Mike Tintner wrote:
Richard,
Thanks for response. But it surely *is* still a puzzle as to how and
indeed where that distorted image on the retina gets rectified and
raises major questions about vision.
Well, no: my point when I replied to you was that it makes no sense to
speak of the image as "distorted" at all.
The only way that someone might think of it as distorted is if they
think the image is going to be presented on some kind of internal
viewing screen. If that happened, the image might be distoted if (for
example) the individual signals from each retinal receptor were given
equal space on the screen. If that rally did happen then the foveal
area of the retina would have most of the image, and the rest of the
world would look shrunken and less colorful.
But there is no internal viewing screen. The buck does get passed down
the line until it ends at a viewing screen, the buck gets taken to
pieces and processed until all of its parts are related to one another
and assessed for the consistency with which they seem to be about a
particular view of a 3-D world. When the consistency checking works out
okay, we "feel" or "sense" or "see" that 3-D world as an undistorted whole.
There is no great mystery about why the image is "not distorted", there
is just a lot of work to be done in understanding that immense process
of signal analysis and consistency checking. And we are doing that.
Richard Loosemore
No one as, I understand, has the
answer. I am too ignorant to have a POV here - but my general
experience is that people/scientists faced by major unsolved problems,
tend to proceed as if they do not exist (or will be solved in good
time), when they should be racked by them.
Mike,
Have you ever considered that it is completely meaningless to look at
the layout of wires coming from the retina and refer to the images
carried by those wires as "distorted"?
If I get a bizarre new keyboard for my computer in which all the keys
are in the reverse of their usual positions, will all the ideas that I
express then suddenly become reversed? If all the keys were a
different shape, with some being really huge and others quite small,
will my ideas become distorted?
Richard Loosemore
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agi
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