However, the human eye only has 126 million rods and cones combined, so at any given instant our eyes can't perceive every pixel on an HD screen, let alone reality. The menu is indeed not the meal.
Even if we *could* perceive all of the photons fired at us, we'd still only be looking at a reflected image of whatever might really be out there. By far, most of the detail is filled in by our imagination, expectations and informed guesswork.
This is completely true, and touches on a lot of things that are fascinating me right now. One of these is the way the mind sort of sketches out the world for us, giving us a "map" of the world, but of course we know that the map isn't the territory.
I think Smell-o-Vision is a better band name. Terrible Superpower, Good Band Name. Which, in itself is a pretty interesting meta band name. God, what have I done?!
The manipulation of photons is a central reason why television broadcasting works. Philo Farnsworth, one of the contenders for the title of the technology's inventor, first conceived it as a screen (more square shaped than the ones available now) in which photon exposures were lined up in a grid. And that's by and large what it remains- only the size of the screen has changed.
This seems a bit like how physicists have set out to model the cosmos with the binary - digital physics and the like. Everything can be represented by things like grids and digits.
Which makes it amazing that Farnsworth did this without a college education- his co-"inventors" John Baird and Vladmir Zworykin had physics backgrounds...
I have a bit of a different take. I think folks without that sort of formal education, particularly back then, had an advantage when it came to truly novel approaches. They weren't held back by so many preconceived notions.
That being said, a singular mind is a singular mind. He was clearly smarter than the average bear, and your point is well taken.
Pixel quanta fun fact - each one uses the same red/green/blue model as our eyes rods & cones with 256 variations possible for each . So, every one of your 33 million 8K pixels can display 16 million colors
I understand that the richness of the color in nature is much greater - like you can see a bunch more variations out there than 16 million - but that's really neat that the RGB combo is the same.
You can see these examples all over now about how we made computers in our image so to speak, using crude techniques versus nature but as we scale (like not many years ago the state of the art was 1080p which I think is 1/8 of 8K) computers approach our natural or organic experiences
Also: ever pay any attention to digital physics? The idea is pretty straightforward as I understand it: that you can make pretty much anything with "yes" or "no", with ones and zeroes. In other words, we might already have everything we need to represent the world completely faithfully, especially if the universe uses the simplest rule imaginable as the basis for everything.
However, the human eye only has 126 million rods and cones combined, so at any given instant our eyes can't perceive every pixel on an HD screen, let alone reality. The menu is indeed not the meal.
Even if we *could* perceive all of the photons fired at us, we'd still only be looking at a reflected image of whatever might really be out there. By far, most of the detail is filled in by our imagination, expectations and informed guesswork.
This is completely true, and touches on a lot of things that are fascinating me right now. One of these is the way the mind sort of sketches out the world for us, giving us a "map" of the world, but of course we know that the map isn't the territory.
Pffft, call me when I can smell the shape of someone's face through a TV. That's when I'll know we've made it as a species!
Unfortunately, smellyvision is still a few years out. We could always try trademarking the idea, though!
Sounds like a terrible superpower to have, to be honest.
"Terrible Superpowers" might be a good band name. I'm not sure if we should call it or not, though.
I think Smell-o-Vision is a better band name. Terrible Superpower, Good Band Name. Which, in itself is a pretty interesting meta band name. God, what have I done?!
It's smelly turtles all the way down.
Wait, is "Smelly Turtles" better than all the other names so far?
The manipulation of photons is a central reason why television broadcasting works. Philo Farnsworth, one of the contenders for the title of the technology's inventor, first conceived it as a screen (more square shaped than the ones available now) in which photon exposures were lined up in a grid. And that's by and large what it remains- only the size of the screen has changed.
This seems a bit like how physicists have set out to model the cosmos with the binary - digital physics and the like. Everything can be represented by things like grids and digits.
Which makes it amazing that Farnsworth did this without a college education- his co-"inventors" John Baird and Vladmir Zworykin had physics backgrounds...
I have a bit of a different take. I think folks without that sort of formal education, particularly back then, had an advantage when it came to truly novel approaches. They weren't held back by so many preconceived notions.
That being said, a singular mind is a singular mind. He was clearly smarter than the average bear, and your point is well taken.
Pixel quanta fun fact - each one uses the same red/green/blue model as our eyes rods & cones with 256 variations possible for each . So, every one of your 33 million 8K pixels can display 16 million colors
I understand that the richness of the color in nature is much greater - like you can see a bunch more variations out there than 16 million - but that's really neat that the RGB combo is the same.
You can see these examples all over now about how we made computers in our image so to speak, using crude techniques versus nature but as we scale (like not many years ago the state of the art was 1080p which I think is 1/8 of 8K) computers approach our natural or organic experiences
Also: ever pay any attention to digital physics? The idea is pretty straightforward as I understand it: that you can make pretty much anything with "yes" or "no", with ones and zeroes. In other words, we might already have everything we need to represent the world completely faithfully, especially if the universe uses the simplest rule imaginable as the basis for everything.