Essence of Seeing
Jul. 21st, 2025 02:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
draconicaI can see the light.
Isn't that the very essence of seeing? If you see, there must be light, at least that's how our eyes work. Light is a stream of photons, very small particles that move at the speed of light as you might've guessed it. But if you were a photon, it would seem to you that you are moving from place to place instantaneously, because special relativity.
I can see colors, isn't that the essence of seeing? It's certainly not the essence of light, because photons aren't colored. What is colored are photon detectors in our eyes, we have three kinds of them, Red, Green, and Blue, mostly Green, because we as a humanity grew up among greenery, or so we think. What differs between different photons is their frequency, which is a measure of their energy. Different colors are merely flavors of various amount of energies, much like hot and sweet are different flavors of various chemicals found in foods, poisons and other objects.
So it seems the essence of seeing is transduction. It's a generalization of translation. I'd say it's the same for hearing and touching, they're all transductions. Transduction is essential for information to spread, because it's spread across media, and media have different encodings for signals. So a transducer is needed when information leaves a medium and enters a different medium. In seeing, eyes are but one transduction layer, followed by neural processing to form a picture we perceive. A picture so convincing we think it must be the reality itself, until we dream and hallucinate.
I can see the light, but can it see me? What's it like to be the light? To touch all the things around you? To be woven into reality as an infinite thread of refractions and emissions? To allows others see, yet be blind on your own? To be pure free energy?
That, dear reader, I'm only yet to discover.
Isn't that the very essence of seeing? If you see, there must be light, at least that's how our eyes work. Light is a stream of photons, very small particles that move at the speed of light as you might've guessed it. But if you were a photon, it would seem to you that you are moving from place to place instantaneously, because special relativity.
I can see colors, isn't that the essence of seeing? It's certainly not the essence of light, because photons aren't colored. What is colored are photon detectors in our eyes, we have three kinds of them, Red, Green, and Blue, mostly Green, because we as a humanity grew up among greenery, or so we think. What differs between different photons is their frequency, which is a measure of their energy. Different colors are merely flavors of various amount of energies, much like hot and sweet are different flavors of various chemicals found in foods, poisons and other objects.
So it seems the essence of seeing is transduction. It's a generalization of translation. I'd say it's the same for hearing and touching, they're all transductions. Transduction is essential for information to spread, because it's spread across media, and media have different encodings for signals. So a transducer is needed when information leaves a medium and enters a different medium. In seeing, eyes are but one transduction layer, followed by neural processing to form a picture we perceive. A picture so convincing we think it must be the reality itself, until we dream and hallucinate.
I can see the light, but can it see me? What's it like to be the light? To touch all the things around you? To be woven into reality as an infinite thread of refractions and emissions? To allows others see, yet be blind on your own? To be pure free energy?
That, dear reader, I'm only yet to discover.
