Ed Cryer wrote:
>
> "Johannes Patruus" <invalid@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
> news:695vn3F31h966U1@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>> Ed Cryer wrote:
>>>
>>> "Johannes Patruus" <invalid@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
>>> news:693mbuF2s3s40U1@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>>>> Johannes Patruus wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> http://tinyurl.com/4wgpxr
>>>>
>>>> But would we really need a billion-pixels version of that? -
>>>> http://tinyurl.com/3tefrg
>>>>
>>>> Patruus
>>>>
>>> A hundred and fifty years ago the German scientist Hermann von
>>> Helmholtz studied the human eye and declared how inefficient it was.
>>> He said that a good camera of the time was better.
>>> Ah, so now we have this up-and-coming super-high-definition
>>> thingamabob which will make the eye even more passé. Take pictures
>>> with it, look at them and ask "Where the devil did that bit there
>>> come from? I didn't see that".
>>
>> "The eye is often described as like a camera, but it is the quite
>> uncamera-like features of perception which are most interesting. How
>> is information from the eyes coded in neural terms, into the language
>> of the brain, and reconstituted into experience of surrounding
>> objects? . . . There is a temptation, which must be avoided, to say
>> that the eyes produce pictures in the brain. A picture in the brain
>> suggests the need of some kind of internal eye to see it - but this
>> would need a further eye to see *its* picture . . . and so on in an
>> endless regress of eyes and pictures."
>> (R L Gregory, "Eye and Brain", London, 1966)
>>
>> Patruus
>
> Ah yes, the human brain; the most complex organism in nature. But how
> the devil does it produce mind? It baffles me, it's baffled the greatest
> minds of scientists and philosophers through the ages; and it baffles
> Dr. Jonathan Miller.
> You live in London; I live in a grotty northern town. Melvyn Bragg comes
> from Newcastle and seems to be living the intellectual high-life that I
> feel should be mine. I subscribe to his weekly newsletter and podcast
> for the Thursday morning R4 In Our Time broadcasts. He does them from
> BBC House at 9-30am, strolls through the parks of the capital to the
> House of Lords, attends there, party or reception in the evening.
>
> Here's an extract from a recent newsletter.
>
> "After the party we piled down to a nearby restaurant where conversation
> was
> free and easy until the last hour, when Jonathan Miller held forth in
his
> inimitably brilliant manner about materialism and his view that
> consciousness
> would never be cracked. There was no way it was sufficiently observable
> for us to understand what it was and yet he declared himself a total
> materialist. And so the day ended as it had begun."
>
> A modern-day Cicero; but from a much humbler background. And, come to
> think of it, much humbler in personality.
I am uplifted to learn of Miller's agnosticism, but downcast at the
thought
that our Melvyn, although a heavy hitter in the present age of darkness,
might be considered relative lightweight by the standards of as little as
fifty years ago.
Patruus
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