About the Eye

What do you define as "seeing the real world"?

 

I'm wondering what you mean by the "real world," as well.

I mean it's nothing new that humans perceive the world differently than lets say, a dog, does. We have a limited hearing frequency range, we can only see only so many dimensions, we can only smell things so well, etc., etc.

 

It's been a central tenet of western philosophy for centuries that we cannot directly interact with the external objective world. Everything is 'filtered' through our senses.

This does not mean that we cannot obtain an accurate representation of the external world through scientific study.

Or are you asking something different?

 

Vision is defined as the ability to interpret information from visible light reaching your eyes. So if we have false vision, what would real vision be?

Let's just say that the objective nature of something is totally different than what we are ever capable of perceiving. Why would it matter to us?

 

There is a lot of image processing that occurs in the eye before the signal travels down the optic nerve to the brain. We evolved to perceive edges and motion; much of the processing that extracts these features from our visual field occurs in the retina and the signals that travel to our brain are enriched in edge-and-motion data compared to flat-field data. Is that the "real world"? It is, at least, the part of the real world that helped my ancestors survive through reproduction.

Note - vision research isn't my field, this is gleaned from reading popularizations.

 

It seems to be a question of direct realism versus representationalism.

 

Holography comes to mind.
Not a minimal energy solution though.
I would be a huge energy drain on a biological system,

 

The organism would need to emit coherent light or in other words it would have to have a biological laser.

 

The brain is an amazing device and I also experienced some very bewildering revelations of knowledge about the mind. I would suggest reading an introductory nueroscience book.

Oh, and not just the section on vision!!

The more you know about the world around you (and the one inside you) the more empowered you become!!!

 

The answer is obviously yes -- but I understand your concern. This was a major strand of Kant's work. In the world there are the "things in themselves", or noumena. But we only ever get access to sense experiences, or phenomena.

So an interesting question presents itself - how much of the phenomenal world is contributed by the noumena, and how much is contributed by us? Kant thought many features of the phenomenal world, such as colour, causation and categories of things, were contributed by us.

 

To tell the truth our senses all work together to give us as accurate a description as possible about our environment. The thing is that we have an "internal" environment as well that tends to mess up the signals we're bringing in from the external one.

For instance, without sight, our hearing is partially impared because the eyes are always helping us determine the direction a sound is coming from.

When we can touch, sense the pull of gravity, smell the ozone of lightning or smoke of a fire, when we can taste the breeze off of a flowering orchard we see... this begins to give us the "triangulation" we need to determine where we are and what the "real world" is doing... outside of our senses.

edit: what you may be referring to is the fact that our senses do not go as far as being able to observe molecular structures or atomic levels of our every day environment. In an upcoming thread I'm going to address the fact that, even though we don't see something, we are aware of it, have knowledge of it and are able to incorporate that information into our daily lives.