What is the concept behind “you don’t see darkness, you see nothing” if you lose your eyeballs?
#ExplainedSimply #SeeingDarknessVsSeeingNothing
Have you ever wondered what people mean by “you don’t see darkness, you see nothing” if you lose your eyeballs? It can be hard to grasp the idea of seeing nothing instead of just pitch black. Let’s break it down to make sense of it.
### The Explanation:
When someone says you don’t see darkness, you see nothing if you lose your eyeballs, it means that without your eyes to receive and process visual information, there is no perception of either darkness or light. It’s comparable to trying to see out of your elbow – there is simply no way for your brain to interpret visual stimuli without the necessary organ, in this case, your eyes.
### Seeing Darkness vs. Seeing Nothing:
1. **Seeing Darkness:** When you close your eyes or are in a dark room, your eyes can still receive some light, even if it’s minimal. This is what we perceive as darkness.
2. **Seeing Nothing:** However, if your eyes are not present to receive any light or visual information, there is a complete absence of perception – you see nothing.
### Conclusion:
So, the next time you hear someone mention that you don’t see darkness, you see nothing without your eyeballs, you’ll understand that it’s not just about darkness being present, but the absence of any visual input at all. It’s a fascinating concept that highlights the crucial role our eyes play in the way we perceive the world around us.
What do you currently see from the back of your head? It’s not a “black void”; it’s just nothing at all.
You know how thermal cameras see heat? Now try to see that with your bare eyes.
Or try to detect magnetic fields the way birds can.
Or electric fields the way sharks can.
You can’t because you simply don’t have the organs for it. Far as your naked body is concerned, there is no such thing as a magnetic field. That’s what happens when you lose your eyes: there’s no more organs so in a stable state there is no such thing as electromagnetic radiation within the 500-700nm “ish” band. It just doesn’t exist.
Now that comes with the caveat that if you were once seeing, your brain will almost certainly detect the loss in sensation and do something goofy to try to make up for it, possibly by “seeing black” since that’s as close to “nothing” as we can imagine. But it’s just a phantom sensation the way amputees “feel” their lost parts.
When you lose an eye, the nerve is no longer receiving signals, so in the same way that a TV screen shows different things compared to when it’s not receiving a signal (static) versus when it’s off, you don’t see blackness out of the missing eye, you don’t see anything. Like they said, like trying to see out of the back of your head or your elbow.
it’s a pretty hard thing to understand since we process our vision pretty much 100% of our conscious lives, sighted people that is. the people who have been blind since birth have never seen anything at all, and black is just the absence of light. so it’s inaccurate to say they “see black” since they can’t see anything.
the best example i’ve encountered went something like “when you close both eyes you see black but when you close one eye your other eye sees nothing”. not sure if that helps you understand but it made something click for me when i heard it
Cover one of your eyes and Leave the other open. Tell me what you see in the closed eye?
Have you ever gotten lost in a day dream? Like one where you were gone for a couple of minutes before snapping back to reality? If I asked you what you were seeing during the day dream you would say nothing. Your eyes were open, you weren’t seeing black. Your eyes just weren’t providing visual information that you were conscious of. Its like that without the need to day dream
When I was a kid I used to think blind people must see blackness because that’s what I see when I close my eyes, but then one day I realized that I don’t see blackness behind my head or beneath my feet or anywhere else I don’t have eyes. When you close your eyelids your eyes are still working, it’s just that all you’re seeing is the absence of light (darkness) akin being in a perfectly dark cave or the like. The experience of not being able to see behind you, for example, is from a lack of vision not a lack of light, which means you don’t even see blackness, there’s just no visual input at all. In order for you to ‘see’ darkness you must have functioning eyes, but if your eyes are scooped out of your head or whatever then those spots will revert to being like the bottom of your feet – no visual input at all, not even blackness.
Close your eyes and you see darkness, right? The inside of your eyelids.
Close just one eye, you stop seeing out of it completely.
The eyes give sensor input and darkness is a sensory input.
You can look into darkness and your eyes will pass information to your brain which will be processed, so you will simulate your brain.
Let’s if I can crack it down.
If you close your eyes, you see darkness. How dark it is, depends on the amount of light in the room. Even if you close your eyes, you still have some “light”.
But if there are no eyes to receive any form of light, then there is no darkness, there’s nothing. Nothing is not darkness or anything. Nothing is nothing.
If you lose an arm, you might get a phantom arm and sometimes feel your arm is there, but if you were born without 1 arm then all you know is 1 arm and nothing else. To the 1 arm borned person, there is no 2nd arm, there never was, there is nothing.
Fuck, I can’t explain it.
Take a finger, move it to the edge of your vision. Now, keep moving it until you can no longer see it. It’s not “black,” it’s not there. Now imagine that for everything.
There is a blind spot in our field of vision. Close one of your eyes, take finger around 20cm away from opened eye and move it left and right while looking at the same spot in front of you(so only finger moves).
At one point the tip of the finger disappears. And that spot doesn’t become black. It just disappears.
That is the same with blind. You have no sensation at all. It simply doesn’t exist. No black. Nothing.
I saw a good way of understanding this a few weeks back.
Close one eye and then try to describe what you see with the closed eye. Apparently this is what it’s like for blind people. It’s not black, you just lose some of your field of vision. Then try to imagine it in both eyes
Try to look out the back of your head, you see nothing behind you, that is exactly it there is nothing, this is why other sences seem more alert.
One thing that helped me understand it was someone said to close only one eye and describe what the closed eye sees.
Close one eye. Now try to see out of that eye. What do you see?
Outside of your field of vision is ‘nothing’. Shrink down your whole field of vision until that surrounding nothing is ‘everything’ you can see.
I have been blind in one eye since birth, so I have the rare ability to compare a seeing eye with a blind one 🙂 It is indeed “nothing” in as much as you can see “nothing” out of your elbow. My visual field stops where my seeing eye stops, and there is nothing in the field of my blind eye. It’s the same if I close my eyes- there is blackness behind my seeing eye and nothing behind my blind one.
I lost an eye last year and it has been very upsetting to deal with, it’s difficult to say if others have described it accurately.
In fact, its difficult to say what I “see” from my missing eye, even describing it as “nothing” is sort of hard to say. Nothing is pretty accurate though, I wouldn’t say I see black out of one eye, I simply see nothing, it has taken over a year, but it does feel like my body has adjusted to where it somewhat feels like I only ever had one eye.
My nerves were ripped out when I lost my eye, about 1.5 inches of them so whatever the “signals” my nerves were looking for, they’re scarred and deep within my brain, perhaps since the nerves are deep I receive zero signals.
Lots of different eye injuries and different ways people lose / hurt them, so I guess it can be pretty case dependent.
Either way I am pretty sure I would prefer to die than go completely blind… I’ve been depressed for years because of this.
Close one eye while looking around with the other. Now, what do you see with the closed eye?
Only when you close both eyes is when you see darkness, but with only one eye closed you don’t see anything.
Try closing only one eye, and leave the other opened. The closed eye isn’t seeing black, it’s seeing nothing.
If you close one eye you will see (not see?) anything, not even darkness.
Put your hand infront of your face amd move it around your head until you can’t see it, then try to look at it of course you can’t,
that’s what blind people see, nothing, not darkness, not a void, they dont see anything.
it’s something we cant really fathom or truly realize unless experienced
A blind person once told me „how much do you see with the tip of your finger?“. Exactly that. You don’t see nothing. You literally get no signal.
I imagine it like this: if you have two working eyes and close one, it’s not like half of your field of vision goes black. It’s more like it just isn’t there.
So I asked a blind person about this, who lost his sight as a teenager. He told me to keep both my eyes open, but cover one of them with my palm, and whatever I see on that eye is what they “see”, which is basically nothing (as in not even darkness, just a lack of anything).
It’s also a depressing party trick you can pull!
When I had a stroke a couple of years ago my eyesight was gone for a out 10-15 minutes, and I experiences exactly this
It wasn’t pitch black or anything, just like my eyes didn’t exist anymore, I can’t describe it…
Basically like if you’d try to think of a color that doesn’t exist, the brain just doesn’t comprehend things it has never experienced
Close one eye and then try to see through that eye. You dont see black, you see nothing from that eye
I don’t think a lot of these answers aren’t good. One that helped me a lot is if you close just one eye.
First, cover your right eye with your hand but keep it open underneath it. Half your vision is black, right? Now take off your hand and just close your eye with your eyelid. Just one. You suddenly lose input from that eye completely. With a little bit of imagination I guess you can extrapolate that to both eyes to see what it might be like if you’re blind.
Like… Imagine the taste of some sort of food. Now imagine the smell of that food, and the feel of grass under your feet. That’s what blindness is like. You don’t actively see black, you just experience other senses.