vision – Harmonia Philosophica

See your face… Move your hand… Break the mirror…

Photo by **Jason Stewart** from **Pexels**

Given the limited capacity of our attention, we only process a small amount of the sights, sounds, and sensations that reach our senses at any given moment. Research suggests that certain stimuli – specifically, your own face – can influence how you respond without you being aware of it.

In an experiment, participants looked at a cross symbol displayed in the center of a computer screen while a picture of a face appeared on each side of the cross. The face on one side of the cross was the participant’s own face, while the face on the other side of the cross belonged to a stranger. The participants were told to focus their attention on the cross and ignore anything else that might appear.

The findings showed that participants automatically attended to their own faces when they appeared on screen, despite the fact that they were instructed not to do so. Importantly, the findings also showed that participants automatically attended to their own faces even when they weren’t aware of them. (1)

We know our self.

We sense our self.

Some only see their self.

Everywhere.

Even when we are told not to.

Yet, these people will not see what they look for.

For you need to look to others in order to see you.

Look closer.

They are not obstructing you from seeing better.

Instead, they provide the only window to yourself.

These are not ‘other’ people.

They are you.

You are them.

Mirrors of existence, mirroring what cannot exist.

Look at the mirror.

Move your hand.

No, the mirror does not reflect you.

You ARE the mirror…

Filling in the gaps (of the blind spot). Believing (what is not there). Lies. Truth.

To make sense of the world, humans and animals need to combine information from multiple sources. This is usually done according to how reliable each piece of information is. For example, to know when to cross the street, we usually rely more on what we see than what we hear – but this can change on a foggy day.

“In such situations with the blind spot, the brain ‘fills in’ the missing information from its surroundings, resulting in no apparent difference in what we see,” says senior author Professor Peter König, from the University of Osnabrück’s Institute of Cognitive Science. “While this fill-in is normally accurate enough, it is mostly unreliable because no actual information from the real world ever reaches the brain.

Scientists wanted to find out if we typically handle this filled-in information differently to real, direct sensory information, or whether we treat it as equal.

To do this, König and his team asked study participants to choose between two striped visual images, both of which were displayed to them using shutter glasses. Each image was displayed either partially inside or completely outside the visual blind spot. Both were perceived as identical and ‘continuous’ due to the filling-in effect, and participants were asked to select the image they thought represented the real, continuous stimulus.

It seemed that people treat ‘inferred’ visual objects generated by the brain as more reliable than external images from the real world. (1)

What is real is just a representation in our mind.

And the more “pure” the representation, the more “real” it feels.

We see what we want. And the more interference we get from our senses, the more fake the world seems to be. That should not make us doubt the validity of our mind, but the validity of our senses instead. If their input does not imply anything regarding the validity of our perception (or what is more, if their input makes our perception be less related to “reality”) then perhaps our senses could be not related to the… validity of our perception.

This is the obvious and simplest conclusion of them all. And we should not be afraid of any conclusion, no matter how much it opposes our beliefs.

Look out for the fake.

It does not carry any notion of ‘reality’ and, thus, is more pure. (and thus, more real)

Look out for the lies.

That is where veracity is hidden…

Cancelling your eyes. Making everything still. Flying…

Scientists analyzed how the brain of a fly compensates for its own movement when seeing and found out that indeed specific neurons are suppressed in order to keep the fly… flying. When a gust of wind unexpectedly blows a fly off course, for example, a powerful reflex known as the optomotor response causes the insect’s head to rotate in the opposite direction, snapping its eyes back toward their original target. The fly also stabilizes its flight path by using its wings to execute a counter-turn. If a fly intentionally turns to shift its gaze, however, something different occurs. The urge to rotate its head and body back toward the original flight direction is somehow suppressed. Otherwise, it would never be able shift its gaze at all.

The same with humans: “Every time you move your eye, the whole world moves on your retina,” says Gaby Maimon, head of the Laboratory of Integrative Brain Function. “But you don’t perceive an earthquake happening several times a second”. That’s because the brain can tell if visual motion is self-generated, canceling out information that would otherwise make us feel – and act – as if the world was whirling around us.

Each time you shift your gaze (and you do so several times a second), the brain sends a command to the eyes to move. But a copy of that command is issued internally to the brain’s own visual system, as well. This allows the brain to predict that it is about to receive a flood of visual information resulting from the body’s own movement — and to compensate for it by suppressing or enhancing the activity of particular neurons. (1)

Shift your gaze. The world is moving.

However, it is actually not.

Shift your point of view. The world seems different.

Nevertheless, it is still the same.

Trust not your eyes. They are not the ones which ‘see’.

Trust not your brain. It is not the one which ‘thinks’…

Think rationally.

Think irrationally.

Cancel all movement.

Just let the fly fly.

No distractions whatsoever…

Asymmetries. Sensing. Motionless.

“Did something move over there?” Everyone has experienced this situation. One is looking towards a sound source, but with the best will in the world, one cannot detect an object. Only its sudden movement, even if minimal, allows its immediate perception.

Scientists at the Ruhr-University Bochum have investigated this phenomenon and show for the first time how simultaneous counterchange of luminance at the borders between object and background triggers activity waves in the visual brain. These waves may constitute a sensitive signal for motion detection. In their study, the scientists presented small gray squares on a monitor screen. The squares then either turned bright or dark with identical luminance intensities and the scientists recorded the subsequent brain activity. The surprising result was that the darkening squares were represented considerably earlier in the brain than the squares that brightened. “This shows that simultaneous changes in luminance occurring in the outer world were time-shifted in the brain,” says Sascha Rekauzke, first author of the study. A small temporal offset of a few milliseconds between the processing of darks and lights was already known. Within the eyes, retinal ganglion cells that signal light “ON” open their ion channels directly upon transmitter release. In contrast, light “OFF” signals are conveyed indirectly, via further intracellular cascades. The RUB scientist now showed that the resulting time difference is further amplified within the brain, in the range of about ten milliseconds. As a consequence, simultaneous counterchange of luminance at neighboring locations leads to a spatiotemporal offset of activation in the brain. This offset triggers a motion signal in the form of a wave of activity spreading asymmetrically in one direction.

Asymmetry is also used for sound localization: Acoustic waves from laterally displaced sources reach the ears with minimal temporal offset. From the interaural time difference neuronal networks compute time delays and our brain interprets from them the presumed direction of the sound source. As Dirk Jancke said: “Our brain is a giant comparison machine based on self-generated asymmetries. Our study further substantiates this and shows that this is true even for elementary steps in perception”. [1]

So we detect motion due to asymmetries. Asymmetries in our sensory organs. Asymmetries in our brain. The whole world is in motion. And we sense it.

But could the world be stable? Could the universe and the cosmos be completely symmetrical, thus motionless? Could the asymmetries in our sensors be the CAUSE of the illusion of motion?

Stop sensing.

And you will see everything.

In one place.

Motionless.

Whole.

Seeing. As if “thinking”. Being. As if “seeing nothing”.

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has sent back the first in a series of the sharpest views of Pluto it obtained during its July flyby and the best close-ups of Pluto that humans may see for decades. [1]

In another story: Scientists have long known that when sounds are faint or objects are seen through fog in the distance, repetition of these weak or ambiguous sensory ‘inputs’ can result in different perceptions inside the same brain. Now the results of new research, described online Dec. 7 in the journal Nature Neuroscience, have identified brain processes in mice that may help explain how those differences happen. [2]

Vision: Totally subjective. Dependent on the scale on which we see things. Dependent on the brain which interprets signals from sensory organs. Dependent on our own perception of things. Dependent on the weather. Dependent on… fog.

And yet we tend to believe only what we see.

The only catch is that we do not realize we trust our eyes not because we believe they are objective. But because we believe our mind is. After all, who wouldn’t trust his own mind?

Stop thinking. And you will stop seeing.

Stop seeing and everything will stop existing.

Being: What is left when you are in the… fog seeing “nothing”.

See now?