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If thereâs nothing between you and an object you can feel it at a distance. Texture is a little dulled, and some textures are easier to feel than others, but thereâs also a whole second kind of texture that we call color. As light gets dimmer it gets harder to feel the difference between those textures, and it gets harder to feel the distance to things, until there is nothing left but a single all encompassing flat texture at a single unknowable distance which we call dark.
Also, some objects only partially block your ability to feel whatâs behind them, and things like windows are designed to be so easy to feel through that itâs hard to feel them at all. Unless they get dirty. Then you can feel the dirt on them.
I find this somewhat sad but also quite beautiful. Those with sight often feel bad for the blind, as they miss out on much of the world we see, but simultaneously it appears as though the blind experience a world of its own beauty that those with vision could never feel or imagine. I donât often pay mind to textures or feel objects that are out of reach. If you and I are standing in front of a waterfall, I suppose everything is still there for you except for how it looks - so who am I to determine that what youâre seeing in your minds eye is any less spectacular? I can say with certainty that when Iâm standing in the middle of a deep forest, the way it looks is an afterthought when compared to what it makes me feel. Maybe both worlds are equally beautiful.
Seeing is to the eyes what hearing is to the ears. Just as you can hear sounds, tones, and voices that tell you about the world around you, seeing allows people to perceive light, shapes, colors, and movements. Imagine being able to âfeelâ everything around you without touching it, from a distance. Itâs like sensing the presence, shape, and texture of objects, but from afar and all at once. Colors, which are a significant aspect of vision, can be likened to different tones or pitches in sounds. Just as a high note feels different from a low note, different colors have their own âfeelâ visually. Overall, seeing is a way of sensing and understanding the environment from a distance, much like how you can hear someone talking from the other side of a room
Thereâs only one octave with the colors so it kind of seems more like flavors. Itâs less of points along a line as it is like peanut butter vs jelly vs broccoli
Why would you say thereâs only one octave?
Human audible frequencies are in the range of 20 Hz to 20 kHz, and are logarithmic.
Human visible frequencies are in the range of 400 THz to 800 THz, and are linear.
Thereâs far more available distinction to be made with color than with sound, it just doesnât interfere the same way.
An octave is a doubling of frequency. 400 to 800 THz is one octave. Color has one octave.
The way you know that is you donât experience redness when absorbing ultraviolet light, and you donât experience blueness when absorbing inferred light.
It doesnât âloop aroundâ like the A note does at 440 Hz, 880 Hz, etc.
An octave is when a doubling of frequency leads to a new waveform that stimulates the same set of neurons as the frequency an octave below it.
Ah. That makes sense. Something about the harmonics, though:
Sound generates those harmonics because itâs physically vibrating sensors in our ear, so we get a 1 to 1 translation of the waveform. Light doesnât, because itâs received by 4 different sensors that are sensitive at different ranges and in different phases. The reason we donât experience âbluenessâ in the infrared spectrum is because our infrared sensors donât know what âblueâ is.
Youâre saying resonant frequencies donât operate the same way with photon absorption? A molecule likely to absorb one wavelength wonât also absorb double or half that wavelength?
Well, think about it.
WiFi is electromagnetic radiation, and penetrates walls. The standard frequency is 5 GHz. With harmonics, we should expect similar behavior from wavelengths that are some whole-number multiple of this frequency.
There are multiple such frequencies within the visible light spectrum, such as 500 THz (orange), but visible light doesnât usually penetrate walls, itâs instead reflected or absorbed.
On the other end, we have X-rays, which are in the range of 3Ă10^(16) - 3Ă10^(19) Hz, which are used medically to see into the human body. There are likewise whole-number divisors, such as 200, which put a potential fundamental at around 600 THz (green). Yet, we generally canât see through people using normal light. Thatâs why we use X-rays.
Now, this is all well and good, but itâs all purely academic, because the reason why you canât use your infrared sensors to detect the color blue or purple is because the infrared sensors arenât sensitive in that frequency, the same reason why you canât use your blue cones to detect infrared.
Iâll take one PBB&J, plz
In the same way that sandwich would taste like garbage, mixing all the colors results in âbrownâ which visually is sort of boring, non-differentiated color. Kind of like the way sounds are drowned out by being near lots of loud heavy equipment, brown tends to reduce the features of things, make them less distinguishable, makes them capture attention less.
I assume that, over time, youâve memorized where everything in your living space is. You have some idea of what shape the space around you takes.
Seeing is knowing what shape a space takes without trial and error. The depth of a room or the texture of a couch. Knowing where an item is without having to touch it, or be told where it is.
How it feels⌠it feels safe. Seeing makes me feel safer. Thatâs the only word that comes to mind.
Like hearing but with color.
No, seriously, itâs impossible to accurately convey. You can talk about the mechanics, the use cases, what you can do with it, but you cannot convey âhow it isâ, same as a bat cannot convey âhow sonar isâ.
Only good answer, really - can only answer in the terms of other senses, however, since colour is meaningless too: âItâs like being able to hear the texture of things, even at a great distance.â
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Thatâs exactly the point. Nothing you say will have a meaning over what that person has experienced. You canât really convey what seeing means, and the âbut with colorâ was meant to show exactly that.
You can explain the technicalities, but thatâs trivial enough that thereâs no point in explaining it.
Imagine explaining what it feels like to e.g. drive a really fast car to someone who has never been in a car. Yeah, you can say âitâs really fastâ or âitâs exciting/fear-inducingâ or âacceleration pushes you into the seatâ, but nothing you say can actually convey the feeling.
Same with seeing. You can say, âwith my eyes I can differentiate objects over long distancesâ, but I am pretty sure every blind person already knows that. You can say, âDifferent things have different colorsâ, but also they know that, but at the same time it has no meaning to them.
But then try to explain a beautiful sunrise or a moving painting or something else thatâs evokes emotions and then it falls apart, because you cannot convey that.
I would describe it as a cacaphonic symphony that you eventually get used to. It packs as much information into one sense as you can get from your other four put together.
Much like how you can discern an individual instrument type in a symphony, sight lets you discern individual objects from afar, and gives you a mostly accurate summary of its basic properties.
Also much like with sound, it can be very appealing or unappealing, depending. Thereâs an intrinsic beauty to the sense itself though. Every object has color, for instance, and color is more like smell. It can give you hints about what something is, but its mostly an arbitrary blend of different âflavorsâ that combine to create more complex examples.
Itâs the super-sense, the one sense that binds them all. When one of your other four detects something, your first instinct is to locate it with sight to determine more information before you do anything else. You âlook at itâ first. Almost without fail.
Itâs like knowing where everything in front of you is without having to touch or hear it. Sight works with your other senses too. For example, if a pillow is laying on the floor in an unfamiliar room Iâll know what shape it, how far away it is, and that if I pick it up itâll feel soft. If the pillow was really gross looking Iâd be able to tell without smelling it first.
A million fingers going in all directions to sense how far everything is away from you and tell what propertyâs things probably have
I think I might mention something about perspective and about lines. How everything in essentially flattened into 2d, so everything has a contour. So it is like feeling a 2d shape on say a table, like a circular dish, but what you are seeing is actually a 3d ball.
Further, things can be obscured by other things that are closer, which are in front. Itâs a bit like tracing the dish with your finger, but not knowing that there is a smaller dish hidden beneath it. For example a ball is behind another ball.
Things that are further away are smaller than things that are closer. As the ball moves further away, the 2d contour becomes smaller. So in the analogy from before, the dish would shrink until it becomes too small to sense.
Finally, instead of just having a few fingers to trace these contours, we have millions of them, so we can effectively sense all contours all at once and tiny notice changes in real time.
Well I suppose I could extend the analogy further by saying that colors are like the physical textures that you feel when moving your finger over an object. The dish could be made from wood, plastic, porcelain and so on, and it is like we have fingers all over the dish at every point at once. Such textures, just like the colors, can be quite intricate.
I could go on but letâs leave it at that.
Like echolocation on crack
Succinct, and actually a great analogy
Itâs like Sex to me, Iâll never get it
Are you visually impaired? I work with a VI kiddo. He asked me why some walls feel different. I was completely stumped trying to describe a window. Have any tips?