It was a footnote in an article I read about a monkey using blindsight and that there had been several experiments with humans proving blindsight existed and that surprised me. As a footnote.

There have been several experiments that indicate people can see without using their visual cortex.

  • lad
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    7 months ago

    Thank you for providing insight.

    What I mean is more that things related to consciousness, subjectivity, and qualia are rather loosely defined and aren’t guaranteed to have any measurable and good definition

    • Varyk@sh.itjust.worksOP
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      7 months ago

      You’re right, something vaguely defined can definitely have that problem.

      Blindsight stood out to me a significant because the visual cortex is damaged, not functioning or missing all together and there’s a part of the brain that works with lower(and higher) animals that apparently allows them to see still, somehow.

      If it was a matter of definition, like “degraded sight” versus “partial blindness”, I would nou have found this as compelling and certainly not noteworthy enough to post.

      But if you are missing the part of the brain that processes sight, or are missing an eyeball… I believe one of the test participants had his actual eyeball destroyed.

      If it’s the physical lack of a processing unit and still we get the result of apparent sight and there is no conclusive scientific objection to half a century of scientific experiments measuring how much blind people can see, that’s fascinating to me.

      • lad
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        7 months ago

        Actual eyeball destroyed should not allow to percept anything I think, but I don’t know of course

        Other than that, as a layman, I would expect there to be some automatic and autonomous stuff related to vision but not requiring conscious results. After I learned of some processing done right in the eye (can’t find the link, it was some experiment on cat eyes) I’m more inclined to think that a lot of processing is done out of consciousness, or sometimes even brain