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Comment by minitoar | Hacker News Reader

I mean, what is your brain doing if not that?

You don't think there's a difference between what you see with your naked eye, and what is visualised for you by sensors and software?

do you think your eye is not a sensor ?

Of course your eye is a sensor. As are all your senses. The difference is that the input it receives is unmediated by external sensors and software. Visualising atoms or DNA is fine, but it is an inferior source of information. By a long way.

Imagine you were born deaf and couldn't hear music. But that someone showed you a music visualiser.

Do you think if you were watching the output of that visualiser you would now know the music in some meaningful way?

Would it be possible for you to try at least to contribute to the discussion? This out of hand dismissal seems to be a bit of an issue for you, maybe try harder?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26743591

How is it inferior? We can't see in for e.g. the IR spectrum. But we can turn an IR image into a false-colour image that our eye and brain can make great use of. Using your eyes to directly see in IR will inherently be inferior to processing the results from a sensor into a form that we can see.

You seem really hung up on some pedantry about "see" and "seeing". Why? This may seem like some kind of strong criticism to you, but it just seems as though you are unaware of these technologies and haven't really thought through what constitutes a measurement or observation.

Sure, but digital cameras are still useful.

There are an incredible number of recurrent top-down connections in your vision processing areas. You do not really see what's there in any meaningful way. What you see is heavily conditioned on what other modules of your brain "expect" to see.

Consider foveated vision. The idea that you can actually see what is going on on your desk all at the same time is an illusion.

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