Neural devices #1: Sight
I’ve been interested in how we (and other species) have evolved to process the world around us. Once life gained the ability to probe, it achieved subjective experience. But no matter how sophisticated sensors are - it’s always only a portion of objective universe.
It’s been good enough for life to thrive in all forms here on Earth. But what if environment promoted objectiveness?
This is first in a series of thought experiments, each touching a different aspect of what such an ecosystem might produce. Let’s start by examining vision.
Frequency range
What we take for granted as visible light is entirely arbitrary. It’s just what made most sense for surviving elements and what was available in terms of building blocks for the photo-sensitive machinery. Also it’s tiny. Yes, some animals have ability to peek into infrared or ultraviolet, but it’s still nothing compared to the range of radiation we encounter in the universe. What are the limits if we want to perceive as much as possible?
For low end it’s likely the size of particles. The smaller the wavelength, the smaller the sensor needs to be. Let’s say that hydrogen atom is our limit, it’s ~ 0.1 nm in size, roughly 3000 times smaller than the wavelengths animals can currently see (~300 nm). Still far from Plank’s length, but impressive.
Biggest problem with such small scale is stability. It’s hard to keep atoms in nice structures. So we’d need to find a way to keep the sensor the size of one atom stable, but also package it into some sort of useful device for detection.
High end is only bound by structural capacity, but gigantism is not promoted, since resources are limited.
Optics
We can be certain that to achieve maximum objectivity ratio, creatures would employ many different imaging techniques, much like humans.
Outer surface might be all covered with photo-sensitive organs that are best at catching light that doesn’t go very well through matter. Underlying layers of receptors might be tuned to more penetrating light, etc. Somewhere deep inside the body creature might have a chambers for sensing radio waves. There would be some metal-rich tissues involved, i would imagine, but it’s definitely possible.
It’s amazing what such creature would be able to see!
Signal processing
All these sensors are creating a ton of information, so the creature would need to have immence brain or brain-like structures to process it. And it needs to have every piece of information double checked.
We humans (and many other species) have some vision checking as well. For example, photo-sensitive cells in our retina have threshold for firing, so that higher level of neurons is only triggered when enough of cells in the area are firing. This is mainly to avoid a lot of random noise, since individual cells might misfire or be triggered by some other processes.
Creature seeking objectivity would need to have redundancy, for example 3 independent sets of each photo-sensitive system which are processed by 3 independent regions of brain that consult to make sure no one is hallucinating.
There is also interesting topic about attention and filtering here, but i’ll leave it for another day.
Energy
Just vision alone would require a lot of energy. I think it would be more efficient for creature to extract the energy from sunlight directly rather than from digestion. Or at least have symbiotic pal that can do that.
All of the above makes me picture something rather static. Maybe something we would call a tree or even a forest. And it’s fitting, since main goal is to perceive. As objectively as possible. I too wouldn’t run around much)
Thanks, see you in the next one!
