How did we evolve this?

[John99]

My apologies.
I assumed (incorrectly it appears) that you'd had, at some point in your life, schooling.
This was explained to us as school children.

i am mostly self taught, up until the 8th grade. then i resumed formal education. admittedly those years of self education left their mark on me. it has its good and its bad points. for i, like the ferral child, eager for nourishment went out there exploring the natural world.

ok, the eye sees upside down. for sake of argument.

back ot: i dont know.

 

[Dywyddyr]

ok, the eye sees upside down. for sake of argument.

So you're effectively saying you don't think it's true?

Okay. What possible reason could you have for assuming that eyeballs don't follow physical laws?

 

[Hercules Rockefeller]

Our eyes merely evolved to accommodate a law of physics.

How did our eyes figure out they were seeing upside down?

Okay smarty pants, point taken.

I should have said our brains evolved to accomodate a law of physics as it's our brains that interpret light signals received by the eye.

 

[Hercules Rockefeller]

Mod note: Now now people, there’s no need to resort to insults.

Looking at the images in the thread and tbh i was never convinced that we know that the eye does get the image upside down.

The physics of lenses, the functional optics of the human eye and how they relate to each other have been known to great precision for some time. I’m sure you would find it very easy to obtain enough evidence to “convince” yourself. You should start with a textbook like this one:

Optics of the Human Eye
Paperback, 288 pages, publication date: FEB-2000
ISBN-13: 978-0-7506-3775-6
ISBN-10: 0-7506-3775-7

http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/bookdescription.cws_home/699320/description#description

 

[(Q)]

We have an eye that actually sees images upside down, and a brain that can then flip the image upright again.

How did we evolve this? I doubt that more primitive animals saw everything upside down then at some point developed a brain that could invert the image again.

Richard Dawkins has an excellent demonstration on the evolution of the eye in his "Growing up in the Universe" series, highly recommended.

 

[S.A.M.]

Okay smarty pants, point taken.

I should have said our brains evolved to accomodate a law of physics as it's our brains that interpret light signals received by the eye.

Still same question, how did our brains figure out that we were seeing upside down? Is there any disorder where this perceptual correction is affected? Are there people who see the world upside down? Animals? What is the process of this correction? Since I assume there is no corrective lens in the brain, how is the image interpreted, by physical laws?

 

[iceaura]

Still same question, how did our brains figure out that we were seeing upside down?

We aren't seeing upside down. Our brains interpret the retinal data correctly, is all. I see no difficulty in assuming evolutionary selection against seriously incorrect interpretation of retinal data, starting with the very first light sensitive spot and earliest lensing arrangements, long before anything like an "eye" had appeared.

I doubt the retina bothers to tell the brain what it would be registering if it had an inverter lens built into it for some reason.

Are there people who see the world upside down?

There have been people who were fitted with inverting lenses (like complicated eyeglasses, in a sort of motorcycle goggle arrangement), and after a couple of days their brains had adjusted - there's a youtube video of one of them riding a bicycle down an ordinary street.

Since I assume there is no corrective lens in the brain,

The brain constructs the image from data - there is no camera in the brain. Among the added features, supplied by the brain using the data from the eye, are color and motion and three dimensional shape (the retina is two dimensional).

The brain is not looking at the retina.