Why is the Universe Comprehensible?

[AtheistCrusader]

94. Good grief.

"The device only exists *NOW* if people are willing to trade color blindness for legal blindness."

I didn't suggest colorblind people would install these today, if they could. Feel free to point out where you think I did. The point, I thought was obvious, is that we understand enough about how our entire visual system works from end to end, that we can introduce entirely artificial signals directly into the brain, that do carry not only light/dark, but (with the german implant I pointed you to) actual color perception. Just that we CAN DO IT, nothing more. A lot of the challenges around this technology lie in powering the devices, making them small enough to reduce rejection, out of materials that reduce rejection, etc. Acuity is just one element of the technology. But we CAN DO IT, that is all I claimed. Which implies a functional understanding/comprehension of how the system works. That was my only point in that entire fucking tangent. I think it reasonable to assume that someday such implants will prove superior to our organic bits, sure. But that's not relevant to the core point; we understand enough to artificially simulate it. I also raised the point we understand enough to extract live visual data from the optic nerve. These are only points as to our developing body of knowledge around how human sight works.

Interpreting my point about that implant as suggesting a colorblind person might trade their current colorblindness for legal blindness just to gain a couple colors, makes about as much sense as interpreting my point about extracting video from the optic nerve as to suggest someone might get those implants to replace their fucking cell phone camera. (A theoretical long-term possibility, I suppose) Not what I was suggesting at all, and seems a willful misconstrual.



"The device you're citing is for blind people , people who remain legally blind after the device is implanted."

And this objection has what to do with: "Colorblind people are capable of discovering light frequencies."? Nothing at all. I made no claim as to visual acuity. In fact I was not even talking about the implants there. I referred to the butterfly researcher. In this case, the problem is Boolean: can you see 'red' Y/N. That implant (the german one, and probably others) enables the ability to see red. Ta-da, scope of my claim supported. Your objection has nothing to do with what I actually claimed.


"Going round and round in circles arguing that a device that would legally blind a currently legally sighted color blind person is some resolution to color blindness is ridiculous."

That's a strawman. You just built one. I did not suggest these current generation of implants would be suitable for normal vision people, or that they RESOLVE colorblindness. The only claim I made was that we understand enough to make these things happen, to enable a person who cannot see a particular color, like red, to see it. I made no claim that it was currently superior to normal sight, or that an other-wise normally sighted person would trade their high visual acuity for a few colors with no spatial resolution, just to be able to see the colors. You just made that up. I did speculate in this thread or the other fork, that someday these implants will enable us to see things we can't currently see, or to see better than we can with perfect 'normal' organic bits. But that is not relevant to the point that we understand human sight well enough that we can induce color perception directly in the brain, even for blind people.

It's an important point, because to the best of my knowledge, and feel free to correct me if I am wrong, but of all the types of colorblindness I am aware of, none are caused by the brain itself. They are all issues within the physical hardware of the eye/optic nerve. That we can bypass that biological hardware and induce a color signal directly into the brain, says a hell of a lot to me about our understanding of how our sight systems work.