My brain has been noodling around with the concept of multidimensional representations of “reality”, particularly how our brain manipulates our two dimensional perceptive ability into this experience which feels so “complete(?)”. I came across a paper on optics and it linked back to information about camera obscura and that to the mechanics of how our eyes generate the image on our retinas.
The concept is interesting because in order to “see” the light on our retina, the “rays” are limited to one specific angle relative to the position of our eye. We don’t see “light” which is bouncing off of an object, we only see the single tiniest quanta which happens to be at the correct deflection relative to our eye.
This is baking me on two accounts, first the realization that three dimensional “vision” is literally holographic, as we move a stored reference beam is diffracted against a constantly updating external beam to produce the illusion of three dimensional space. Further, perception of three dimensional space across ethological boundaries is absolutely not consistent. I need to actually research this but under this concept, animals like horses or rabbits must perceive the world two-dimensionally most of the time and only generate three dimensional perception only while moving. It is the degree of binocularity which produces the illusion of three dimensional space while the organism itself is not moving.
Thinking about how much vision research is done using animal models, if this turns out to be consistent with the evidence, then most of that is low quality. As the animals perceive the world in a fundamentally different way, their reaction to stimuli would not be immediately coherent with other animal models (including humans) without accounting for the change in base perception. An example of how significant this is comes to mind when looking at how differently foveal vision is processed compared to peripheral vision in humans, is this the same in our animal models?
That our perception is literally holographic is an interesting turn on the concept of the “holographic universe”. We create these constructs not because they represent “reality” as is, but as a reflection of our own perceptive limitations.
The second part of this is the realization that the amount of data that we actually perceive is literally the tiniest part possible. When we look at an object, we don’t get to see the amazing diffraction which is literally following the “shape” of the object and the immediate interactions with other “light”. We don’t have a way to truly understand how diverse those interactions truly are because our eyes can only “see” information which is presented in an extremely specific way.
Our brains compel us to understand the world around us as “reality”, as a concrete representation of all that is, when really the best we can perceive is the thinnest of representations and the richness of the universe is lost on us.