@Mark So you’ve drunk the Kool-Aid . . . Congratulations . . . But before you drown perhaps you could explicate . . .
Notably, you claim . . . “Vision is the Goliath that bestrides neuroscience.”
Here, I’m wondering precisely what it is that you are claiming . . . ??
The reasons you give are pretty pusillanimous:
- Partly because it is our primary sense . . . (Huh!!) Reads like you are talking to pre-schoolers.
- So we find it inherently fascinating. WTF. No wonder you intuit, “I turn 40 next year. It would be amazing if any of my work to date ends up being 1/100th as influential as anything Marr did.”
- And partly, prosaically, because the region of cortex where signals from the eye first arrive is the easiest bit to record from. With this sort of logic, no wonder you are hiding in an outlying county of the Empire . . .
It would appear you are intoxicated (remember that Kool-Aid??) by either something you read or just the jaded recognition of the beauty of your own cognitive functionality.
It is not clear in what sense you mean vision is “our” primary sense . . . what about the congenitally blind . . . (oh no, just scratch them off the list to increase the truthiness of your belief system). I mean it is likely that more cortical area is devoted to visual processing than any other sense, but audition covers a range of about 10 octaves in wavelength cf. the almost one octave of vision. So what is happening here . . . ??
As for your ebullient claim that vision is inherently fascinating because it is our primary sense . . . Well, that leaves me almost speechless . . . !!
But let’s move right along here . . . “because [it is] the region of cortex where signals from the eye first arrive [and therefore] is the easiest bit to record from”
No . . . my claim would be that it is the sensory system for which it is possible to establish input-output relations that most easily accord with what is generally agreed might be going on in the given target area recorded from. Why else did Hubel & Wiesel receive a Nobel Prize for their discoveries concerning information processing in the visual system . . .
In the grandest of behaviorist traditions, this approach has assisted in the simplification of identifying stimulus response pairs, which in turn is thought to give clues to functional principles . . .
And low and behold, one of the most profound complications of Marr’s approach to understanding is revealed . . . There is no agreed upon definition of either “information” or “processing.”
It is not so much that the brain is as you put it, “a ridiculously complicated machine.” Once again you appear to have taken as axiomatic fact a simplifying assumption . . . As with much else science in the modern world touched . . . The majority cling to reification as a drowning man to a twig . . .
If the brain is like a “machine” then it is like no machine ever created by humanity. Or are you are still trapped in the machinations of a clockwork universe, a view of the cosmos which has long since been discredited . . .
