Well my point was that the experience isn’t that your vision is replaced by another sensation. In the linked slatestarcodex there is a comparison picture. That kind of thing might suggest that the visual snow would appear the same as if there were mist or something. But it in fact superimposes or some relation which would only make sense in perceptual analysis. Like if you repeat the same word multiple times it can fail to seem like a word. But you are still aware of the all the phonemes/letters of the word. It would be weird if somebody could hear the word but could not hear the individual letters. And hearing the letters doesn’t interfere with hearing the word. Saying that hearing single letters would be “hallucinating things that are not there” would be really backwards. So in vision when I can see the rawer visual data I am not seeing stuff that isn’t there.
If you have a correctly working monitor and take it appart and study it’s function it will stay as a functional monitor. If you wire it differntly then it might function differently but if you refrain from rewiring it stays correctly working. If you look inside and see how your visual cortex works you might change your opinion on your visual cortex but it is unlikely that it started to act up just because you looked into it (in the cognitive sense). On the opposite pole if you intentionally set out to imagine a picture of a apple if your visual cortex complies and provides a red apple picture that would be a hallucination. But if it shares what it already has anyway there is no fraudulent component. If it happens during normal operation it is not an artifact even if you were not aware of it’s existence. There is some good quote that has parts to the effect of “People can handle the truth for they are already enduring it ”
I agree. These all feel like very real sensory information. This is in contrast to being in sleep paralysis and creating extra sensory information or in very vivid dreams, since in both of these cases I realize afterwards “Oh, those weren’t real” as in, I didn’t actually receive that sensory information.
Also, I made a mistake in my initial post, my correction is separating different things that might be confused with “visual snow” such as:
1. Visual Snow—Like a million very tiny dots. Very much like static/white noise in the wiki. More visible in low light conditions or when you’re tired. I saw it for the first time this (8/12) morning in low-light conditions.
2. Patterned lines (?) - Like the geometric/kaleidoscopic shape in this picture. Doesn’t have to be that consistent or patterned but is better described by “lines” than either of the other two. This is what I meant by “jumpy spiderwebs made out of light” and what I thought visual snow was.
3. Blue-sky Sprites—The picture is a nice animation (can be seen without looking at the blue sky but apparently it’s more prominent in that case). Dots and wisps the size of a mm or a little bigger. Maybe 5-100 at a time vs the million in “visual snow”. Resembles afterimages and the “black stars” when feeling faint.
4. (Also very possible there’s more that I’ve missed)
Well my point was that the experience isn’t that your vision is replaced by another sensation. In the linked slatestarcodex there is a comparison picture. That kind of thing might suggest that the visual snow would appear the same as if there were mist or something. But it in fact superimposes or some relation which would only make sense in perceptual analysis. Like if you repeat the same word multiple times it can fail to seem like a word. But you are still aware of the all the phonemes/letters of the word. It would be weird if somebody could hear the word but could not hear the individual letters. And hearing the letters doesn’t interfere with hearing the word. Saying that hearing single letters would be “hallucinating things that are not there” would be really backwards. So in vision when I can see the rawer visual data I am not seeing stuff that isn’t there.
If you have a correctly working monitor and take it appart and study it’s function it will stay as a functional monitor. If you wire it differntly then it might function differently but if you refrain from rewiring it stays correctly working. If you look inside and see how your visual cortex works you might change your opinion on your visual cortex but it is unlikely that it started to act up just because you looked into it (in the cognitive sense). On the opposite pole if you intentionally set out to imagine a picture of a apple if your visual cortex complies and provides a red apple picture that would be a hallucination. But if it shares what it already has anyway there is no fraudulent component. If it happens during normal operation it is not an artifact even if you were not aware of it’s existence. There is some good quote that has parts to the effect of “People can handle the truth for they are already enduring it ”
I agree. These all feel like very real sensory information. This is in contrast to being in sleep paralysis and creating extra sensory information or in very vivid dreams, since in both of these cases I realize afterwards “Oh, those weren’t real” as in, I didn’t actually receive that sensory information.
Also, I made a mistake in my initial post, my correction is separating different things that might be confused with “visual snow” such as:
Did you see visual snow as in #1? And the others?
Atleast 1 and I guess 3 too but no 2