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Articles

On Vision

by Peter Lorden

What actually happens when we see? Just as the windows of a house are those of the house and not of a creature looking through them, so eyes are not “the windows of the soul” but of the skull. And to ask what is looking through them is simply to mislead ourselves, because the question implies another pair of eyes inside the skull.

For present purposes, all that we know of vision is that light passing through the lens of the eye projects an image on its retina and that this image – or an encoded version of it – is conveyed by the optic nerve to the visual centre of the brain. What happens there is a mystery.

Consider the case of an ophthalmologist who performs an operation enabling a patient gone blind to see again.

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