How Many Eyes?
My mind likes to play some weird games with itself. All my life, it has created these little puzzles for me to solve. Trying to estimate how many of something exists or whether one thing or the other came first—these are often based on very incomplete information, and it can be fun to play detective in situations like these.
One of these puzzles came up the other day. I was reminded of how a camera is, basically, a type of eye, in a manner of speaking.
Think about how light first enters a lens, where the light is then converted into a different form of information. There’s a little opening that lets the right amount of light in—an aperture on a camera, or a pupil in an eye.
In the brain or in a digital camera, the incoming light is converted into an electrical signal. In an analog camera it’s a bit different—instead of converting the information to electricity, the photons bombard a sheet of film, but either way, that signal has to be converted.
The newly converted information then he…
