Two sorts of fake vision

Prompted by the newspaper article at reference 1, I bought the book at reference 2 and have, as a result been thinking about how we get to have the subjective experience of colour. After charging about for a bit, I came back to reference 3, which had been living on one of my book shelves for some time. All against the background of my pet hypothesis (LWS-R) about subjective experiences in general, also known as consciousness, most recently introduced at reference 4.

Charging around first this morning from a recumbent position there seemed to be two distinct varieties of imagined colour.

First variety

This first variety arises from looking with the eyes, but having one’s eyes shut. In a room where it is dark, but not completely dark. There is a bit of light getting in from somewhere.

One is experiencing vision, but at first there is nothing much there. One’s eyes can flit about behind the closed lids, but nothing. Perhaps just a rather matt, rather dark grey. Sometimes small objects appear, usually even darker, visual artefacts which one presumes to be the result of stuff floating around in the eye. Perhaps of some imperfection of one of the retinas. Perhaps some vascular activity in the eyelids.

One then tries to imagine a patch of colour. If one concentrates one can sometimes, not very reliably, get a faint but distinct impression of a circular patch of colour. Sometimes with the colour strongest (bright would be too strong a word) at the centre of the patch, fading to grey towards the rim. The sort of colour you get from an array of coloured dots rather than the glossy colour of some printed pictures; an array of dots with the dots dense enough to give a sense of colour, but not so dense that the impression of dots vanishes altogether.

Blue seems to be easiest, but red and green are possible.

Perhaps something like the snap above, taken from Microsoft’s Powerpoint. The faint vertical stripes of the grey, visible on my laptop, probably visible online, are irrelevant – and absent from the Powerpoint original. An image processing artefact.

But the experience is that of looking at something, albeit a fake experience.

Second variety

The second variety arises, still recumbent, still with eyes shut, but from imagining a child’s wooden brick, rather than trying to see one. The sort of bricks in the snap above, lifted from Dreamstime. A sort of brick with which I have spent quality time over the years and we still own some of them, although probably rather fewer than are shown here.

This morning anyway, this second variety seemed rather easier than the first. I could reliably call to mind individual coloured bricks. Either regular bricks like the blue one, top middle, or cylindrical bricks like the green one, top right. With practise, the other shapes. And I could do colours up to a point: red, green, yellow, blue, black and white. With blue being easiest and white hardest.

The imagined bricks were small, about the size they would appear for real. The experience of a brick was quite vivid, but I couldn’t hold it in mind for very long and I didn’t try moving it, rotating it or anything like that.

The present point is that they did not appear to be the product of looking at all. They had been called to mind ready made and were not in the visual field in the way of the faint blue disc in the first of the snaps above. They just popped up, somewhere else.

Comment

You need to be quiet and still for this sort of thing to work. To get extraneous stimulation down to a minimum.

I am presently at a loss to explain the difference in quality between these two experiences, why one is much harder to achieve than the other, why one seems like looking, while the other seems like calling something ready made to mind.

But perhaps the place to look is in one the layers supporting the visual experience of LWS-R, rather than in the layers generating the raw experience. The contents of these support layers might well be quite different in the two experiences, thus giving rise to the different subjective experiences.

Two associations here. First to the wraiths that Odysseus encounters when he visits Hades. They are the people they once were, up to a point, but they are just shadows of their former selves, without substance. Rather like the first of the varieties above. Second to the Mach bands (snapped above) and to the Craik-Cornsweet-O’Brien illusion which I read about in reference 3, with support from reference 5. To the effect that we see rather more than is there; the raw visual experience is touched up by the brain to make it a bit more intelligible. A touching up which the brain sometimes gets wrong.

References

Reference 1: What the platypus could tell us about climate change: The COP26 delegates would do well to look at the world from the perspective of animals – Jackie Higgins, Financial Times – 2021. 23rd October.

Reference 2: Sentient: What animals reveal about our senses – Jackie Higgins – 2021. In particular, Chapter 1 about the eyes of a curious sort of shrimp.

Reference 3: Image processing handbook – John C Russ – 1992. Fifth edition, 2007. In particular, Chapter 2 about human vision.

Reference 4: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/09/an-updated-introduction-to-lws-r.html.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornsweet_illusion. 

Reference 6: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/12/on-seeing-colour-some-science-fiction.html. A previous product of this same venture.