The title of this column might be a little on the surface simply because empirical science does not address the basic question in our reality, how do the images that exist in external reality become the images that we can form in our minds? Anyone spending anytime in an eye doctor's examining room is familiar with the pictures of the eyeballs on the walls, and even the large plastic eyeballs that can be taken apart to show the various parts of the eye. But this is all medical and has nothing to do with how we see what we see. If you dig into some texts, you find that the eye has millions of what are called photoreceptive neurons. Photon has a definition dealing with the eye, a unit of retinal illumination equal to the amount of light that reaches the retina through one square millimeter of pupil area from a surface having a brightness of one candela per square meter. More words. I don't know where the coined word photon, used to provide an explanation for Einstein's photoelectric effect. came from, but photograph came first.
These photoreceptive neurons are found in the retina, an inside layer of the eyeball, and come in two flavors, rods and cones. Rods discern light and dark, shape and movement, and contain only one light sensitive pigment. Cones require more light than rods and also come in three flavors, or should I say colors, with ones that contain pigments that respond to the different wavelengths, red, green or blue. It's pretty clear this is a deduction from the white light is made up of all colors fiction Newton created before the discovery of the electromagnetic emission field, which makes all of nature conform to the human eye. It seems that the frequencies increase in an individual manner until they get to the frequency involved with our vision. Then, for some reason, no, it would have to be by chance, the frequencies we see are all bundled together into a single frequency that then has to be broken down into color.
This leads to the absurd notion that material absorbs all colors but the one we see, and therefore the cones have to have pigments "sensitive" to the basic colors so they can be separated out (and then recombined to form all colors).
So far, we know nothing about how we see what we see. Well, empirical science returns to the medical, which has the rods and cones sending light to a lens at the back of the eye and the lens is connected to the optic nerve. What travels up the optic nerve? How does the mind convert whatever is traveling up the optic nerve into a picture of what is in reality, well, these questions are simply not valid scientific questions. Empirical science can only speculate on that, but it does know what happens when whatever it is that gets to the brain, works, it lights up neurons in specific patterns that become linked for life and those lit up neurons become the picture of reality that we see in reality. So for empirical science, reality is out there, and it's in our heads, but there's no in-between. Our eyes are just one of our senses, and senses, by definition sense, so we don't need to make sense out of the obvious.
But the reality is, in the face of empirical science's refusal to admit it as a result of its laziness and resulting ignorance, the dimensions of external reality are somehow transported through our optic nerves so that we can internally reconstruct those dimensions and produce a picture of reality. Empirical science likes to fuzz up this fact with statements like no two people see the same thing the same way, but the proof of this reality is completely objective. As long as we all have a common language, the ability to write, and functional eyes, we can individually describe external objects in reality. A tree is a tree because it is a tree in external reality, and we can separately write down a description of a tree none of us has seen before, and those descriptions will be pretty much the same. We can all be shown a representation of a geometric form, and even if we've never encountered it before, we will be able to individually draw the form and when we compare drawings, the drawings will be the same (except for mine, I can't draw anything).
External reality is objective and real, and we are somehow constructed so that we can reproduce that external reality within our skulls. This fact leads to three questions empirical science has never bothered to address. The first question is, what is happening in physical reality between the objects that make up that reality and our eyes that allow our eyes to obtain the dimensions of physical reality. The second question is, how is that information transported up the optic nerve. The third question is, how do we reconstruct the information in our skulls so that we have an accurate representation of objective external reality. I should point out that there are probably another dozen questions involved empirical science hasn't even thought to ask simply because it assumes away so much, but I'm trying to keep this as simple as possible. All of this is covered in The Model Mind and How the Body Really Works, volumes 4 and 9 of The Copernican Series. And I covered this material from a different perspective in column 34-05. Bleep II: Finding the Mind, and in fact, for the answers to questions two and three, I will simply refer to that column. Here I want to highlight how we see what we see in light of column 21-06 on polarization. It's important to know exactly how we see what we see if we want to know anything about the world around us.
The objects in our existence have distinct shapes. Some are one dimensional, posters and walls, others are three dimensional, chairs and tables. All may have other shapes attached to them, the posters, words or pictures, the walls, decorations, the three-dimensional objects decorations of one type or another. If they occupy a windowless room, and we turn off the light, however, they all have one thing in common. They disappear from our vision. We can no longer see them. I realize this is so obvious, it's not worth saying, but it is worth saying because it points out that we see what we see because of light. There is nothing inherent about the objects in reality (with the few exceptions of objects which themselves produce light) that has anything to do with how we see what we see. If we want to find out how we see what we see, we have to look at light to understand, and the question, what is happening between the objects in reality and our eyes that allows us to obtain a picture of reality, can be refined by asking, what is it about light that allows us to see the dimensions of the objects in our reality.
Light is a very measurable quantity. If we hang a lone light bulb in the middle of a room ten feet wide by ten feet deep by ten feet high, we can make a specific statement about the light coming from the light bulb. Except were it is being prevented from expanding by the cord it's hanging from, the light is expanding away from the light bulb in all directions. This is what I call an expanding sphere of light, and it continually amazes me the difficulty people have, and when I say people, I refer to empirical scientists, engineers and liberal arts diploma devotees, in understanding this. It is not a concept, it is a fact. Light expands away from its source in all directions. At any instant, a new sphere of light is being emitted by the light bulb.
This results in a continuous series of expanding spheres our detectors are designed to represent as waves, but which are in actuality frequencies, with the hotter the light, the shorter the frequencies.
We can measure precisely how these expanding spheres act simply by knowing the formula for the area of a sphere. The area of a sphere is 4pr2, where the r2 is the square of the sphere's radius. Thus, with the other terms static for all of the expanding spheres, the square of the sphere's radius from its source determines the area of the surface of the expanding sphere. This is why light expands inversely with the square of its distance from its source.
This gives us the exact amount of light that exists from any point in the room because all we have to do is measure the distance of that point from the surface of the light bulb. If we hold an object five feet away from the bulb, the strength of the expanding sphere will be different than if we hold an object six feet away from the light. Because the expanding spheres are being emitted at any one instant, the light bouncing off the object is not the same light, but it is the same amount of light. When we move out to the six foot point, at each instance its different light, but the same amount of light at six feet, less than at five feet. How much less? Light diminishes uniformly over the expanding spheres, so it's easily determined how much less the light is. This is all mathematically computable if we know the amount of light being emitted from the bulb and the distance the object is from the bulb.
The sun is continually emitting expanding spheres of light, but we can only approximate the distance and we definitely can't compute the amount of light with any degree of accuracy, but that is not important in determining how we see what we see. In our experimental room, we can determine this, and we are only doing so to understand how light carries information. What information? Information about distance. If we don't know the distance, and we don't know how much light is being emitted, we might not be able to interpret the information about distance, but we will see that isn't important in determining how we see what we see.
Once we understand the fact, not concept, but fact, of expanding spheres of light, we have to understand how light travels. To do this, we have to know that light diminishes uniformly as it expands. This is a window into the nature of the frequency of light, for light to be diminishing, something empirical science doesn't like to discuss because it destroys the myth that its telescopes can see light from the end of the universe and the beginning of time, with light diminishing, it has to be traveling in streams that are expanding over the surface of the expanding sphere. Forget wavelength, think flows. Light is not only a series of frequencies, it is a series of frequencies that are connected to the series behind them so that as the frequencies expand, they retain frequency, but lose intensity.
This leads to the obvious conclusion that light is a flow of frequencies that diminish over the surface of the expanding sphere each of the frequencies constitute. Thus, when the expanding spheres of light from the light bulb hanging in the center of the room hit the walls, they bounce off the walls, not as expanding spheres, but as flows of light. At each point a quantum of flow, and I use the word quantum to describe the amount of light the flow contains at that point determined by the distance to its source, bounces off the wall and begins to itself re-expand in a new expanding sphere of light. Why? Because light expands into the area available for it to expand. I refer to this effect as the overexpansion of light. See column 09-04 on Young's experiment, where light is passed through a slit. The flows of light that pass through the slit begin to expand once again, but that are expanding at a greater rate than they would have had they not passed through the slit because they now have more area in which to expand.
As each flow that bounces off the wall re-expands, it has a new point of expansion, and a new measurement for the intensity, or strength of the flow. Thus, it provides information as to its source. This information is precise information, but like the light from the sun, the actual nature of the information is not known, cannot be known, unless we are controlling the intensity and distance, and more important in understanding how we see what we see, it doesn't have to be known. This is because the eye is not determining the information relative to a single flow of light, it is determining the information relative to millions of flows of light. All it needs to know is the relative difference between the flows to construct a picture of the distances the flows are producing.
If we change our controlled room to a room with abundant windows and a lot of furniture, we can understand how knowing the relative differences in the information contained in each flow allows us to construct a picture of what we see. The sunlight is streaming in and lighting up the furniture. The furniture is solid, three-dimensional objects in reality. These solid objects are made up of edges, not just the back of a couch, but a back of a couch that stretches perhaps six feet, and therefore has thousands of edges making up its back. In short, there are millions of edges in the room. As the sunlight streams into the room, it hits these edges at a different distance so that no single frequency flow hits more than one edge. This is because the edges are all different distances from the source of the light, the sun. It might only be a small distance, but the frequencies of light are very small, much smaller than the hard edges of reality we need for our eyes to define that realty.
As each of the flows bounce off a hard edge in the room, it begins to re-expand, and thus, the flows that that edge represent has the unique information embedded in it about its distance from wherever it enters the eye. At the same time, discreet flows from all the hard edges of reality are entering the eye. As the eye collects these flows, it can compare them on a relative basis and therefore has the information needed to reconstruct a picture of what it sees.
That's the how of it. How that information gets inside our head, and what happens in our head to reconstruct the picture so that we can reconstruct external reality in our minds, is covered briefly in 34-05, and includes my reasoning why I think the information is encoded in a structure similar to a gene and transported up the optic nerve rather than simply streamed into the mind through the optic nerve. In looking through past columns, I see I really haven't directly addressed what the mind is and how it works, that it results naturally from one of the three formations a single elementary particle with two opposing properties produces. I'll leave that to the next column, What is the Mind?
Peter Bros is the author of the 9 volume Copernican Series and is President of The Far Museum of Dallas, an actual history museum, which will house its collection of 50,000 rare Eastern Mediterranean manuscripts and artifacts together with actual history displays and tours in a full-sized replica of the Egyptian Temple at Dendera to be built in the Dallas Ft. Worth area. Email:peterbros@therealskeptic.com