Comments on: Who is the Buddha that makes the grass green? http://www.douglaspurdy.com/2008/06/26/who-is-the-buddha-that-makes-the-grass-green/ tanto nomini nullum par elogium... Thu, 26 Aug 2010 22:33:52 -0700 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 hourly 1 By: John Cowan http://www.douglaspurdy.com/2008/06/26/who-is-the-buddha-that-makes-the-grass-green/comment-page-1/#comment-62 John Cowan Thu, 26 Jun 2008 20:20:10 +0000 http://douglaspurdy.wordpress.com/?p=86#comment-62 You betcha. Imagine (this example is I think originally Gregory's though I read about it in a book by Dennett) that you are standing in a room wallpapered by lots of copies of a picture of Marilyn Monroe. If you have normal vision, it *seems* to you that you see all the MM pictures simultaneously, that you *perceive* a tessellation of the walls of the room by MM pictures. But that cannot be. You can only focus on a small number of them, the ones directly in front of your fovea, at any one time. Your eyes are constantly moving, to be sure, so you are constantly cross-checking that all the MM pictures are actually still there, but if some of them changed into a vaguely similar picture while you weren't looking at them, there is about a 50% chance that *you wouldn't notice*. You betcha. Imagine (this example is I think originally Gregory’s though I read about it in a book by Dennett) that you are standing in a room wallpapered by lots of copies of a picture of Marilyn Monroe. If you have normal vision, it *seems* to you that you see all the MM pictures simultaneously, that you *perceive* a tessellation of the walls of the room by MM pictures.

But that cannot be. You can only focus on a small number of them, the ones directly in front of your fovea, at any one time. Your eyes are constantly moving, to be sure, so you are constantly cross-checking that all the MM pictures are actually still there, but if some of them changed into a vaguely similar picture while you weren’t looking at them, there is about a 50% chance that *you wouldn’t notice*.

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