Blindsight and the Million Dollar Challenge

Sarkus said:
I.e. their eyes subconsciously picking up, to a degree at least, what a normally sighted person would consciously pick up.
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Nooooo, blindness is not a mental problem. It is a sensory problem. When the eyes lack or have damaged rods and cones, or optical nerve damage, there cannot be vision.

Blindness and vision loss
Blindness is a lack of vision. It may also refer to a loss of vision that cannot be corrected with glasses or contact lenses.
  • Partial blindness means you have very limited vision.
  • Complete blindness means you cannot see anything and do not see light. (Most people who use the term "blindness" mean complete blindness.)
People with vision that is worse than 20/200, even with glasses or contact lenses, are considered legally blind in most states in the United States.
Vision loss refers to the partial or complete loss of vision. This vision loss may happen suddenly or over a period of time.
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Some types of vision loss never lead to complete blindness.
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https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/003040.htm#
 
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Write4U said:
Processed how?
In science, "somehow" is just not good enough, is it?
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That's why they are studying the phenomenon, and why there are theories behind it. FFS, have you not read the report that was linked??? I don't know how they can see. I'm not a bioligist. Nor am I at the forefront of the studies into this phenomenon. Why are you asking me to be an expert, when articles have been provided to you that detail much of what you're after???
Write4U said:
Nooooo, blindness is not a mental problem. It is a sensory problem. When the eyes lack or have damaged rods and cones, or optical nerve damage, there cannot be vision.
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That's certainly been the thinking in the past, yes. This is why the phenomenon of blindsight is being tested. Scientifically. With theories around how such people are able to react to visual stimuli. Read the report that was linked! Have you not read the wiki article, even??
What of all this are you not getting???
 
Sarkus said:
That's why they are studying the phenomenon, and why there are theories behind it. FFS, have you not read the report that was linked??? I don't know how they can see. I'm not a bioligist. Nor am I at the forefront of the studies into this phenomenon. Why are you asking me to be an expert, when articles have been provided to you that detail much of what you're after???
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I am only asking what is asked of me.
That's certainly been the thinking in the past, yes. This is why the phenomenon of blindsight is being tested. Scientifically. With theories around how such people are able to react to visual stimuli. Read the report that was linked! Have you not read the wiki article, even??
What of all this are you not getting???
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The concept of blindsight as a form of sightedness is ridiculous.

Blindsight: recent and historical controversies on the blindness of blindsight

Morten Overgaard
First published: 30 July 2012

https://doi.org/10.1002/wcs.1194
Citations: 5

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Abstract
The phenomenon ‘blindsight’ has received much interest from neuroscientists, philosophers, and psychologists during the last decades. Several researchers seem to agree that blindsight might be of great importance in the ambition to find neural correlates of consciousness. However, the history of blindsight is a history of changing experimental paradigms and very few patients. In late 19th century, researchers debated why lesions to primary visual cortex seemingly left some visual abilities intact in animals, while human patients reported to be blind.
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From the 1970s until today, experiments have attempted to compare measures of conscious and unconscious perception, suggesting a distinction between visual functions and visual experience. However, more recently, newer methods and an interest in introspective reports have cast doubts about the ‘blindness’ of blindsight. A cautious conclusion is suggested, though current research can be interpreted in different ways. WIREs Cogn Sci 2012 doi: 10.1002/wcs.1194
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This article is categorized under: Psychology > Brain Function and Dysfunction

INTRODUCTION
Blindsight refers to a ‘visual capacity in a field defect in the absence of acknowledged awareness’.1 The phenomenon seems to occur after lesion to the primary visual cortex, and shares as such all important features of other lesions leading to cortical blindness, apart from one crucial issue: patients have intact visual functions, regardless of their reports of total blindness.
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https://wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wcs.1194[/quote]
 
Being that the neural network is self-referential, maybe this blindsight is merely a distribution of data regardless if part of the brain is damaged. Both sides of the brain are in constant communication.

May 18, 2023
Left Brain vs. Right Brain: Are You Really One or the Other?
Different parts are responsible for different things, but you use both sides all the time
Essentially, your brain can be divided into three parts, each with its own job to do.

Your cerebellum and your brainstem are the two parts of your brain that control your automatic functions — things like muscle movement, breathing, digestion and swallowing.
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Your cerebrum is the third part, and it’s the part of your brain we’re talking about when we call someone left- or right-brained.
It’s the biggest part of your brain. And it’s responsible for interpreting information from your senses. Your cerebrum also regulates your emotions, reasoning and learning. In other words, it’s the part of your brain that starts and manages your active thoughts. It’s the part of the brain that makes you … you.
Your cerebrum is divided into two parts: the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere. (Hence, the whole idea of left and right brain.)
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“It’s absolutely true that different parts of your brain are responsible for different things,” Dr. Tworek states. “But the idea that one hemisphere is substantially stronger than the other and that that dominance plays a major role in your personality or your abilities haven’t proven out in research.”
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https://health.clevelandclinic.org/left-brain-vs-right-brain

But when we talk about a "network", there is no physical disconnect and depending on the type of data, the entire network becomes involved or is affected. But that is not visual in and of itself.
That can just be the recording of data flowing , through the unconscious parts of the brain that may still be connected and measurable.

Example: Thermogenics.
Thermogenic means tending to produce heat, and the term is commonly applied to drugs which increase heat through metabolic stimulation,[1] or to microorganisms which create heat within organic waste. Approximately all enzymatic reaction in the human body is thermogenic, which gives rise to the basal metabolic rate.[2]
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In bodybuilding, athletes wishing to reduce body fat percentage use thermogenics in order to attempt to increase their basal metabolic rate, thereby increasing overall energy expenditure.
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Caffeine and ephedrine are commonly used for this purpose in the ECA stack. 2,4-Dinitrophenol (DNP) is a very strong thermogenic drug used for fat loss which produces a dose-dependent increase in body temperature, to the point where it can induce death by hyperthermia. It works as a mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation uncoupler, disrupting the mitochondrial electron transport chain. This stops the mitochondria from producing adenosine triphosphate, causing energy to be released as heat.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermogenics

And measurable as unconscious "activity" but not "perception".
 
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Write4U said:
Processed how?
In science, "somehow" is just not good enough, is it?
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Exactly. It is a sixth sense we didn't know exists. Until blindsight was discovered, we thought all visual information came through the visual cortex. Then the brain processes the information. Alternative pathways directly into the brain also exists that do not utilize the visual cortex at all. And most amazing of all, complex information such as the interpretation of other people's emotions, are somehow processed completely without our knowledge of it.

By definition a six sense is a form of extra sensory perception - ESP.

What everyone here wants to demand is that it must be magic to qualify as ESP. It is an extra sense beyond the five we recognize. Demanding that it must be magic is a crackpot argument. It is precisely the sort of double-talk Randi was using to dupe his cult following.

Being a professional deceiver himself, Randi was great at exposing frauds. But that does nothing for science. First and foremost, Randi had no means of testing for things that can't be produced on command. If the bottom line was Randi, ball lightning wouldn't exist either. Nor would earthquake lights.
 
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Write4U said:
[...] The concept of blindsight as a form of sightedness is ridiculous. [...]
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Curiously, there doesn't seem to have been a direct mention yet of Nicholas Humphrey, including what he has spun off from blindsight with respect to consciousness. (The reference to monkeys could indirectly allude to him.) He has associations with either eliminativism or Keith Frankish's "consciousness is an illusion" school of thought.

The prospect of blindsight might scrape a tad against the idea of a philosophical zombie, where the latter speculative entity would process sensory information (of all modes) and successfully navigate its environment, but be minus any manifested representations of the latter (experiences). But this isn't even narrowly a vestige of that, IF the alternative visual procedural pathways are not expected to have experiences associated with them to begin with. A hypothetical p-zombie would be fully functional in all areas, not impaired like these individuals.
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Ivan Seeking said:
Exactly. It is a sixth sense we didn't know exists. Until blindsight was discovered, we thought all visual information came through the visual cortex. Then the brain processes the information. Alternative pathways directly into the brain also exists that do not utilize the visual cortex at all. And most amazing of all, complex information such as the interpretation of other people's emotions, are somehow processed completely without our knowledge of it.

By definition a six sense is a form of extra sensory perception - ESP.
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Explain to me how data can enter the brain without the neural network?

Even Extra Sensory Perception involves the processing and transportation of electrochemical data, functioning at cellular levels, right?
And that function requires a data reception and transmission network, sensory or not, right?

We know what enables all this data transmission at every level of dynamic existence and that is the common data processor all living things use. It is the microtubule network that is involved at every level of data reception and transportation, from gross kinetic trauma to molecular transmission of electrochemical action potentials.

By any measure, those functions require microtubules to maintain a responsive variable homeostatic control of regulatory and other autonomous survival functions without needing conscious control. Microtubules are self-forming dipolar spiral arrangements of just 2 tubulins (a & b) and are a "common denominator" in every Eukaryotic organism on earth!

The cytoskeleton and cytoplasm of every cell in every organism on earth contain thousands of trillions of nanoscale microtubules that make up the processing aparatus of internal data transmission, including "mitosis", iow. copying genetic data (DNA) and forming a new cell.
Essentially that is what happens to all self-forming patterns such as "growth", which happens to be the difference between inorganic life (mineral crystal growth) and organic life (cellular microbiome growth).

Note, that One reality is "Humans are microbiomes and without our symbiont residents of flora and fauna we would die in a few days".
 
C C said:
A hypothetical p-zombie would be fully functional in all areas, not impaired like these individuals.
_
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It might well be that blindsight is something we all have to a degree - not the damage part, but the ability to react to visual stimuli that we don't consciously see. And perhaps it's only called blindsight because it bcomes noticeable with people who have no conscious sight - i.e. are otherwise blind. To the rest of us it is put down to intuition, or luck, or something else.
I agree that the matter of p-zombie is not relevant, though, other than being an example of reacting to non-conscious stimuli. The p-zombie does such for what would otherwise be conscious stimuli, whereas blindsight is only ever non-conscious, in both a p-zombie and a normal zombie. ;)
 
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Write4U said:
Blind sight has nothing to do with optics. It has to do with substituting sight with a different measuring method such as echo-location.

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Although not connected to blindsight, video was a good, brief trip down memory lane about this technique.
_
 
Write4U said:
Nooooo, blindness is not a mental problem. It is a sensory problem. When the eyes lack or have damaged rods and cones, or optical nerve damage, there cannot be vision.
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That's 100% wrong. You didn't even read the definition you yourself posted.
 
billvon said:
That's 100% wrong. You didn't even read the definition you yourself posted.
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Yes, I did read and think about it. I concluded that the expression "blindsight" is a contradiction in terms.
I know the definition of "sight" and it is not "blindness", and vice-versa.
sight, noun
The faculty or power of seeing.
Similar: eyesight, vision, eyes, faculty of sight, power of sight, ability to see, visual perception, observation.
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blind, adjective
Unable to see, due to physiological or neurological factors.
Unable to be used to see, due to physiological or neurological factors.
Failing to see, acknowledge, perceive.
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and
blind-sight, noun.
The ability of individuals with blindness to detect and respond to visual stimuli despite lacking awareness of having seen anything
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Websters

According to the definition, the "response" is not of a visual nature at all, but is merely the production of a non-visual response, such as recorded by EEG. I have had a few of those and do not recall the experience of blind-sightedness.

If anything, blind-sightedness is performed by non-brained organisms, such as sunflowers.
Then it is called "heliotropism".
Heliotropism, noun
A form of tropism, is the diurnal or seasonal motion of plant parts in response to the direction of the Sun.
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Wikipedia

And this is supposed to be a scientific definition? I believe my compound terms are a lot better than this semantic abomination.
 
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Write4U said:
Yes, I did read and think about it. I concluded that the expression "blindsight" is a contradiction in terms.
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Yes, it's an oxymoron. But it is apt, in that it is describing an apparent contradiction: the apparent ability to see while supposedly being blind.
According to the definition, the "response" is not of a visual nature at all, but is merely the production of a non-visual response, such as recorded by EEG. I have had a few of those and do not recall the experience of blind-sightedness.
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It's not a matter of what the response is but rather what the stimuli is. I.e. it is the reaction to visual stimuli, as previously explained to you. Please try to understand.
If anything, blind-sightedness is performed by non-brained organisms, such as sunflowers.
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Sunflowers react to visual stimuli???
Then it is called "heliotropism".
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Heliotropism is nothing to do with visual stimuli, but to do with light and/or warmth received from the sun.
And this is supposed to be a scientific definition? I believe my compound terms are a lot better than this semantic abomination.
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Sure. Whatever. Maybe you first want to actually understand what it is you're referring to? Just a thought.
 
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