A revolution in thought

[ceptimus]

Most living things react to light in some way or other.

Plants grow towards the light, some plants turn their leaves through the day so that they face the sun to collect as much sunlight as possible.

Many 'simple' animals know whether it's light or dark - they have simple light detector cells somewhere on their bodies, even though they are nothing like what we would call 'eyes'.

Then there are animals that have their light receptor cells at the bottom of pits on their bodies - so they are able to detect which direction the light is coming from. And then there is a whole range of different animals, some with poor vision and some that have (in some respect) vision that is better than that of humans. Cats and dogs can see better at night than us; many hawks have very sharp distance vision; some birds and insects can see in the ultra-violet.

Does Lessans have anything to say about vision in animals other than humans?

Peacegirl, do you think all animals see efferently, or is it just some animals, or perhaps only human beings?

[naturalist.atheist]

Originally Posted by But

But the light is present on the retina. What is missing? Why doesn't it work? Why does the light from each point on the object have to hit a corresponding point on the retina?

What's missing is that it makes Lessans' bullshit completely unnecessary. That and peacegirl is just not capable of connecting the dots.

[naturalist.atheist]

Originally Posted by peacegirl

I want to say that today would have been my father's 93rd birthday if he had lived. If you are so inclined, please offer a moment of silence in his memory, or maybe even sing Happy Birthday to him, in recognition of his contribution to our world (not that I'm being serious because no one thinks he has made a contribution.)

Not being serious? So you understand that the supposed contribution of Lessans is only in his and your mind?

[naturalist.atheist]

Originally Posted by peacegirl

Movement in black and white is not sight LadyShea. I am not moving any goalposts. The premises have not changed. I'm just getting more specific since people are trying to equate seeing shadows or a light pointed in their eyes, as true sight.

This is a good example of the hole in your brain. If it isn't perfect vision then one can't see. It doesn't matter that very few people in the world have perfect vision and yet are able to do all sorts of things that require sight.

And no matter how long people spend trying to get you to understand this, it is a completely wasted effort. Because you are just not capable of comprehending the idea.

[LadyShea]

Happy Birthday Seymour. I am sure you miss your dad, peacegirl

[naturalist.atheist]

Originally Posted by LadyShea

No, you freak out at the mere thought of Lessans being possibly incorrect, and start in with the emphatic but unsupported "you are wrongs" and "I will be vindicates". This is natural for a True Believer because, like religious texts, he asserted his infallibility right in the book. Over and over.

No scientists ever use "undeniable" so it's a stupid word to make a synonym for "scientific". His claims of discovering absolute truths and laws of nature and all that are the claims of an egomaniac, not a scientist.

peacegirl isn't gonna comprehend this either. Any scientist that were to make their claims in the massively overconfident way that Lessans does would be given a lot of shit simply because of the history of how often people who thought they got it right were spectacularly wrong.

[naturalist.atheist]

Originally Posted by Vivisectus

Why is that not sight? And how os color specifically important? Is black and white sight not sight now? The premise has changed extensively - we are now redefining sight into multiple things, somehow.

Also, you seem to be mixing people up again.

Because of the hole in peacegirls brain when the thought "color blind" crosses it, it only comprehends "blind".

[LadyShea]

Originally Posted by peacegirl

I never said anything about babies not being able to see in color, once they are able to see clearly. I said black and white as if the objects were black or white, but if they were blue and orange, the baby could probably see those colors. This is, once again, getting way off topic.

Then explain the comments below

[naturalist.atheist]

Originally Posted by peacegirl

Unfocused means blurry, but a person who needs glasses is not cross-eyed and the source of that blurriness is completely different than a babies. Lenses or glasses would not help a baby because his eyes aren't unfocused due to a refractive error. What is your point?

Blurry is blurry. There is no such thing as "babby blurry". But there does appear to be such a thing as "Lessans blurry". And everything but "efferent vision" appears to be "Lessans blurry".

There are completely automatic non-invasive machines that can determine the optical characteristics of a human eye while it is still in the human and give a very detailed picture of what that eye can focus on, how blurry it will be and what sort of detail will be present.

It has been used on babies and that is how they know that they are capable of seeing things.

But of course such machines were not in existence when Lessans was alive so peacegirls knowledge of the world is frozen in time. Again the hole in her brain does not allow her to conceive that Lessans used many pieces of contemporary information in his book to make his inferences, such as they are, but that information is now known to be wrong. The idea of knowledge improving also appears to fall into the category of ideas that are obliterated by the hole in peacegirls brain.

[naturalist.atheist]

Originally Posted by peacegirl

And of course the sources are "unreliable" because they conflict with Lessans. What other method does peacegirl have to determine if something is "reliable"?

It's that hole in her brain working again.

[naturalist.atheist]

Originally Posted by Angakuk

What can a newborn see?

Peacegirl,
You keep saying that newborns are cross-eyed, as if that were a constant condition. Sometimes their eyes are crossed, sometimes they are a bit wall-eyed, sometimes one or another eye wanders and sometimes both eyes point straight ahead.

Yes but the way peacegirl's brain works, if at least one infant can't see then that is good enough for her to infer that all infants can't see. That is how Lessans taught her to think. With a giant hole in her brain.

[naturalist.atheist]

Originally Posted by But

But the light is present on the retina. What is missing? Why doesn't it work? Why does the light from each point on the object have to hit a corresponding point on the retina?

Because in Lessan's world light directly strikes the optic nerve (which it doesn't). And Lessans' never mentions a retina, so it's existence in peacegirl's mind is highly suspect. Again because of the hole in her brain.

Of course even in Lessans' time they knew how eyes worked, but Lessans appeared to get his information from old out of date books that he probable was able to get for nothing.

[LadyShea]

I gave links to abstracts/summaries and or news stories about various published studies. These do not include the data found in the full articles/papers and the full articles are only available in scholarly journals. I am not paying for the full articles, which you probably wouldn't understand even if you didn't ignore it. You have no basis on which to base a reliability assessments because you didn't see anything but summaries.

Additionally for every link I posted there are many hundreds of studies and papers I didn't find or link to or know about.

If you are truly interested, you need to visit a University library and/or scour the appropriate various journals for likely papers and either pay for them or request a copy for review.

Your son, as a doctor or medical student, probably has a subscription that allows him to get full articles easily and for free. Just send him a citation, or tell him what you are looking for.

[naturalist.atheist]

All she needs to do is visit a decent optometrist for an eye exam. Make sure to schedule the visit at the end of the day so there will be plenty of time to show peacegirl how eyes work using her very own eyes.

But she will never do this because of the hole in her brain. Lessans has told her everything she will ever need to know. Whether it has anything to do with reality or not.

What do you want to bet that if she did such a thing she would come back and say that Lessans is still right because seeing for her self how her own eyes work is "unreliable".

[naturalist.atheist]

Originally Posted by LadyShea

Your son, as a doctor or medical student, probably has a subscription that allows him to get full articles easily and for free. Just send him a citation, or tell him what you are looking for.

Her son is a medical student? I wonder if they ever talk about "efferent vision". He probably knows that there is just no point.

[LadyShea]

He's a radiologist IIRC. She chose not to bother her kids with the book, and says she didn't even talk about the concept of no free will with them, because they wouldn't have understood. And now they're busy.

Makes you wonder why she wouldn't start the world peace process at home, huh?

[naturalist.atheist]

Originally Posted by LadyShea

He's a radiologist IIRC. She chose not to bother her kids with the book, and says she didn't even talk about the concept of no free will with them, because they wouldn't have understood. And now they're busy.

Makes you wonder why she wouldn't start the world peace process at home, huh?

Makes me think that deep down peacegirl knows it's bollocks. But that hole in her brain keeps her from making the connection.

[Angakuk]

On the subject of crossed eyes. When I was a child we had a cross-eyed tomcat. His name was Samson (it was Delilah originally, but when we learned she was a he we changed it to Samson). Sam was awesome at catching gophers, but it took him awhile to get the hang of it. When he first started trying to catch gophers he would sit for hours by the hole, when the gopher finally made an appearance he would pounce and miss. He did this repeatedly until he finally figured out how to compensate for the peculiarities of his vision caused by his crossed eyes. Once he got the hang of it he hardly ever missed a gopher. He was cross-eyed, but he was hardly blind.

[LadyShea]

I worked with a lady who was very cross eyed, to the point of being legally blind, but could read receipts and printouts by bringing them all the way to her nose. She was the bookkeeper.

[Angakuk]

Could she catch gophers? I ask, because that is the only reliable test for true sight.

[Vivisectus]

Originally Posted by Naturalist.Atheist

And no matter how long people spend trying to get you to understand this, it is a completely wasted effort. Because you are just not capable of comprehending the idea.

Not incapable, in my opinion. Unwilling. I suspect that if you wanted to deconvert her, you would have to find an emotional reason for her to change her mind. Rational ones are ignored, because they threaten a belief that yields a great deal of emotional satisfaction.

Right now, she has it All Sorted Out. She has a simple system that purports to be the answer to anything. It carries in itself an explanation for why it does not work in the world we see around us: it only works if everyone believes in it. It promises a happy eternal life. It promises simplicity in a complicated world. It doesn't require a lot of work - you do not have to spend years learning difficult science, only to find out you know have more questions that you started out with. You just need to agree with Lessans, and has the answers to everything. Also it allows her to believe that her father was the wise, humble, saintly scholar that he liked to portray himself as, and not just a rather eccentric man who fancied himself a philosopher and scientist, but was not very good at either of those two things.

Typically, any criticism of it is met with the standard approaches: first it is called a lack of knowledge, then it is called a lack of open mindedness - at this stage you are treated in a slightly condescending but friendly way.It is not the doctrine that is at fault, but people's lack of understanding.

If people persist to criticize, they are accused of malice and the reactions become more hostile. You are frequently accused of persecuting the author and the religion. You are a part of the establishment that just refuses to accept the "undeniable" truth because of bias and interest in maintaining the status quo.

It gets interesting when you use logic or empirical evidence. It is approached in several ways:

One is to unilaterally decide it is inconclusive. The realm of the inconclusive is a rather large one in her mind. If in Peacegirls view, the idea that exposure to extreme radiation can cause cancer would contradict Lessans, then she would insist that the link is not at all conclusively proven. In effect, a written affidavit from God would only just be acceptable to satisfy her. The reasoning is, and I quote, "There is a chance that he was right".

And so there is. It is about as large as the very real but also infinitely small chance that I stand of spontaneously floating towards the ceiling right now, for instance. For practical purposes we can rule it out.

Another one is to move the goalposts. This is where sight is not information, or that since nothing moves in direct sight (actually an even bigger contradiction of physics that faster-than-light sight, but that aside) information has not travelled and therefor there is no breech of causality. Also, apparently that what babies see is not real sight. The vague shapes and shadows we can generate using a camera and a specialized chip attached to the retina is not real sight either.

It is relatively easy to do things like this all the time, because you simply start with the preconceived notion that Lessans was absolutely right about everything, and then work back from that, re-arranging or plain ignoring reality as you see fit. The amazing fact that cameras are completely afferent machines (a weird way of putting it, I know, but it is a useful shorthand) and yet show us the same image as the human eye is one of the points that is completely ignored and waved away with some vague blather about objects and fields of view.

It is absolutely fascinating. It is like seeing a fundamentalist, only without the benefit of thousands of years of glib apologism to draw on: Peacegirl has to make all hers up herself. It is amazing to see how large the chunks of reality she denies can get, as long as they are perceived to threaten her fairytale.

The stratagems are the same as those of bible-literalists. They are impervious to rational arguments, because rationality has nothing to do with why they believe what they do. They believe it because it feels good. Which would be fine, if they didn't then tried to project their irrational beliefs onto reality.

PG is the same. She believes what she believes because it feels good. Which is fine by me, really. I just wish she would stop trying to pass it off as scientific or rational, because it is neither, and just say "Well, it is what I believe and it works for me", which is honest and fine.

For me the question is - "Do you challenge the irrationality in literalist religion" - to me the answer is "Yes, when they try to pass it off as rationality or science, because it is neither."

[peacegirl]

Originally Posted by LadyShea

What on Earth do you mean you no longer dispute these things?

So you agree that light enters the eye, and through transduction the impulses are sent to the visual cortex? From the eyes to the brain is an afferent connection, because that is what afferent means...TO the brain.

So what are you still disputing?

I am disputing that the eyes are efferent, but I am not sure of the exact mechanism. I don't want my effort to figure out where the afferent model may be flawed to hurt Lessans because of my speculation.

[peacegirl]

Originally Posted by peacegirl

Of course. Your eyes need to bend light rays so the image can be focused sharply on your retina. The better your retina records the image, the more likely that your brain will interpret the image, and the more likely you will see the image clearly.

Originally Posted by But

OK, close enough.

Refracting is a big word that means bending light rays.

Originally Posted by But

Thanks, that'll come in handy in my electrodynamics exam in two weeks.

If a person has vision trouble, it's often a refractive problem. Glasses or contact lenses work so well because they can correct refractive problems. In other words, they bend the light rays in a way that lets you see more clearly.

Originally Posted by But

OK.

So if the refraction is corrected, the image that the brain sees will be clear. If it's not striking correctly, the brain will not see clear. It would work the same way in afferent vision as in efferent vision, because the exact point at which the light strikes the retina is still necessary in order to see a clear image,

Originally Posted by But

Why do you think that is? Why does the light have to be focused on the retina? It's arriving there even if it's not focused, and if (your version of) efferent vision is correct, the brain should be able to look there because all the conditions are met.

The brain needs the lens to focus the light on the retina at just the right angle. If not, the brain cannot see clearly, through the eyes, because the shape of the eye, and the lack of refractive correction, is causing the problem. How light and the retina work together as a necessary function for clear vision does not shed light on this subject matter (no pun intended).

[LadyShea]

To find a flaw in the current scientific ideas of light and sight, you have to understand it pretty thoroughly.

Lessans extraordinary claim is unsupported by equally extraordinary evidence, and he failed to leave you a description of the mechanism, so you're stuck trying to defend it from a place of ignorance.

Really you can't hurt him. The idea is very refutable from many angles and you need to comprehend those refutations.

[peacegirl]

Originally Posted by LadyShea

No, it's not nearly as simple. Many muscles are not well developed at birth because they were not used in utero, hence newborn humans can't hold up their head. In healthy full term babies their heart muscle is well developed at birth and their diaphragm works well so they can breathe and cry.

There is no need to practice focusing on different distances in the womb, so those muscles aren't very strong until they get used.

You may not be able to pick up a 70lb box today, but if you developed those muscles by lifting increasingly heavy things daily, you would get to that point. People with broken bones and casts find that their muscles become weakened due to lack of use and have to redevelop those muscles, correct?

This is the most common sense, observable, and relatable thing in the world- human muscles don't work well without having been developed and maintained. You are only disputing it from a faith standpoint.

That's fine, and it might be that the ciliary muscle was not used in utero, but this doesn't prove (it is speculation) that this is the cause of the newborns inability to focus. Moreover, the idea that a newborn can see close up (6-18 inches) is not confirmed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraocular_muscles