Is there a finite number of different images we can possibly see?

[Omnifarious]

1 hour ago, write4u said:

 

YES, there is NO after life. The universe continues to exist, but YOU cease to exist including your consciousness. There is no longer a you or any self-awareness of you.

I don't know how to make that any clearer. There is no longer a YOU at all.

And I don't  know how to make it any clearer that this is your opinion, which you are entitled too, but it is not an objective truth. 

Do you know when something becomes objective truth? When it has been proven with scientific methodology and those results have been replicated by other scientists. Until then, if someone is on a side of an argument, that is their opinion. The existence of gravity, humans having a single jawbone, the shape of the Earth and that it orbits the Sun, these are objective truth because they have been proven with observation and experiments and those results were replicated by other scientists.

Can you tell me there has been an experiment that proves conclusively that there is no afterlife? Has it been replicated by others?

I don't think so, it would have been huge news if it had. And until there is, you are free to have whatever opinion you want but it is just that, an opinion. And you would do well to remember that when discussing scientific matters.

For example, is there alien life out there? The Drake Equation says there should be plenty of planets where life could evolve, and there should be about 35 million alien civilizations. But others point out that we have trained our best instruments on a galaxy that's supposed to be teaming with life and found none of it.

I for one think there is life somewhere out there and if someone were to ask me "Is there alien life?" I would say "In my opinion, there must be." I would not say... "There definitely is."

Also I did not ask YOU if there was no afterlife, I was asking if the man in the video was saying that. I was asking what his opinion was and not yours. And it's possible that when he said "When the end of consciousness comes, there's nothing to be afraid of," he was talking about being asleep or unconscious and there's nothing to fear about bad dreams.  

[Omnifarious]

2 hours ago, write4u said:

The picture you copied is correct.

How do you know this? I'm not trying to bring you down I just want to know where you got your information. 

How do we know that the eye and brain work exactly like that? With a mosaic of pixels blended together? What work has been done to prove this?

By the way, I mentioned Stack Exchange earlier, I posted the same picture and question there and someone said...

"Your overall question borders on philosophy and the biology of consciousness which is hardly understood at all. However, your picture of sensory input is a huge oversimplification. That's not really your fault, it's the sort of thing you are likely to pick up from pop science descriptions, which in turn are faulty because this is not a dead field where everything is understood to a T."

Also, once when I was having an eye exam in hospital, I asked the person examining me the same question. I don't think he ever thought about it before, at first he said yes but after I pressed a little further he said... "There are things we know about the eye and things we don't know. And we're always learning more."

So I'd like to ask you again and please be direct in your answer, how do you know this?

[write4u]

1 hour ago, Omnifarious said:

I for one think there is life somewhere out there and if someone were to ask me "Is there alien life?" I would say "In my opinion, there must be." I would not say... "There definitely is."

We know there is definitely life on earth. And there is no evidence that anyone has ever risen from the dead. We do know their bodies have all turned to dust.

[write4u]

1 hour ago, Omnifarious said:

So I'd like to ask you again and please be direct in your answer, how do you know this?

What is knowledge? How do we know anything is true?  IMO, we know things to be true when they are self-evident, are logical, and lend themselves to repetition.

OTOH, resurrection or afterlife are not self-evident, are illogical, and do not lend themselves to repetition.'

As I am not a scientist, I have the luxury to keep my beliefs simple and only to those things that are axiomatic in the scientific world.

As far as deep science,  I assume Anil Seth (neurologist) knows this from theory and experimentation (see the video) and Stuart Hameroff (anesthesiologist) knows this from practical experience of rendering persons into objects (vegetative state) and then restoring them back into persons (self-conscious individuals).

Stuart Hameroff on ORCH OR

I think...therefore I am!

Edited February 11, 2021 by write4u

[write4u]

6 hours ago, Omnifarious said:

How do we know that the eye and brain work exactly like that? With a mosaic of pixels blended together? What work has been done to prove this?

The brain may not work exactly like a photographic plate. There is no light inside the skull. Controlled hallucinations are chemically experiential phenomena. 

Consider that the brain contains billions of microtubules  and your body another few trillion microtubules, you can begin to get a idea of the potential sensory richness contained in such a interactive neural network.

I may be wrong in my intuition, but AFAIK, there is no other more persuasive hypothesis other than IIT (Integrated Information Theory) by Tononi.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory

 

But here also seems to present a process which I assume would be performed by microtubules.  I like microtubules, dynamical nano scale biological rheostats. They keep us alive and do a hell of a lot more than that alone.

Edited February 12, 2021 by write4u
added detail

[write4u]

4 hours ago, Omnifarious said:

Can you tell me there has been an experiment that proves conclusively that there is no afterlife? Has it been replicated by others?

Is there a way to prove a negative? There is no evidence of an afterlife.  No dead person has ever returned from an afterlife, except in mythology. Therefore it is impossible to replicate an afterlife. Therefore the default position should be that there is no afterlife.

Therefore it is up to the person making the claim that there is an afterlife, to provide proof of that claim. Do you claim there is an afterlife? Do you have proof of an afterlife? Can you replicate it?

Edited February 12, 2021 by write4u

[Omnifarious]

Can we stop talking about the afterlife? That's not what I originally asked, it wasn't the point of this thread and it's painfully clear what your position is. 

 

Speaking purely in terms of photoreceptors, do they literally work like I outlined in my OP and on the diagram?

If so, do we know this for certain? 

If so, how do we know? 

[write4u]

4 hours ago, Omnifarious said:

For example, is there alien life out there? The Drake Equation says there should be plenty of planets where life could evolve, and there should be about 35 million alien civilizations. But others point out that we have trained our best instruments on a galaxy that's supposed to be teaming with life and found none of it.

Oh, I believe there is other life out there. Robert Hazen has convinced me of that.  Of course the distances involved make identification of life on other planets in the universe a problematic endeavor. But as I understand Hazen, the earth , rather than being an exceptional planet, is a rather ordinary planet, in a suitable orbit around a relatively small star. Nothing very special and there should be no logical reason why there cannot be life on other ordinary planets with similar external conditions to earth.

But then he does not claim there is an alien afterlife. Because that would be extraordinary and has a very low probability factor., something like 00.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% maybe.

If you think that is a small number, let me remind you of a large number. According to Hazen, the earth has performed some 2 x 10^54 (2 trillion, quadrillion, quadrillion, quadrillion) chemical interactions during its relatively short life span. Numbers lose all meaning when calculated on a universal scale. Only probability factors count.

START VIEWING @ 12:00 (to avoid  a lengthy introduction).

 

[write4u]

39 minutes ago, Omnifarious said:

Can we stop talking about the afterlife? That's not what I originally asked, it wasn't the point of this thread and it's painfully clear what your position is. 

 

Speaking purely in terms of photoreceptors, do they literally work like I outlined in my OP and on the diagram?

If so, do we know this for certain? 

If so, how do we know? 

I hoped that I had already explained that.

The photo receptors are only located in the retina of the eye, not inside the brain. There is no light inside the skull.  Photoreceptors would be useless inside the brain.

IMO, it is the microtubules that process the electro-chemical coding and produce the experiential phenomena of sight, sound, pain, pleasure, etc.

https://universeintheattic.weebly.com/the-brain-in-the-vat.html

Edited February 12, 2021 by write4u

[write4u]

On 2/7/2021 at 9:58 PM, write4u said:

Ok, last try. The optical sensors in your eye do see A and B as exactly the same shade of gray. It is your brain that produces the different optical experience, from a naturally evolved survival response in the brain.

Does that explain the separation between optical sensory reception and the brain's interpretation of the electro-chemical data ?

Edited February 12, 2021 by write4u

[Omnifarious]

9 hours ago, write4u said:

I hoped that I had already explained that.

The photo receptors are only located in the retina of the eye, not inside the brain. There is no light inside the skull.  Photoreceptors would be useless inside the brain.

No you have not satisfied me because I asked you to answer yes or no and you have not answered yes or no.

Right now I am only concerned with the photo receptors and their sending of information to the brain. I am completely unconcerned with the brain and it's workings. I know the brain is a huge part of perception but it could not have less to do with what I'm asking.

So I'm going to ask the community to answer in ONE WORD and to leave the brain OUT OF IT.

Do photoreceptors work like I asked at the beginning of this post and exactly in the pixel-like way in the picture?

YES or NO?

[write4u]

Ok, I'll give it my last shot, being as there is no YES or NO answer. It is both KINDA and KINDA NOT.

The eye has individual photoreceptors that are akin to pixels. There are 125 million of them in each eye - roughly ten times the number of pixels found in a smart phone camera.

Ziess microscopy   Photo Credit: Flickr

Information from these photoreceptors is shuttled to the deeper recesses of the brain through the optic nerve. And here's where the story gets interesting. The optic nerve is small and slow - a bottleneck for the flow of information. If we took a single photo from a smart phone and transmitted its data file through the optic nerve, it would take about two seconds to reach the brain. One snapshot, two seconds. How can that be? We certainly see more than a snapshot every couple of seconds.

The left optic nerve and the optic tracts   Photo Credit: Wikimedia

The short answer is that the eyes don't transmit visual images to the brain in the form of pictures. They can't. The bandwidth just isn't there. The eyes are somehow efficiently cherry picking and repackaging the visual data, and they're doing so in such a way that, when other parts of our brains receive it, our perception of the world is the smooth, continuous visual flow we're all familiar with. "This is one of the wonders of the brain," writes Quiroga, "one of the many mysteries that keep us neuroscientists up at night." 

Quote

https://www.uh.edu/engines/epi3153.htm#

 

Edited February 12, 2021 by write4u

[Omnifarious]

6 hours ago, write4u said:

Ok, I'll give it my last shot, being as there is no YES or NO answer. It is both KINDA and KINDA NOT.

The eye has individual photoreceptors that are akin to pixels. There are 125 million of them in each eye - roughly ten times the number of pixels found in a smart phone camera.

So photoreceptors really do work like pixels or fibre optic cables? If so, how is this known?

Also, does this mean human eyes are only capable of seeing a finite number of different possible images like I fear they do?

Edited February 12, 2021 by Omnifarious

[write4u]

5 hours ago, Omnifarious said:

So photoreceptors really do work like pixels or fibre optic cables? If so, how is this known?

Also, does this mean human eyes are only capable of seeing a finite number of different possible images like I fear they do?

What are photoreceptors?

Quote

 

In the retina, five types of neuron — photoreceptors, bipolar cells, retinal ganglion cells, horizontal cells and amacrine cells — are wired together to form one of nature's most complex circuit boards.Sep 5, 2018

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06111-y

Photoreceptors are photo sensitive bio-chemical organelles which respond to light waves of different frequencies and shapes.

Can human eyes observe infra-red or ultra-violet blue objects or transmitters, like many insects? No!

Edited February 13, 2021 by write4u

[Omnifarious]

16 hours ago, write4u said:

What are photoreceptors?

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06111-y

Photoreceptors are photo sensitive bio-chemical organelles which respond to light waves of different frequencies and shapes.

Can human eyes observe infra-red or ultra-violet blue objects or transmitters, like many insects? No!

What is your point?

[write4u]

1 hour ago, Omnifarious said:

What is your point?

I answered the OP question.

There are a near infinite number of different natural phenomena humans we cannot possibly see without the aid of instruments.

 

Quote

 

0.0035 percent

The entire rainbow of radiation observable to the human eye only makes up a tiny portion of the electromagnetic spectrum – about 0.0035 percent. This range of wavelengths is known as visible light.Oct 17, 2018

 

 

https://www.energy.gov/nnsa/articles/visible-light-eye-opening-research-nnsa#

But allow me to ask , what is your point in posing the question? Clearly you must have already known some of this stuff......

Edited February 13, 2021 by write4u

[Omnifarious]

20 hours ago, write4u said:

I answered the OP question.

There are a near infinite number of different natural phenomena humans we cannot possibly see without the aid of instruments.

 

 

https://www.energy.gov/nnsa/articles/visible-light-eye-opening-research-nnsa#

But allow me to ask , what is your point in posing the question? Clearly you must have already known some of this stuff......

No you did not answer it. You only pointed out the light spectrum extends beyond what our human eyes can perceive.

Are you saying that confirms there are only a finite number of images we can see? Because I can tell you it does not. Light is continuous and can have an infinite variation in it's wavelengths, no matter what the spectrum is limited to. And as a matter of fact I do know some of this stuff because I have been obsessing over it for years!

Apparently you can't tell from this writing but I've been anxious, distraught, frustrated, angry and in despair this whole time I've been talking with you. I thought I had made it clear how much this had affected me but apparently I had not been clear enough. This thing has all but DESTORYED me! Creativity was my life, it gave me joy and purpose. When this obsession came along it was like my soul had been ripped out. I have been struggling with depression ever since. For years I have seen no future for myself worth having. And there have been times when I didn't care if I continued on or not.

And now you tell me my fears are true (I think) and do it with a smiley face. Either you don't know how much this bothers me or you don't care.

And don't try and tell me that this thing about perception doesn't matter or I shouldn't be bothered by it. I have told you how I feel and I don't have to explain why I feel this way.

I wanted to see if anyone else had thought of this and if scientists had proven it. I was hoping to get something that would give me reason to think this idea is not true and so far it's been a disaster.