The retinal image is an image in a mathematical sense; it is a projection or a mapping. The retinal image is not an image in the sense of a picture – or, if it is, this is entirely accidental. How it looks, or how it reads, plays no role in its performance of its neurophysiological job description. Once we appreciate that the retinal image isn’t something that we see, we lose a grip even on what it means to say that it is upside-down. Upside-down, one must ask relative to what? Who’s to say what counts as upside-down in the head relative to the tasks faced by the nervous system?
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Again, we don’t experience the retinal image; we don’t experience any image , in that sense. We experience the world.
Jul 012011
CONTACT – ART AS THE OUTER LIMITS OF THE UNIVERSE ©Rune Peitersen 2010 The movie ‘Contact’ (1997) explores different aspects of the traditional positions of science and faith; what is faith and how does faith differ from scientific deduction. It cleverly raises a few questions about the validity, or reality, of individual experience versus ‘objective’ [...]