communicate. Even harder than abstract concepts such as “beauty”. So I don’t know if what I said makes sense. Hope it helps though.

kodt 2y ago
This seems to be very similar to the debate on internal monologues. No-one can seem to agree on what exactly they think it means.
- riiii 2y ago
  The internal monologue is interesting. If you are taking, who is listening?

hbosch 2y ago

Nah, you've identified the problem and IMO it's quite philosophical. Like to me, what the person in this article describes is what someone else would call "seeing the apple". >She could think about an apple: its taste, its shape, its color, the way light might hit it. But she didn’t see it. Behind her eyes, “it was completely black,” Shomstein recalled. And yet, “I imagined an apple.” What is the difference between this, and what another person might describe as a hologram? There is no material way to confirm or disconfirm what someone says happens in their imagination. I can conjure an apple in three dimensions, I can rotate it in my mind with my eyes either opened or closed. I can imagine a wireframe of that apple, or multiple apples rolling down a staircase and I can conjure the physics of them bumping into one another and landing in a bruised pile. I am imagining that vividly, in full color and full holographic clarity, but I am imagining it right now as I type to you here. So... am I "seeing" it in my "mind's eye"? How would either of us know what the other meant if we said yes or no? To me, the person in the article is describing the physical reality (eyelids over eyeballs = darkness) as "seeing" just as much as someone else, say a math wiz, can close their eyes and see colorful geometry playing in spatial relationships with one another or a oil rig worker might start seeing slick black sludge on a piston. I don't see a point in creating taxonomies of imagination.

idunnoman1222 2y ago
It’s definitely different when you’re dreaming or when you’re falling asleep, I mean the vividness of one’s imagination so people are claiming they have the same level of vividness all the time it seems that you must take their word on this, no?