Funny thing about vision, inside our heads, in our consciousness, it feels like we are seeing a picture. As in, we have pictures 'inside our heads'. But they can't actually be pictures, they must be data structures.
When our vision centres have analysed the incoming signals from the retina and processed it into information about edges, lines, colours, objects - does that then get reassembled somewhere to make the image we see in our heads? Its a very intuitive idea but that can't be possible. Because if your brain is recreating the 'image' inside your head somewhere, something then needs to look at it (and process it and break it down again to information about edges, lines, colours). But you've already done that! You already have the data, no need to make it back into an image and then re-analyse it again (see Dennett, cartesian theatre, inner observer, homunculus etc).
This is a simple concept but its very hard to get a grip on it, it is so against our intuitive feeling for how these things should work.
I have an analogy with computer games - imagine rendering a frame of a 3D game, Doom or something. The game has information about the 3D structure of the room, where the walls are, where the entities are. Then it goes to the rendering pipeline and that data is used to draw on a 2D screen, creating a 2d image. The light from that image then hits your retina and your vision processing centres break the image down into data again - the 3d structure of the room as far as you can see it, where the entities are, colours. That data is then in your head (obviously not exactly the same data that the game had, but some analogous data structure in whatever weird internal format the brain uses). And thats it! That data is you seeing it! (But no, you think, surely that data is used to recreate the image in my head somewhere....)
Things like the necker cube gives us a peep behind the curtain maybe.
I didn't vote, but my guess would be that it's because "aphantasia" (the inability to visualize images) is a popular topic on this site: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia. Some people see images in their head, and others (possibly overrepresented here) simply don't. My guess would be that a comment that starts by assuming everyone sees images in their heads was considered misleading and simplistic.
My confusion was slightly different. The parent comment was the top ranked comment yet grayed and continued to remain gray after I upvoter.
About your comment, I am very because I am not sure where I myself fall.
My mental imagery is certainly not so strong that I can claim with any confidence that I have one. My wife, on the otherhand claims strongly that she can see things in her minds eye and I have ample evidence to believe it.
Can those with aphantasia do rough sketches of some familiar object from memory of the object ?
There is a loophole in the task though. One can translate the visual imagery into words and remember them. Then one can sketch using the remembered words, not that different from the workings of a deep autoencoder.
It really comes down to the nature and geometry of the latent space. Is it a topological space with a topology less boring than a discrete topology. Is it spatial/geometric or symbolic.
I had to shorten the title to fit it, but there's so much here and the Necker cube is just a final addendum. This is what publishing was intended to be like!
I now come to the point which you particularly wished me to describe to you mean the luminous appearance of trees, shrubs and birds when seen from the foot of mountain, little before sun-rise.
I saw something similar at sunset the other day, a luminous dog! A fluffy white dog: the last sunbeams hit him from behind, so that he had an amber corona.
Commonly used to this day in photography and cinematography, where you have a "key light", big bright one up high and off to one side aiming down a bit at the subject, a "fill light" being dimmer, lower down, and off to the other side to relieve the shadows on the face that the key light throws, and a "hair light" behind the subject to make their hair glow a bit and pull them off the background.
One of the films I want to watch at 4x normal speed so I can put it in my brain faster, then go back and look at each individual frame for ten minutes apiece so I can see every single thing in it.
Technically it first appeared as a fusion letter in late Latin writings, but yes it did become its own letter in Old English where it was adopted to represent a specific sound. And, to the Norwegian's comment, it's been used in more modern English as well, until relatively recent times ("recent" in the European sense)
Funny thing about vision, inside our heads, in our consciousness, it feels like we are seeing a picture. As in, we have pictures 'inside our heads'. But they can't actually be pictures, they must be data structures.
When our vision centres have analysed the incoming signals from the retina and processed it into information about edges, lines, colours, objects - does that then get reassembled somewhere to make the image we see in our heads? Its a very intuitive idea but that can't be possible. Because if your brain is recreating the 'image' inside your head somewhere, something then needs to look at it (and process it and break it down again to information about edges, lines, colours). But you've already done that! You already have the data, no need to make it back into an image and then re-analyse it again (see Dennett, cartesian theatre, inner observer, homunculus etc).
This is a simple concept but its very hard to get a grip on it, it is so against our intuitive feeling for how these things should work.
I have an analogy with computer games - imagine rendering a frame of a 3D game, Doom or something. The game has information about the 3D structure of the room, where the walls are, where the entities are. Then it goes to the rendering pipeline and that data is used to draw on a 2D screen, creating a 2d image. The light from that image then hits your retina and your vision processing centres break the image down into data again - the 3d structure of the room as far as you can see it, where the entities are, colours. That data is then in your head (obviously not exactly the same data that the game had, but some analogous data structure in whatever weird internal format the brain uses). And thats it! That data is you seeing it! (But no, you think, surely that data is used to recreate the image in my head somewhere....)
Things like the necker cube gives us a peep behind the curtain maybe.
Why does this appear downvoted ?
I didn't vote, but my guess would be that it's because "aphantasia" (the inability to visualize images) is a popular topic on this site: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia. Some people see images in their head, and others (possibly overrepresented here) simply don't. My guess would be that a comment that starts by assuming everyone sees images in their heads was considered misleading and simplistic.
My confusion was slightly different. The parent comment was the top ranked comment yet grayed and continued to remain gray after I upvoter.
About your comment, I am very because I am not sure where I myself fall.
My mental imagery is certainly not so strong that I can claim with any confidence that I have one. My wife, on the otherhand claims strongly that she can see things in her minds eye and I have ample evidence to believe it.
Can those with aphantasia do rough sketches of some familiar object from memory of the object ?
There is a loophole in the task though. One can translate the visual imagery into words and remember them. Then one can sketch using the remembered words, not that different from the workings of a deep autoencoder.
It really comes down to the nature and geometry of the latent space. Is it a topological space with a topology less boring than a discrete topology. Is it spatial/geometric or symbolic.
I had to shorten the title to fit it, but there's so much here and the Necker cube is just a final addendum. This is what publishing was intended to be like!
Site is down. This should be the same PDF I think: http://wexler.free.fr/library/files/necker%20(1832)%20observ...
Just from the title it sounds really cool, but I guess the server got the hug of death (kept getting timeout)
Why were people so incredibly wordy back then?
Algebra too used to be worst once. Then came symbols.
Did not realize autocorrect had translated "wordy" into "worst". Too late to edit.
I now come to the point which you particularly wished me to describe to you mean the luminous appearance of trees, shrubs and birds when seen from the foot of mountain, little before sun-rise.
I saw something similar at sunset the other day, a luminous dog! A fluffy white dog: the last sunbeams hit him from behind, so that he had an amber corona.
No pictures from 1832, but I found a photo describing the phenomenon. So low-res one can barely see the effect: https://onehundredmountains.blogspot.com/2008/04/sunrise-on-...
Such beautiful writing. Thanks so much for sharing.
Commonly used to this day in photography and cinematography, where you have a "key light", big bright one up high and off to one side aiming down a bit at the subject, a "fill light" being dimmer, lower down, and off to the other side to relieve the shadows on the face that the key light throws, and a "hair light" behind the subject to make their hair glow a bit and pull them off the background.
One of my favourite use of lighting is the glowing embers in Sean Young's eyes in The Blade Runner.
One of the films I want to watch at 4x normal speed so I can put it in my brain faster, then go back and look at each individual frame for ten minutes apiece so I can see every single thing in it.
Then you may like this one
https://nofilmschool.com/2013/07/a-lesson-in-lighting-throug...
Let me submit this as a an HN post
https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=49694634
This is amazing, thanks!
As a Norwegian; my culture is not your costume. æøå ;)
(Old) English had æ first!
Technically it first appeared as a fusion letter in late Latin writings, but yes it did become its own letter in Old English where it was adopted to represent a specific sound. And, to the Norwegian's comment, it's been used in more modern English as well, until relatively recent times ("recent" in the European sense)