Question:
Do you appreciate the philosophical problem with claiming the brain turns the visual image "the right way up"?
grayure
2010-07-28 00:48:20 UTC
I've just been rather frustrated by asking a question in Zoology about feline visual tracts. Both the answers claimed that the brain "turns the image the right way up". This is false both in the sense that activity in the superior part of the visual cortex reflects stimuli in the superior part of the visual field and phenomenologically. Do you personally appreciate why this claim is complete nonsense? I'm just wondering if people are generally that naive.
Eight answers:
Martin T
2010-07-29 18:56:27 UTC
I agree with you.



When I was young I had a children's encyclopedia. It was mainly very good - but got this issue totally confused. It claimed that the brain had to turn the upside down image back the right way up before it could work out what the eyes were actually seeing. As you point out, that is nonsense.
?
2010-07-28 13:34:00 UTC
I know that "If you were able to look at the back of someone's eyes, there would be an upside down image." But I don't think you meant, "the part of the brain controlling movements and sensations in the rest of the body is upside down..." No part of the brain is "upside down".



But I don't agree that "there isn't a little person inside your head watching it on a cinema screen." Yes, I agree that "All there is, is...your brain processing what you see so you can make sense of it..." That is the little person.



It is important to recognize that "little person". That is obviously an analogy, but "you" are in there, and we are talking about "cognition", so here is why it's important to recognize that "you" are in "there":



Let's break down consciousness: Sensations come from the sensory organs, and at the point where they physically end inside the brain, a connection is made in consciousness called a "perception". Perception is not the "sensing", as many people incorrectly believe; it is the mind's acknowledgment of having received sensory inputs. There is a form of blindness in which the eyes and the nervous system work perfectly--nothing is organically wrong. But when the sensory input reaches the brain, no perceptions are acknowledged. In other words, there is no "perception" of having had the sensory experience.



After a perception, which is the acknowledgment by the mind of having had a sensory experience, then the perception goes through at least one, and often more, stages of cognition. The first is a simple induction: "Oh! Something exists!" Perceptions are the acknowledgment that "something" exists. The next stage is to "abstract" from it the information that will eventually tell us "what" exists.



Knowing "what" exists is the field of metaphysics; so the first conscious stage of abstraction is to determine "identity". But the first mental function after perception isn't the abstraction itself; rather it is the process of epistemology that allows for the abstraction. Otherwise, it would be like saying we extract oil from the ground without an oil rig.



The abstraction of information from our perceptions is said to be "intuitive". Cognition is "a. non-propositional apprehension (perception, memory, introspection, etc.)...



Intuition is a "result from the proper species, or the proper image of the object itself, impressed upon the mind by the object...",



and "quidditative" means "that which arises from the proper image of an object, like intuitive knowledge, and besides, penetrates distinctly, with a clear, proper, and positive concept, the essential predicates of a thing even to the last difference." http://www.ditext.com/runes/c.html



In order for the mind to make sense of its world, it cannot look down at its feet and see them as being above his or her head. If the cognitive mind did not turn things upside down for us, then to see ourselves in a full-length mirror we would have the image that children have of people below the equator standing on the earth upside down, and even the earth there is upside down---until you turn the picture over.



Not being a neurologist, I do not know in which part of the mind our cognitive processes turn things over from the way they appear at the back of the eyeball. You do not appear to be a neurologist either.



And while I see that this question is a philosophical premise to be figured out, it must first be determined by such scientists as can know where in the brain, and how in the brain, the process is done.



Only after science gives us the answer can general philosophy determine the truth or falsity of the statements, because that is the purpose of general philosophy.



Cognitive neurology is specialized, and you need to ask one of them-----unless of course the answer is already out there and one of us knows that answer. But don't count on it.
2010-07-28 10:35:04 UTC
Yes. You are EXACTLY CORRECT.



that explanation, the brain turning the image "right side up" is so utterly ABSURD. They really do make it seem like the back of our eye is a movie screen that has a movie playing on it upside down. There IS no image in there. There are only nerves that are being stimulated.



True story. When a group of people were given a certain type of pair of glasses, that compelled them to see everything upside down (because of mirrors placed strategically in the glasses) and they WORE these glasses ALWAYS when they were awake,...



after a couple of weeks, they could see things right side up again. With the glasses. The brain re-ordered the data it was receiving on the nerve endings on the eye and created an image that made sense to human consciousness.



And the denouement was that when the glasses were removed, the people saw things UPSIDE DOWN...for about two weeks or so...until the brain once again, formulated the vision to be right side up.



there IS no image "OUT THERE". in fact, there is no "OUT THERE". That's why the ordinary "explanation" is just so much bullshit.



Since the first two people who answered don't have the intellectual capacity to understand you (frustrating, isn't it, to live in a world peopled with morons like these, isn't it?) I gave them both thumbs down.



That's only fair.
Sal Chæch
2010-07-28 09:58:52 UTC
You're just being stubborn.



The brain receives an image that is upside down. It might process that image as is, but the fact remains that you visualize the image in the way it was supposed to be seen. There is YOU, seeing things that are NOT upside down, despite the fact that the image is reversed by the cornea, onto the retina, and straight into the brain with no re-reversal.



Your argument is purely semantics. If you just stop and think about this simplistically for a moment, you might realize that you're over complicating it. If I turn my computer's tower upside down and backwards, my monitor still displays in the right direction. I don't see the sky below me and the ground above me, no matter how my brain processes that event.
?
2010-07-29 04:16:49 UTC
I would like to answer by telling you about an actual experiment. A device sort of like a helmet that covers the eyes was created by researchers. The device causes the wearer to see everything upside down. After a period of days wearing the device the wearer's brain inverts the image and the person sees everything right-side up. If the wearer suddenly took off the helmet after reaching that point then he or she would see the world -- with their uncovered eyes -- upside down. That is, until the brain again "readjusted." The fact is your eyes are not terribly unlike a camera lens. You see the world upside down with your eyes, but your brain transforms the image for you.
Hippie Mama has pen, will travel
2010-07-29 17:41:57 UTC
This point is particularly well driven home by the experiment in which people wear special glasses that turn all images upside down. After consistently wearing them for a while, the participants see the world as right side up when wearing the glasses but upside down when they take them off.
Baron VonHiggins
2010-07-28 16:01:56 UTC
Your misstatement is the illegitimate reverse of a legitimate problem. This means, of course, your intention is to contrive a pseudo-problem which omits the will, and so the issue of human freedom, obscuring the real inquiry. The fundamental features that you pay no attention to were identified by Schelling two hundred years ago: eternity, independence of time, and self-affirmation. For you the relation between memory and the moment of perception, then, is NOT a problem. Coincidentally, it is not a problem for the ARTIFICIAL intelligence that informs both you and those you intend to dupe.
Witch, please!
2010-07-28 08:46:46 UTC
hmm well i think i understand it, but the philosophical problem i'm still not sure on. is it that there's no inherent right way to see things because there's no up or down in the universe except that which we arbitrarily decide?


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