Seeing is to the eyes what hearing is to the ears. Just as you can hear sounds, tones, and voices that tell you about the world around you, seeing allows people to perceive light, shapes, colors, and movements. Imagine being able to ‘feel’ everything around you without touching it, from a distance. It’s like sensing the presence, shape, and texture of objects, but from afar and all at once. Colors, which are a significant aspect of vision, can be likened to different tones or pitches in sounds. Just as a high note feels different from a low note, different colors have their own ‘feel’ visually. Overall, seeing is a way of sensing and understanding the environment from a distance, much like how you can hear someone talking from the other side of a room
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I’ll take one PBB&J, plz
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If there’s nothing between you and an object you can feel it at a distance. Texture is a little dulled, and some textures are easier to feel than others, but there’s also a whole second kind of texture that we call color. As light gets dimmer it gets harder to feel the difference between those textures, and it gets harder to feel the distance to things, until there is nothing left but a single all encompassing flat texture at a single unknowable distance which we call dark.
Also, some objects only partially block your ability to feel what’s behind them, and things like windows are designed to be so easy to feel through that it’s hard to feel them at all. Unless they get dirty. Then you can feel the dirt on them.
I find this somewhat sad but also quite beautiful. Those with sight often feel bad for the blind, as they miss out on much of the world we see, but simultaneously it appears as though the blind experience a world of its own beauty that those with vision could never feel or imagine. I don’t often pay mind to textures or feel objects that are out of reach. If you and I are standing in front of a waterfall, I suppose everything is still there for you except for how it looks - so who am I to determine that what you’re seeing in your minds eye is any less spectacular? I can say with certainty that when I’m standing in the middle of a deep forest, the way it looks is an afterthought when compared to what it makes me feel. Maybe both worlds are equally beautiful.
I assume that, over time, you’ve memorized where everything in your living space is. You have some idea of what shape the space around you takes.
Seeing is knowing what shape a space takes without trial and error. The depth of a room or the texture of a couch. Knowing where an item is without having to touch it, or be told where it is.
How it feels… it feels safe. Seeing makes me feel safer. That’s the only word that comes to mind.
Like hearing but with color.
No, seriously, it’s impossible to accurately convey. You can talk about the mechanics, the use cases, what you can do with it, but you cannot convey “how it is”, same as a bat cannot convey “how sonar is”.
Only good answer, really - can only answer in the terms of other senses, however, since colour is meaningless too: “It’s like being able to hear the texture of things, even at a great distance.”
It really is, which is why I find videos like “Kids explain color to blind people” (which is an actual video that exists btw, it’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen out of a clickbaity video trying to be smart, and one kid is even like “so you know what an apple looks like right?” or something) so dumb.
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That’s exactly the point. Nothing you say will have a meaning over what that person has experienced. You can’t really convey what seeing means, and the “but with color” was meant to show exactly that.
You can explain the technicalities, but that’s trivial enough that there’s no point in explaining it.
Imagine explaining what it feels like to e.g. drive a really fast car to someone who has never been in a car. Yeah, you can say “it’s really fast” or “it’s exciting/fear-inducing” or “acceleration pushes you into the seat”, but nothing you say can actually convey the feeling.
Same with seeing. You can say, “with my eyes I can differentiate objects over long distances”, but I am pretty sure every blind person already knows that. You can say, “Different things have different colors”, but also they know that, but at the same time it has no meaning to them.
But then try to explain a beautiful sunrise or a moving painting or something else that’s evokes emotions and then it falls apart, because you cannot convey that.
Millions of long range hands letting you feel the front of everything around you all at once. But they only work when certain area auras are in effect.
It’s like knowing where everything in front of you is without having to touch or hear it. Sight works with your other senses too. For example, if a pillow is laying on the floor in an unfamiliar room I’ll know what shape it, how far away it is, and that if I pick it up it’ll feel soft. If the pillow was really gross looking I’d be able to tell without smelling it first.
that if I pick it up it’ll feel soft.
https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2020/01/marble-pillows-by-hakon-anton-fageras/
I really like these sculptures, but would hate them in person, because not soft.
I would describe it as a cacaphonic symphony that you eventually get used to. It packs as much information into one sense as you can get from your other four put together.
Much like how you can discern an individual instrument type in a symphony, sight lets you discern individual objects from afar, and gives you a mostly accurate summary of its basic properties.
Also much like with sound, it can be very appealing or unappealing, depending. There’s an intrinsic beauty to the sense itself though. Every object has color, for instance, and color is more like smell. It can give you hints about what something is, but its mostly an arbitrary blend of different “flavors” that combine to create more complex examples.
It’s the super-sense, the one sense that binds them all. When one of your other four detects something, your first instinct is to locate it with sight to determine more information before you do anything else. You “look at it” first. Almost without fail.
A million fingers going in all directions to sense how far everything is away from you and tell what property’s things probably have
Like echolocation on crack
Succinct, and actually a great analogy
It’s like Sex to me, I’ll never get it
Are you visually impaired? I work with a VI kiddo. He asked me why some walls feel different. I was completely stumped trying to describe a window. Have any tips?
