Nature, Brain, and Culture

Hi.

Sorry to be "late" to reply. Holiday season etc ... .

This is a very interesting post (again). In fact the issues you raise are more complicated than this sketch you provide can show without being expanded to an unwieldy size. I wish to make a few comments. These will be even more "random" than the selection of points in your article (which at least sort of cohere around the issue of not seeing ones [nose / hands] in vision).

First let me mention that there is more than just one's nose and hands which are missing in vision (compared to an FPS [First Person Shooter], say). One's feet normally come into and go out of the visual field routinely when one is walking. Indeed there is a growing theory of blindsight which has led to (maybe historically unwarranted claim?) the discovery of "new" eye-brain pathways in vision, through the corpus callosum [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosensitive_ganglion_cell ].
When one is sitting down one normally sees a largish part of the front (ventral?) surface of one's body, or more accurately one's clothing over this surface.

Second, wrt the issue of video games, one certainly is aware that the "action" all takes place on a screen which certainly doesn't fill the visual field. The same is true of movies, even IMAX. (Boston's Museum of Science has a kind of surround IMAX which might encompass almost all of the visual field, iirc ... ?)

Third, wrt the issue of transparency of the nose or hands, there is a comment I wish to make about what I might call "nativistic concepts" of humans (!). To warm up, let me mention that it may have occurred to you that the mythological human concept of a dragon MIGHT be influenced by the existence or dinosaur fossils at various places on Earth. To get to the point, let me mention that the mythological concept of a GHOST might be influenced precisely by the transparency phenomenon which you describe. Preusmably there is a lot more to the "concept" of "ghost" than this, for example the phenomenon of dreaming, not to mention the "puzzle" of death. But I hope I have made my point here (?).

One general comment and then I want to end this post. There are MANY ASPECTS of human vision. Sometimes your writing seems to tend to emphasize a particular aspect and propound it as the "true" whole of the given "situation". I continue to advocate tackling the complexity PER SE and not shying away from it.

I once had a Chinese fortune cookie which said: If you lose your needle in a haystack, look for it in the haystack. [end] To me this is a worthwhile observation of our topic here.

A couple of days ago I ordered and today I received a copy of "The Vision Revolution". It looks quite good to me! I'm glad it was cheap in paperback or I might have been deterred from purchasing it.

Here is a line of reasoning I have been developing in my mind on the question of the origin of language. It is not directly related to 3D movies, but definitely is related to the topics of this blog construed in the broad sense. For what it is worth I have decided to post it here.

Beyond Prayer. There are two ways to control the “inner monologue”. One is prayer, which tries to “tie up” the monologue. The other is meditation (Buddhist stopping). This is a more fundamental method.

The former method leads to the belief in God (because one takes the inner to be outer (!)). The latter method leads to self-awareness.

We all know the sound of (young) children playing (outside). The giggling, screaming, yelling, crying, etc which is so dear to a mother's heart (ideally at least―not necessarily these days). The sound itself is the “lifeline” to the mother. If the sound stops, something is wrong.

Then there is the case of the women's high voices. Similar (in relation to the men) to the relation of the children to themselves [= the women]. They also scream when they are in trouble. [Transistor radios. How to tie up the inner monologue. TV sets.]

So different from the low barking, shouting of commands of the male voice in time of war (or, earlier, the hunt). [My sister says: I'm the only girl (female) I know who hates cell phones.]

So now [next] we have the picture of the campfire. The “play”―the reenactment of the days events “as story”. The slow accumulation of knowledge.

And the sound (humans acting like birds) sets up the possibility of [phrased as a pun: sets the stage for] “modulating” the “song” with information. Enter language (or at least language w syntax).

The paradigm of words, predicates, thoughts ... . Inference is twofold. The outer (communication) (deeply) affects the inner. One becomes able to say, to think, new things.

Then the stream of consciousness, reasoning, mathematics, etc.

[end]