The Thoughts and curiosities of a totally blind person on sight
Hi,
Before starting my ramblings, I should probably say just for the record that I'm not writing this as self-pitty or anything like that, I've been pretty much content with my blindness as long as I remember, except for very particular moments that aren't the subject of this post. Also, try to bear with me, I'm putting this thing together at 3:20AM . Oh and My apologies in advance if such matters are discussed here already, which is most likely but I have missed it.
Sometimes, when liing in bed and not being able to sleep just like now, I used to reflect on my blindness. This would lead to a whole lot of curiosities and questions about sight. The first of those questions was what are writings and pictures? I asked people these questions in many different ways, getting many responces, some of which were rather surprising. For example, one of my approaches was asking whether the sighted people saw the actual screen of their tv when watching something, or only the screen's content. This question would render them speechless for a moment and their responce was that they had never thought about the screen. At first, I thought that they didn't know that because they had taken the screen for granted, the same way that our breathing is always their and we don't notice it unless we concentrate on it. But after a while, I figured out (assuming it's true), that sight is nothing more than the difference of colours. They don't see the screen because the colour of the entire screen is replaced by the colour of the contents. This also ment that there isn't much difference between pictures and letters, because they are both the same thing, only new colours covering the original colour of the paper or screen or whatever they are written on. Another interesting thing about sight was that it seemed a tad bit less informative than I thought. I was told that sighted people can't really notice whether something is wet, unless the colour of the dampening substance is different from the colour of the wet object. Size isn't easy to tell either, unless they have something to which they can compare the seen object. Meaning if they see the photo of someone, they don't know how tall the person is, unless the photo also contains a familiar person or object.
Naturally, learning these stuff led to another, more annoying, more difficult and still unanswered question: What are colours? I and my wife sometimes do some sort of testing. Because I can see light, she shows me objects and asks if I can see any difference in them with my eyes. For the first few things, I usually can tell correctly that the light reflecting off them is a bit dimmer or brighter than the rest. But then I become self-conscious, get wrong input from my eyes, and then our test turns into a game. More often though, much to the annoyance of my wife, it turns into a discussion of what colour is. Just like the other sighted people I've asked so far, she can't explain it in a way that I can understand. At first I thought that it is the brightness level of an object that can determin its colour. But now I think it's more complicated than that. From our little tests, I think that there are different colours with the same level of brightness. Problem is I'm a bit too old for hoping to see with my eyes any time soon and I hate not knowing. So, what are colours? What is sight, Are my conclusions correct? What thoughts do you guys have on sight and the things with which I took some of your precious time?
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