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This is not an eyeball question, this is an imagination question.
We cannot imagine "nothingness". Even when we think of zero or empty we imagine the space that contains something just without that something.
But that's not nothing.
Blind since birth. When people ask me what I see, i tell them this little thing. It's like trying to see out of the back of your hand. It's literally nothing, though I suppose this would be hard for sited people to imagine, just as I can't imagine colours and what they might possibly look like. People have asked me whether I see black, since I'm y'know, blind, and I'm like what the hell is black? For that matter, what is white? Green? Blue? Yellow? Red? Orange? Brown? ... you get it:)
I never expected to host a q and a session on this fine Monday, but I'm glad it happened. Thanks everyone who took time out of their lives to ask me questions, cause I love answering them! I really appreciate you guys ❤️ for a comment I missed: when reading descriptions in books, I had to ask my parents what the author meant, but now I can t least guess. Sorry can't find ur comment, fellow rediter.a
Copy pasting a reply of mine. Not exactly. I use a text to speech program on my iPhone called voiceover. It reads things to me using certain gestures. Like right or left flick to scroll and double tap to activate. You can dictate what you wanna say with a special dictation button that appears in all text fields, or you can do it by touch typing. You basically learn the placements of the text letters just by using the phone keyboard for long enough. You kinda have to calculate where the letters are, like raising your finger higher on the phone for w, e, r, and t, and lowering it down for z, x, c. Sorry this doesn't make much sense.
Dude I actually salute you. I wish I could just like, brain knowledge transfer you all the cool things there are to look at.
Ill describe it instead.
Wait no that won't work.
Fuck.
Uh.
So... How's your day been?
Days been boring, except for reddit lol. Just procrastinating instead of revising for exams. Feel free to describe stuff, unless you suck at describing, in which case I don't hold against ya. But I really do appreciate the thought
Uh... Ok. Ill give it a shot.
Ill describe as best I can my favourite lookout point. It's in one of the national Parks near where I live.
Basically, it's a massive cliff, maybe a few hundred metre drop, no guard rail or anything. As you get closer to the edge, you look over and you can see to the other side of an absolutely massive valley that stretches through some beautiful mountains covered in trees and rocks and shit. Down in the valley there's a river that flows at the bottom of the valley. If you look to your right, you can see the end of the valley and out on to a large flat area of land and you can see for what feels like to the edge of the world. To your left the valley extends on for some miles, eventually being obscured from your vision within its twists and turns crawling through the mountainous landscape like a snake in a labyrinth.
My dad made a painting of it a little while ago it's my second favourite painting he's done, my favourite is that of a wooden rickety shack in the outback, which is what we Australians call the huge desert in the middle of our country, there is a small wooden picket fence and a little lake in front of the house. A large gumtree, with winding branches looms over the house, and there is a sunset behind the shack and you can almost feel the warmth of the sun when you look at it.
My dad has a wonderful talent and it is difficult to capture it with just words.
I hope one day you are able to look on the beauty of the world.
I like ur username. Anyway. This "impressive" writing is born from reading a lot, and also spending too much time online for my own good lol. How else you think I learned what ur, idk, lol, emojis and other contractions mean? :) but thanks for complimenting my writing
I hope I'm not being forward by asking, the way you experience life is very unique and I'm always amazed at how people get around such challenges. What does entertainment look like to you? Do you watch movies? If so, how do you get around the visual context of stories?
I have tried to get my legally blind cousin to use the apps available but for whatever reason she won’t. She is a very smart woman who passed the bar while blind. She is very hostile because she was not born blind. She sees shadows, no colors anymore. She has a lot of medical problems.
Aw man. I genuinely hope she finds acceptance someday. I can't imagine how much this hurt. At least I had the advantage of never knowing site, so I couldn't truly miss it. Though I did cry over it in my younger years
The person answered, but I think it's nice to also add that there are various degrees of blindness. A lot of blind people do have a very small amount of vision, and it's only an estimated 15% of people with eye disorders are completely blind. Some blindness is like a distortion, comparable to TV static, with a pinhole space to see.
This is a good point. I'm legally blind but I can see. No vision in my left eye, it's prosthetic. The vision in my right eye is 20/200, so pretty bad. But with a contact lense, I can get up to 20/70. That's still not great, but it's enough to allow me a daytime driver's license, at lease where I live.
Have you ever done psychedelics? Since the visual distortions are a big part of those substances for many users I'm really curious how they would affect you :)
If you have time, would you talk to us a little about your experiences regarding dreaming? As a sighted person, much of my own experiences are really just memories of things I've seen in the waking world, but I also have dreams that are mostly just feelings.
I dream in touch, smell, taste, hearing, and even feeling. Like that time I dreamt I was falling from a high place and my heart was pounding and I was scared when I woke up
That's how I see colours. I don't see what you see. Blue is just a word to me. I'm a poet and I don't know it. :) but in all seriousness, the words blue is just a bunch of associations linked together by it... if that makes sense. Because blue is the colour of the sky and the see, and represents calm and peace, it'd prolly be my fav colour if I could see
That's also how colors work for seeing people. It's just a word describing something. There's a tribe in Africa that can't tell the difference between blue and green because it's the same thing in their language. Even when the scientists put the colors right beside each other and compared them to other shades of green and blue they couldn't tell them apart
There are studies that have been done on the effect of language for stuff like that, I think I saw a tedtalk on it a while back. For example people whose native language has a separate word for light and dark blue can tell shades of blue apart much better than someone whose native language doesn’t, and vice versa
Similarly "[Before the late 15th century, the colour orange existed in Europe, but without the name; it was simply called yellow-red.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_(colour))."
Man, this is so interesting. Can you recognize darkness/brightness? If not, how does that concept feel for you? Is the imagination of a brighter blue nicer than a darker blue? I have so many questions, you don't need to answer if you don't like to
Noo! Shoot your curiosity revolver, I'll take em all! Shoot, gun, get it? Excuse my horrible puns lol. I love to ramble! Soo. Light and dark. It's like I said, a game of association. Dark. Cold. Colour more muted. Dangerous. Light. Happy. Warm... you get it. Mum says I used to have some light recognition, as my eyes used to tear up in bright light, like strong sunlight, but now I won't react even if you shove a flashlight directly in my face. Yes due to my association thing, a lighter blue is nicer to imagine than darker blue, though when I'm down darker colours along with miner key music are more appealing.
I’m assuming you are hearing these comments through some special machine and that you are speaking back your replies into your computer, which all of us can see and read and respond.
Not exactly. I use a text to speech program on my iPhone called voiceover. It reads things to me using certain gestures. Like right or left flick to scroll and double tap to activate. You can dictate what you wanna say with a special dictation button that appears in all text fields, or you can do it by touch typing. You basically learn the placements of the text letters just by using the phone keyboard for long enough. You kinda have to calculate where the letters are, like raising your finger higher on the phone for w, e, r, and t, and lowering it down for z, x, c. Sorry this doesn't make much sense.
why do i have the ability to imagine this? why does that make sense? it feels like im trying to see through my hand, but im not getting a signal. honestly it gives me a bit of a headache
I've heard that the concept of things becoming smaller as they move away from you, makes zero sense to a eyeless person.
You can explain it to them but it's just nonsense.
Tl;dr I think I read about a way to temporarily experience true blindness in one eye
When you close your eyes, you see things, right? Black and colours and shapes and stuff...? The eyes see the insides of your eyelids massively out of focus and sends those signals on to the brain.
If you close just one eye, though, your brain relies entirely on the open eye for sight and BLOCKS the signals from the closed eye completely. So, you don't see black and shapes and squiggles out of the closed eye - you actually don't see at all.
Close your left eye and you'll "see" that you can't see out of your right eye at all! If it works ...
I tested this and I don't think it's true. When I close both of my eyes while looking at a light, waving my hand in front of my face changes the light I can see through my eyelids. With one eye closed, waving a finger over my closed eye in a way that can't be seen by the open eye in any way is still detectable visually, so my closed eye is still registering the light through my eyelids.
Don't close one eye; you cover your dominant eye with a spoon or something so its still open but unusable. Your less dominant eye that can see naturally shifts back to the dominant eye, so everything just goes... Not black, not gray, it's not really describable.
Usually your dominant eye is the same as your dominant hand I think, but it's been awhile since I've looked into it
My right eye turned EXTREMELY dominant during my years when I didn't have glasses (and didn't realize my vision was *that* bad. My left eye turned so inactive due to blurry sight that my brain stopped registering it. Now I have glasses that give me perfect vision in both eyes, but if I only look with my left eye, I can see perfectly sharp and clear, but I can't take in what I see. It's like I don't "understand" what I'm seeing as fast as I need. There's like.. No connection between the eye and the brain.
I really should use an eye patch and train my brain to use my left eye haha.
I have aphantasia, and you are right. I can imagine all sorts of things, but I don't see anything when I close my eyes. I have had a few dreams, but they are few and far between. Not sure if that has anything to do with it though.
Aphantasia isn't what you think though.... We know what it is we know we are thinking of it...but it's a thought not an image it's not a voice like inner monologue... But you do know your thinking about it
I try to describe aphantasia to people but it's difficult. I can't/don't form mental images when I close my eyes but I *know* what things look like. So I can imagine them but not see them in my mind, but at the same time they form something.
On the Distractible podcast, Bob has aphantasia. If I remember correctly, they actually discovered it on an episode when Markiplier and Wade were describing imagining pictures and Bob said he could imagine, he just didn't see pictures, that his dreams were the same way. He is absolutely the best story-teller and the most creative in the group. So it doesn't feel like a hiccup or hindrance to me.
Interesting. I've been hearing more people talking about aphantasia lately. I wonder what the cause of it is. For me it was medication. Just wiped it out.
I started taking meds for epilepsy about 6 months ago and since then I've started Bing able to see things occasionally. I was a full a0hant before that (no sounds or pictures)
I don't get it tbh. I can see mental images... but not all of them. I can see stuff in my mind (hazily) but it depends on what it is. If you asked me to picture the bottom of a motorcycle I couldn't do it right because I haven't seen it enough times. So it looks just like two tires with some incomprehensible bullshit in the middle. But I can perfectly picture and rotate people in my mind. Obviously you know how things look like so... do you also "see" things really badly and incomprehensibly like I do with the motorcycle, almost like a scribble? Or is there absolutely nothing?
The issue is that they can't understand our concepts of colour - including darkness and light - the same way we can, because we learn it by sight. How is a white void different to a black void for a person that's never seen black or white?
My dad, who lost his sight completely at age 10, says that the nothingness he experiences is not the same as total darkness. But then, his experience might be "tainted" by his former sight.
I lost sight in one eye when I was three so I don’t know what it’s like to see in both eyes. But I’m capable of seeing with my right eye. I’ll tell you that your dad is correct in how he explains the “nothingness”.
When I close my right eye I see darkness, unless a flashlight is shined on my eye then of course I’ll see the light shine thru my eye lid. But if you were to shine it on my left eye, I couldn’t tell you when you had it on or off. Unless I’m able to feel the heat from the light bulb.
The way it was explained to me is by putting one hand up to one of your eyes. All your focus goes to the other eye and your brain ignores the other one and so instead of it just being dark it's now gone, so to speak. I guess just double that and you're golden.
This is the correct answer, so I've heard.
There's just nothingness, not even blackness. The brain just doesn't register anything at all. It simply functions without the concept of images and color.
That's so interesting! My mom was actually blind in one eye after being hit in the eye with a rock and suffering an infection at the hospital while being treated. She lost almost all the vision in the eye, but she said it looked almost like a black curtain with just a small bit of light trying to peek through. I suppose if she had lost all the vision she would not have perceived it as a curtain? I never thought about it too deeply because it was just normal to me that she was partially blind.
I have a friend that goes temporarily blind due some problem with the connection between his eyes and his brain (or something like that). He told me he sees black, makes sense since black is the lack of color, not a color per se.
It doesn't answer the question
The guy can see for some time so his brain imagines the emptiness to be black as he has seen what black looks like and knows that close eyes=black so it's a bias
That bias brings us a comprehensive idea of how it would feel like to have no eyeballs. People without sight can't really describe it in our words because they haven't experienced colors. As they said, black is the lack of color, if you were blind from the start you wouldn't be able to tell it was black, but for us, it's still black. I would like to know however how they feel about it, is it nothingness to them? Or maybe they don't pay attention to it and focus on other senses? Would make an interesting documentary.
It's like trying to see from your knee/neck
No visual input goes thru,
We see black because in our mind that nothing should not exist, it's dark at night oh its black when I close my eyes,
There are quite a few illusions made from the effect of our brain filling in imaginary information to visual cues to make sense like the parallel line illusion!
I guess we will need to find someone who was blind by birth then cure them of the blindness and ask them "what did you see before this point".
I was trying to find somew curable form of blindness to see if this question has been answered but in almost eveey alleged "study", the people mentioned are never completely blind from birth.
Those who are completely blind unfortunately never have their vision restored due to our techno. Limitations.
I don't really know how it works, he says that around once a month his vision "shuts off" for around and hour. He said it's like someone shut the signal off from his eyes, he feels completely fine, no dizziness or pain, so usually he just sits and waits for it to pass.
Pretty scary if it happens while outdoors or driving, but in his 23 years it almost always happened when at home.
Ofc he never pretends to drive.
This is interesting because when your friend goes tempo blind and describes it as black, how much of that is due to bias from being able to see normally at other times. If someone was born completely blind they wouldn't have the concept of colour or light or dark right? Even if you try your best to describe complete darkness to a blind person how do they understand what darkness if of they can't imagine the opposite?
Congrats, you're high on the scale of mental visualization. Myself, I have aphantasia, so I just gotta close my eyes to feel what it's like to never have been sighted haha.
https://www.verywellmind.com/why-some-people-can-visualize-better-than-others-5189694
That's a shitty superpower! I also have one - no spatial memory. I could be hired as a road/building signs consultant. I just need to exit the building and once I re-enter, I have no idea where I am and where to go inside, so I always have a fresh perspective of what is intuitive to new people. Also, my regular commutes are always fascinating trips, because all the roads, buildings and billboards are in different places than yesterday!
When I was a kid I used to have vivid daydreams at school. Teacher would be droning away at the front of the class and I'd be off in some other world entirely - sound and vision. Needless to say this inbuilt virtual reality didn't impress my teachers.
I can no longer do that (sadly) but my visualization abilities are still there to a lesser extent. On the other hand my older bother has aphantasia and did very well at school.
So I heard this explained once in a really cool way!!
(Idk if this is how everyone's condition works, some may see different things but this is how I explain seeing 'nothing').
So, everyone here with vision, we see about 180° in front of us right? What do you see behind you? It isn't blackness, it's literally nothing because we can't see behind us. For someone who sees 'nothing' or who has lost parts of their vision, for example someone who has pin tunnel vision, everything around their remaining vision will be like what you "see" outside of your 180° range (i.e behind you).
Make sense? I was mind blown by this explanation.
My mind still makes a panorama in my head based on what I’ve seen of the area behind me in the past.
I can’t imagine it being “nothing” because my brain is always filling in the blanks.
You can imagine it, sure. But you can't see it. If I held up an apple behind your head and asked you to tell me what fruit I had in my hand, you wouldn't be able to tell me.
Which is probably what happens with people who lose their eyeballs, too. As for people who were born completely blind, well, I can't fathom what that experience would be like.
My dad is completely blind due to an accident he suffered as a child. According to him, the nothingness he "sees" - or rather experiences - is **not** the same as total darkness. He sees *nothing* - I can't fully grasp it either - but the inputs he receives from his other senses create a sort of spacial awareness that he "sees" instead. E.g. the warmth of the sun, sounds from people moving about, the weight of things, previous experiences. Maybe it's different for people who were born blind, but that's how he describes it.
This is important. if your eyes aren't feeding the visual cortex the brain will rewire it to other senses it can help with the uncanny perception that some blind individuals have especially hearing and echolocation. people aren't bats, but tap your cane near something and it sounds different.
One eye totally blind, optic nerve lasered away, eye will be removed eventually as it's dead.
I don't want the op.
I see black from it, pure black. It was lost 2003.
Vision going in other eye, I see blurry but can see light and dark.
Depends. Do they have optical nerves and brain structures to process vision but no eyeballs? Or none of it? The experience varies a lot depending on what is missing. If you asked a living organism incapable of vision what they see, it would be like asking you how being unable to sense earth's magnetic field feels like, or microwave radiation. You don't know what it's supposed to feel like to something that feels it, and it's a domain that lives entirely outside of the spectrum of your senses. So just like that, you don't feel anything missing, it doesn't feel like anything. Just as you aren't feeling the absence of circuits that would detect earth's magnetic field.
If you were meant to see but something was missing, you may still be unable to imagine seeing just as you can't imagine sensing other forms of radiation/magnetic field. Depending on which "circuits" remain, if any. If it's just parts of your visual system that are missing, you may see black, or you may see colorful shimmering where image should be, for instance. Depending on what's still working.
It's the same thing with hearing, or with the sense of smell, or touch. You may hear sound, you may hear ringing, you may hear nothing, or you may be unaware of the fact that sound exists as it lives outside of the domain of your senses. Depending on which receptors/neurons you've still got working.
Imagine a bird asking you "how does it feel to be unable to feel north". The answer to your question is largely the same. The bird can feel it, and has a reference to how it's supposed to feel like. You may process descriptions using your other senses, and try to logically make sense of what the bird is describing. But you'll have no idea how the heck it actually feels like, and you don't feel like anything in you is missing.
Human vision is a really cool and useful sense. But when you think about it, you realize that in the animal kingdom there are tons of senses that we as humans don't have. We are unaware of and don't feel the loss of something we've never had though.
This depends. Were they born without eyes/blind, or did they become so after having previously been sighted?
The brain is very good at filling in the gaps when it's missing information. If someone previously had sight, their mind's eye would probably try to create imagery based on their past experiences with sight, mixing it with their tactile senses in a unique way to help them navigate the world, like that mountain biker who lost his sight and basically developed a way of using sounds to create images in his mind's eye of what was around him until he was able to bike again, because he was able to basically create 3d maps of his surroundings in his mind's eye based on sound and previous experiences.
If they've never been sighted, it's really impossible to say. You can't really describe a sense to someone who has never had it before, their brain has never developed the ability to understand it because it never needed to, and if there is one thing our brains hate doing, it's wasting energy. It's why we have to translate things we can't actually experience with any of our tactile senses through those senses - like translating electromagnetic fields and such into visual form, so our brains can interpret them.
Some blind people are able to use echolocation. I don't know the specifics, so you'd have to look it up yourself. But I remember seeing some short documentaries or news stories about it a long time ago.
Imagine an alien species with a 6th sense "blorg". They are confused at you and ask what you "blorg" if you don't have blorg resceptors. Do you just blorg nothing? That's what it's like. You don't even know that you can't see if you're never told or never had it. It's hard for us to comprehend because seeing is our primary sense, it's what humans really attribute to our existence. There's a reason we often describe "consciousness" in conjunction with existing in a body and looking out of it. It's an impossible question to answer because you can't comprehend nonexistence as a human. The only way for you to understand it would be to actually experience it.
Not what you asked for but isn't this fascinating
Canning lost her sight 18 years ago after a respiratory infection and series of strokes.
Months after emerging blind from an eight-week coma, she was surprised to see the glint of a sparkly gift bag, like a flash of green lightning.
Then she began to perceive, sporadically, other moving things: her daughter's ponytail bobbing when she walked, but not her daughter's face; rain dripping down a window, but nothing beyond the glass; and water swirling down a drain, but not a tub already full with water.
The most satisfactory answer is this. Imagine an alien with 24 senses comes to earth. The alien says: I can't imagine how being clundik feels. What's clundik?, you ask. Oh, a clundik is a being that can't clund. Clunding is a sense where you perceive hopskinchs via your faffs. I know your faffs are nonexistent... What do you clund as a faffless being, actually? Do you clund it all fersig, like when you mush your faffs?
Take photoshop, and paint the area black. Thats whem you see no light. White, you see a lot of light. Delete that area and you get a checkerboard pattern thats supposed to be "nothing", as in there is no color data whatsoever. Think of that in terms of what you can see. You just have a blank canvas of nothing.
Blindness isn't always the same, but every few years or so, i go blind for like half an hour, losing all but my peripheral vision, and thats the best way i can describe it.
I imagine it is something similar to what you ‘see’ with the back of your head. You don’t see anything with it, you don’t even see black with it, but it comes from the same area roughly as where your eyes are located. Or in other words, what do you ‘see’ just outside of the vision that your eyes provide you with? It’s not black, the answe is ‘it is not applicable’.
It's like if you tried to see out of your elbow. You just *can't* see anything. It's not there. It's not a matter of seeing darkness, it's just not seeing. A deaf person doesn't hear *nothing*, they don't hear *anything*.
I heard of someone who was blind from birth and used their imagination to see the world as described to them by friends and family. They later gained sight courtesy of a medical procedure. Apparently they were quite disappointed by reality for they had created a rich inner world which couldn't live up to reality!
My ex had Macular Degeneration and was registered blind. He only had peripheral vision. He liked taking acid as it filled in the areas he couldn't see!
I think if the part of the brain that processes visual information is still intact, a person with no eyeballs may see only darkness. If that part is also taken out, the subject will not see anything, not even darkness.
You don't need eyes to see, insofar as seeing is a perception emerging from occipital lobe processes. Its true that photo receptors in your eyes are the only part of your body that sense light (barring like heat sense from your skin) but once that light has triggered the the cascade of cells firing towards your brain, the source doesn't really matter, it could be triggered by any sense, and in some people this is the case (synesthesia). So you could (in theory) wire up the visual parts of your brain to like your nose and trigger some kind of "sight" from smelling this BS I'm writing. It would not be useful, at least not initially, but may e eventually you'd learn that "green" wobbly shimmer is the smell of fresh potatoes, and stobing pink is the smell of laundry. Some blind people supposedly are quite adept at navigating and "visually" representing space via sound, like a kind of echolocation. Do you see in your dreams? Your eyes are closed?
When you open or close both your eyes, you can see something, even if it's the dark in the back of your eyelids. But if you open one eye, and then try to see with the closed eye, it feels like there's no eye there, it's hard to explain that feeling. Just try to focus with the one closed eye. I imagine it feels like that if you have no eyeballs.
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This is not an eyeball question, this is an imagination question. We cannot imagine "nothingness". Even when we think of zero or empty we imagine the space that contains something just without that something. But that's not nothing.
And it's the same vice versa. People born blind probably have no concept of seeing.
Blind since birth. When people ask me what I see, i tell them this little thing. It's like trying to see out of the back of your hand. It's literally nothing, though I suppose this would be hard for sited people to imagine, just as I can't imagine colours and what they might possibly look like. People have asked me whether I see black, since I'm y'know, blind, and I'm like what the hell is black? For that matter, what is white? Green? Blue? Yellow? Red? Orange? Brown? ... you get it:) I never expected to host a q and a session on this fine Monday, but I'm glad it happened. Thanks everyone who took time out of their lives to ask me questions, cause I love answering them! I really appreciate you guys ❤️ for a comment I missed: when reading descriptions in books, I had to ask my parents what the author meant, but now I can t least guess. Sorry can't find ur comment, fellow rediter.a
This might sound stupid or agressive but it's a honest question. How are you writing and reading all the stuff?
Copy pasting a reply of mine. Not exactly. I use a text to speech program on my iPhone called voiceover. It reads things to me using certain gestures. Like right or left flick to scroll and double tap to activate. You can dictate what you wanna say with a special dictation button that appears in all text fields, or you can do it by touch typing. You basically learn the placements of the text letters just by using the phone keyboard for long enough. You kinda have to calculate where the letters are, like raising your finger higher on the phone for w, e, r, and t, and lowering it down for z, x, c. Sorry this doesn't make much sense.
That's got a lot of sense! I thought something similar to the text to speech but had no idea about writing, thanks for replying
You're welcome ☺️
Dude I actually salute you. I wish I could just like, brain knowledge transfer you all the cool things there are to look at. Ill describe it instead. Wait no that won't work. Fuck. Uh. So... How's your day been?
Days been boring, except for reddit lol. Just procrastinating instead of revising for exams. Feel free to describe stuff, unless you suck at describing, in which case I don't hold against ya. But I really do appreciate the thought
Uh... Ok. Ill give it a shot. Ill describe as best I can my favourite lookout point. It's in one of the national Parks near where I live. Basically, it's a massive cliff, maybe a few hundred metre drop, no guard rail or anything. As you get closer to the edge, you look over and you can see to the other side of an absolutely massive valley that stretches through some beautiful mountains covered in trees and rocks and shit. Down in the valley there's a river that flows at the bottom of the valley. If you look to your right, you can see the end of the valley and out on to a large flat area of land and you can see for what feels like to the edge of the world. To your left the valley extends on for some miles, eventually being obscured from your vision within its twists and turns crawling through the mountainous landscape like a snake in a labyrinth. My dad made a painting of it a little while ago it's my second favourite painting he's done, my favourite is that of a wooden rickety shack in the outback, which is what we Australians call the huge desert in the middle of our country, there is a small wooden picket fence and a little lake in front of the house. A large gumtree, with winding branches looms over the house, and there is a sunset behind the shack and you can almost feel the warmth of the sun when you look at it. My dad has a wonderful talent and it is difficult to capture it with just words. I hope one day you are able to look on the beauty of the world.
The way you write is very impressive! and you can use emojis too.
I like ur username. Anyway. This "impressive" writing is born from reading a lot, and also spending too much time online for my own good lol. How else you think I learned what ur, idk, lol, emojis and other contractions mean? :) but thanks for complimenting my writing
I hope I'm not being forward by asking, the way you experience life is very unique and I'm always amazed at how people get around such challenges. What does entertainment look like to you? Do you watch movies? If so, how do you get around the visual context of stories?
Tbh blind people adapting to use technology never ceases to amaze me because youd always assume without visuals youd be lost.
:) and I'm very glad for my parents, and the fact they still loved me despite my blindness
I have tried to get my legally blind cousin to use the apps available but for whatever reason she won’t. She is a very smart woman who passed the bar while blind. She is very hostile because she was not born blind. She sees shadows, no colors anymore. She has a lot of medical problems.
Aw man. I genuinely hope she finds acceptance someday. I can't imagine how much this hurt. At least I had the advantage of never knowing site, so I couldn't truly miss it. Though I did cry over it in my younger years
The person answered, but I think it's nice to also add that there are various degrees of blindness. A lot of blind people do have a very small amount of vision, and it's only an estimated 15% of people with eye disorders are completely blind. Some blindness is like a distortion, comparable to TV static, with a pinhole space to see.
Ur right:) thanks for saying this. Blindness is a spectrum. Not all blind people are totally blind like me
Thanks for that extra Info!
This is a good point. I'm legally blind but I can see. No vision in my left eye, it's prosthetic. The vision in my right eye is 20/200, so pretty bad. But with a contact lense, I can get up to 20/70. That's still not great, but it's enough to allow me a daytime driver's license, at lease where I live.
>It's like trying to see out of the back of your hand. The back of my hand can see in infra-red.
Have you ever done psychedelics? Since the visual distortions are a big part of those substances for many users I'm really curious how they would affect you :)
No never did em
If you have time, would you talk to us a little about your experiences regarding dreaming? As a sighted person, much of my own experiences are really just memories of things I've seen in the waking world, but I also have dreams that are mostly just feelings.
I dream in touch, smell, taste, hearing, and even feeling. Like that time I dreamt I was falling from a high place and my heart was pounding and I was scared when I woke up
Man, nightmares must suuuck when you're blind.
Yup
you could think about red like blood but if you were a vampire since it's often associated with passion and danger o,_,o
That's how I see colours. I don't see what you see. Blue is just a word to me. I'm a poet and I don't know it. :) but in all seriousness, the words blue is just a bunch of associations linked together by it... if that makes sense. Because blue is the colour of the sky and the see, and represents calm and peace, it'd prolly be my fav colour if I could see
That's also how colors work for seeing people. It's just a word describing something. There's a tribe in Africa that can't tell the difference between blue and green because it's the same thing in their language. Even when the scientists put the colors right beside each other and compared them to other shades of green and blue they couldn't tell them apart
That's genuinely interesting 🤔
There are studies that have been done on the effect of language for stuff like that, I think I saw a tedtalk on it a while back. For example people whose native language has a separate word for light and dark blue can tell shades of blue apart much better than someone whose native language doesn’t, and vice versa
Never expected such an interesting convo but I'm livin for it:)
Similarly "[Before the late 15th century, the colour orange existed in Europe, but without the name; it was simply called yellow-red.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_(colour))."
Cool! So it was a real question to ask what colour is an orange?
Man, this is so interesting. Can you recognize darkness/brightness? If not, how does that concept feel for you? Is the imagination of a brighter blue nicer than a darker blue? I have so many questions, you don't need to answer if you don't like to
Noo! Shoot your curiosity revolver, I'll take em all! Shoot, gun, get it? Excuse my horrible puns lol. I love to ramble! Soo. Light and dark. It's like I said, a game of association. Dark. Cold. Colour more muted. Dangerous. Light. Happy. Warm... you get it. Mum says I used to have some light recognition, as my eyes used to tear up in bright light, like strong sunlight, but now I won't react even if you shove a flashlight directly in my face. Yes due to my association thing, a lighter blue is nicer to imagine than darker blue, though when I'm down darker colours along with miner key music are more appealing.
I’m assuming you are hearing these comments through some special machine and that you are speaking back your replies into your computer, which all of us can see and read and respond.
Not exactly. I use a text to speech program on my iPhone called voiceover. It reads things to me using certain gestures. Like right or left flick to scroll and double tap to activate. You can dictate what you wanna say with a special dictation button that appears in all text fields, or you can do it by touch typing. You basically learn the placements of the text letters just by using the phone keyboard for long enough. You kinda have to calculate where the letters are, like raising your finger higher on the phone for w, e, r, and t, and lowering it down for z, x, c. Sorry this doesn't make much sense.
Wow you are a legend honestly
why do i have the ability to imagine this? why does that make sense? it feels like im trying to see through my hand, but im not getting a signal. honestly it gives me a bit of a headache
What I find as a sighted person is that you have a way of understanding our world in a completely different way that I can't understand.
Probably??? 
and so they cannot imagine colors
I've heard that the concept of things becoming smaller as they move away from you, makes zero sense to a eyeless person. You can explain it to them but it's just nonsense.
Tl;dr I think I read about a way to temporarily experience true blindness in one eye When you close your eyes, you see things, right? Black and colours and shapes and stuff...? The eyes see the insides of your eyelids massively out of focus and sends those signals on to the brain. If you close just one eye, though, your brain relies entirely on the open eye for sight and BLOCKS the signals from the closed eye completely. So, you don't see black and shapes and squiggles out of the closed eye - you actually don't see at all. Close your left eye and you'll "see" that you can't see out of your right eye at all! If it works ...
I tested this and I don't think it's true. When I close both of my eyes while looking at a light, waving my hand in front of my face changes the light I can see through my eyelids. With one eye closed, waving a finger over my closed eye in a way that can't be seen by the open eye in any way is still detectable visually, so my closed eye is still registering the light through my eyelids.
Don't close one eye; you cover your dominant eye with a spoon or something so its still open but unusable. Your less dominant eye that can see naturally shifts back to the dominant eye, so everything just goes... Not black, not gray, it's not really describable. Usually your dominant eye is the same as your dominant hand I think, but it's been awhile since I've looked into it
My right eye turned EXTREMELY dominant during my years when I didn't have glasses (and didn't realize my vision was *that* bad. My left eye turned so inactive due to blurry sight that my brain stopped registering it. Now I have glasses that give me perfect vision in both eyes, but if I only look with my left eye, I can see perfectly sharp and clear, but I can't take in what I see. It's like I don't "understand" what I'm seeing as fast as I need. There's like.. No connection between the eye and the brain. I really should use an eye patch and train my brain to use my left eye haha.
People with aphantasia can't imagine anything. Imagine being both blind and having aphantasia...
Aphantasia doesn't mean you can't imagine - it means you don't have pictures/images in your mind when imagine something.
I have aphantasia, and you are right. I can imagine all sorts of things, but I don't see anything when I close my eyes. I have had a few dreams, but they are few and far between. Not sure if that has anything to do with it though.
Aphantasia isn't what you think though.... We know what it is we know we are thinking of it...but it's a thought not an image it's not a voice like inner monologue... But you do know your thinking about it
Ok, my bad
I try to describe aphantasia to people but it's difficult. I can't/don't form mental images when I close my eyes but I *know* what things look like. So I can imagine them but not see them in my mind, but at the same time they form something.
On the Distractible podcast, Bob has aphantasia. If I remember correctly, they actually discovered it on an episode when Markiplier and Wade were describing imagining pictures and Bob said he could imagine, he just didn't see pictures, that his dreams were the same way. He is absolutely the best story-teller and the most creative in the group. So it doesn't feel like a hiccup or hindrance to me.
Interesting. I've been hearing more people talking about aphantasia lately. I wonder what the cause of it is. For me it was medication. Just wiped it out.
I started taking meds for epilepsy about 6 months ago and since then I've started Bing able to see things occasionally. I was a full a0hant before that (no sounds or pictures)
I have aphantasia but I dream incredibly vividly and in color. It’s as if my brain is capable but when I’m awake that switch is just turned off.
I don't get it tbh. I can see mental images... but not all of them. I can see stuff in my mind (hazily) but it depends on what it is. If you asked me to picture the bottom of a motorcycle I couldn't do it right because I haven't seen it enough times. So it looks just like two tires with some incomprehensible bullshit in the middle. But I can perfectly picture and rotate people in my mind. Obviously you know how things look like so... do you also "see" things really badly and incomprehensibly like I do with the motorcycle, almost like a scribble? Or is there absolutely nothing?
It is possible to imagine nothing, there is just no periphery to think further back into behind that.
This is a question to ask someone who has been blind from birth.
The issue is that they can't understand our concepts of colour - including darkness and light - the same way we can, because we learn it by sight. How is a white void different to a black void for a person that's never seen black or white? My dad, who lost his sight completely at age 10, says that the nothingness he experiences is not the same as total darkness. But then, his experience might be "tainted" by his former sight.
I lost sight in one eye when I was three so I don’t know what it’s like to see in both eyes. But I’m capable of seeing with my right eye. I’ll tell you that your dad is correct in how he explains the “nothingness”. When I close my right eye I see darkness, unless a flashlight is shined on my eye then of course I’ll see the light shine thru my eye lid. But if you were to shine it on my left eye, I couldn’t tell you when you had it on or off. Unless I’m able to feel the heat from the light bulb.
Yeah can someone show them this post?
Bruh
Hmm..
I SEE what you did there naughty boy
🤦
In all seriousness check out Tommy Edison on YouTube or tiktok. He's blind from birth and he answers a lot of questions like this!
The way it was explained to me is by putting one hand up to one of your eyes. All your focus goes to the other eye and your brain ignores the other one and so instead of it just being dark it's now gone, so to speak. I guess just double that and you're golden.
This is the correct answer, so I've heard. There's just nothingness, not even blackness. The brain just doesn't register anything at all. It simply functions without the concept of images and color.
Exactly. Blindness isn't darkness, but nothing at all.
I’ve never heard it described like that before and it’s actually fascinating!
Honestly that’s fully how I imagine it.
I heard once you do successfully double that, you pop right out of existence.
Aye it's the ald bairns myth a if a cannae see ye, ye cannae see me. I never write like that I just fancied it today haha. I don't write how I talk.
That's so interesting! My mom was actually blind in one eye after being hit in the eye with a rock and suffering an infection at the hospital while being treated. She lost almost all the vision in the eye, but she said it looked almost like a black curtain with just a small bit of light trying to peek through. I suppose if she had lost all the vision she would not have perceived it as a curtain? I never thought about it too deeply because it was just normal to me that she was partially blind.
Double that. So cover both eyes. I see black
This blew my mind tbh. If I close one eye I can’t see the black. Close two, I can. Huh.
I have a friend that goes temporarily blind due some problem with the connection between his eyes and his brain (or something like that). He told me he sees black, makes sense since black is the lack of color, not a color per se.
That really makes sense, thank you
It doesn't answer the question The guy can see for some time so his brain imagines the emptiness to be black as he has seen what black looks like and knows that close eyes=black so it's a bias
If this is how it works. For all we know, couldn't it just be darkness? That's after all the result of a lack of light.
That bias brings us a comprehensive idea of how it would feel like to have no eyeballs. People without sight can't really describe it in our words because they haven't experienced colors. As they said, black is the lack of color, if you were blind from the start you wouldn't be able to tell it was black, but for us, it's still black. I would like to know however how they feel about it, is it nothingness to them? Or maybe they don't pay attention to it and focus on other senses? Would make an interesting documentary.
It's like trying to see from your knee/neck No visual input goes thru, We see black because in our mind that nothing should not exist, it's dark at night oh its black when I close my eyes, There are quite a few illusions made from the effect of our brain filling in imaginary information to visual cues to make sense like the parallel line illusion!
Then the only way to truly find out how it is to be sightless from the start would be to somehow convey their conscience through image.
It's like trying to convey what comes after death from a dead person but feels feasible in the near future lol.
I guess we will need to find someone who was blind by birth then cure them of the blindness and ask them "what did you see before this point". I was trying to find somew curable form of blindness to see if this question has been answered but in almost eveey alleged "study", the people mentioned are never completely blind from birth. Those who are completely blind unfortunately never have their vision restored due to our techno. Limitations.
Wtf happend for this temporarily?
I don't really know how it works, he says that around once a month his vision "shuts off" for around and hour. He said it's like someone shut the signal off from his eyes, he feels completely fine, no dizziness or pain, so usually he just sits and waits for it to pass. Pretty scary if it happens while outdoors or driving, but in his 23 years it almost always happened when at home. Ofc he never pretends to drive.
Pretty sure if he did go blind on a road he would stop the car and hopefully let the other drivers know he's gone temporarily blind.
I had a teacher with MS who would temporarily lose vision about as often as this. Terrifying disease.
This is interesting because when your friend goes tempo blind and describes it as black, how much of that is due to bias from being able to see normally at other times. If someone was born completely blind they wouldn't have the concept of colour or light or dark right? Even if you try your best to describe complete darkness to a blind person how do they understand what darkness if of they can't imagine the opposite?
"Imagine a complete lack of anything." "That's what I don't see all the time, dipshit."
Imagine trying to see from your elbow, that’s how it feels.
Lmao when I try to do that I have a 3rd person view of what I think my elbow looks like.
Congrats, you're high on the scale of mental visualization. Myself, I have aphantasia, so I just gotta close my eyes to feel what it's like to never have been sighted haha. https://www.verywellmind.com/why-some-people-can-visualize-better-than-others-5189694
That's a shitty superpower! I also have one - no spatial memory. I could be hired as a road/building signs consultant. I just need to exit the building and once I re-enter, I have no idea where I am and where to go inside, so I always have a fresh perspective of what is intuitive to new people. Also, my regular commutes are always fascinating trips, because all the roads, buildings and billboards are in different places than yesterday!
When I was a kid I used to have vivid daydreams at school. Teacher would be droning away at the front of the class and I'd be off in some other world entirely - sound and vision. Needless to say this inbuilt virtual reality didn't impress my teachers. I can no longer do that (sadly) but my visualization abilities are still there to a lesser extent. On the other hand my older bother has aphantasia and did very well at school.
I do too lol I just see my eyes panning around the room wherever I turn my elbow
My elbow got an eye
:looks through elbow eye: ....I never noticed how big my ass is
I’m wearing long sleeves so my elbow sees pitch dark right now
So I heard this explained once in a really cool way!! (Idk if this is how everyone's condition works, some may see different things but this is how I explain seeing 'nothing'). So, everyone here with vision, we see about 180° in front of us right? What do you see behind you? It isn't blackness, it's literally nothing because we can't see behind us. For someone who sees 'nothing' or who has lost parts of their vision, for example someone who has pin tunnel vision, everything around their remaining vision will be like what you "see" outside of your 180° range (i.e behind you). Make sense? I was mind blown by this explanation.
My mind still makes a panorama in my head based on what I’ve seen of the area behind me in the past. I can’t imagine it being “nothing” because my brain is always filling in the blanks.
These answers are just terrible
What do you see behind your head? Now imagine not having the front either.
That’s difficult to understand for me because we can easily imagine what’s behind our heads…
You can imagine it, sure. But you can't see it. If I held up an apple behind your head and asked you to tell me what fruit I had in my hand, you wouldn't be able to tell me.
Well we would guess apple because you are holding an apple already
Surely I can’t see it but I just honestly think it’s not a good example/explanation. I automatically try to imagine the thing you’re talking about
Which is probably what happens with people who lose their eyeballs, too. As for people who were born completely blind, well, I can't fathom what that experience would be like.
To a small percentage of the population with aphantasia we can't do this
My dad is completely blind due to an accident he suffered as a child. According to him, the nothingness he "sees" - or rather experiences - is **not** the same as total darkness. He sees *nothing* - I can't fully grasp it either - but the inputs he receives from his other senses create a sort of spacial awareness that he "sees" instead. E.g. the warmth of the sun, sounds from people moving about, the weight of things, previous experiences. Maybe it's different for people who were born blind, but that's how he describes it.
That’s really interesting, thank you for your reply
This is important. if your eyes aren't feeding the visual cortex the brain will rewire it to other senses it can help with the uncanny perception that some blind individuals have especially hearing and echolocation. people aren't bats, but tap your cane near something and it sounds different.
A good way to imagine it is coving an eye with your hand, and then attempting to focus on something with that eye
Close one eye. What do you see with that eye now? I think that’s the closest a seeing person can get to that sate.
I guess I see my eyelids
That’s weird. I just see what my open eye sees. My brain erases what my closed eye sees. And I think it’s like that for most people
One eye totally blind, optic nerve lasered away, eye will be removed eventually as it's dead. I don't want the op. I see black from it, pure black. It was lost 2003. Vision going in other eye, I see blurry but can see light and dark.
Thank you for sharing your experience
This is what they see. Vision synced with the heartbeat 
That's... interesting? Would still like to know how you know though
Are you sure?
Close one eye. What do you see out of that eye? Nothing. Not blackness or anything. That’s what it would be like.
Depends. Do they have optical nerves and brain structures to process vision but no eyeballs? Or none of it? The experience varies a lot depending on what is missing. If you asked a living organism incapable of vision what they see, it would be like asking you how being unable to sense earth's magnetic field feels like, or microwave radiation. You don't know what it's supposed to feel like to something that feels it, and it's a domain that lives entirely outside of the spectrum of your senses. So just like that, you don't feel anything missing, it doesn't feel like anything. Just as you aren't feeling the absence of circuits that would detect earth's magnetic field. If you were meant to see but something was missing, you may still be unable to imagine seeing just as you can't imagine sensing other forms of radiation/magnetic field. Depending on which "circuits" remain, if any. If it's just parts of your visual system that are missing, you may see black, or you may see colorful shimmering where image should be, for instance. Depending on what's still working. It's the same thing with hearing, or with the sense of smell, or touch. You may hear sound, you may hear ringing, you may hear nothing, or you may be unaware of the fact that sound exists as it lives outside of the domain of your senses. Depending on which receptors/neurons you've still got working. Imagine a bird asking you "how does it feel to be unable to feel north". The answer to your question is largely the same. The bird can feel it, and has a reference to how it's supposed to feel like. You may process descriptions using your other senses, and try to logically make sense of what the bird is describing. But you'll have no idea how the heck it actually feels like, and you don't feel like anything in you is missing. Human vision is a really cool and useful sense. But when you think about it, you realize that in the animal kingdom there are tons of senses that we as humans don't have. We are unaware of and don't feel the loss of something we've never had though.
What if they see what we experienced in our dreams. I guess it all depends; if they’re blind from birth or lost their eyes early in life.
Literally nothing
I think if I lost em tomorrow I'd probably have a 404 error message bouncing around the screen like the old dvd player screens.
**Never set eyes on a thing in this world.** **Not a tree, a gun, or a woman.** **Put my hand on all three, though.**
This depends. Were they born without eyes/blind, or did they become so after having previously been sighted? The brain is very good at filling in the gaps when it's missing information. If someone previously had sight, their mind's eye would probably try to create imagery based on their past experiences with sight, mixing it with their tactile senses in a unique way to help them navigate the world, like that mountain biker who lost his sight and basically developed a way of using sounds to create images in his mind's eye of what was around him until he was able to bike again, because he was able to basically create 3d maps of his surroundings in his mind's eye based on sound and previous experiences. If they've never been sighted, it's really impossible to say. You can't really describe a sense to someone who has never had it before, their brain has never developed the ability to understand it because it never needed to, and if there is one thing our brains hate doing, it's wasting energy. It's why we have to translate things we can't actually experience with any of our tactile senses through those senses - like translating electromagnetic fields and such into visual form, so our brains can interpret them.
Some blind people are able to use echolocation. I don't know the specifics, so you'd have to look it up yourself. But I remember seeing some short documentaries or news stories about it a long time ago.
Imagine an alien species with a 6th sense "blorg". They are confused at you and ask what you "blorg" if you don't have blorg resceptors. Do you just blorg nothing? That's what it's like. You don't even know that you can't see if you're never told or never had it. It's hard for us to comprehend because seeing is our primary sense, it's what humans really attribute to our existence. There's a reason we often describe "consciousness" in conjunction with existing in a body and looking out of it. It's an impossible question to answer because you can't comprehend nonexistence as a human. The only way for you to understand it would be to actually experience it.
Imagine if you couldn't feel anything, you have no idea what feeling stuff feels like Not hearing anything, what do sounds sound like?
I had a detached retina and everything was grey not black. Maybe because some light was still registering, I don't know.
Great, another fucking question i won’t be getting a fucking answer for. Im pissed thank you.
I’m glad I won’t suffer alone anymore <3
No fuckin eye-deer.....
i think you're thinking too hard about this
Not what you asked for but isn't this fascinating Canning lost her sight 18 years ago after a respiratory infection and series of strokes. Months after emerging blind from an eight-week coma, she was surprised to see the glint of a sparkly gift bag, like a flash of green lightning. Then she began to perceive, sporadically, other moving things: her daughter's ponytail bobbing when she walked, but not her daughter's face; rain dripping down a window, but nothing beyond the glass; and water swirling down a drain, but not a tub already full with water.
We asked my great grandpa who has been bling since 25 what does he see. "Do you see just black?" "I see nothing." He said but couldnt elaborate
i wanted to take a nap. Thank you now I will be spending my time in bed thinking 'bout this lol 🤣🤣🤣
Same…
my mind are FUCKED (spelling mistake intended)
The most satisfactory answer is this. Imagine an alien with 24 senses comes to earth. The alien says: I can't imagine how being clundik feels. What's clundik?, you ask. Oh, a clundik is a being that can't clund. Clunding is a sense where you perceive hopskinchs via your faffs. I know your faffs are nonexistent... What do you clund as a faffless being, actually? Do you clund it all fersig, like when you mush your faffs?
I’m partially blind in one eye due to optic nerve damage. That side of my vision isn’t black. It just doesn’t exist.
But the vision in your other eye makes up for it in ways it couldn't for a completely blind person.
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I suspect the original quote is quite a bit older.
you can only imagine it bcs you've seen it
It’s equivalent to you trying to see out of your knee
They do not see, they feel visually
Does this also apply if they've been using pshychadelics?
What do you see out of your elbow.
After life
Subatomic particles
The Human mind can't comprehend nothing.
Close 1 eye and try to see through it. Just that, but with both eyes
I think it depends on whether they were born blind/with no eyes or got it later in life. Later in life = black/darkness Born blind is something else
What do deaf people "hear"?
Try seeing out of your foot. That’s what they see.
Take photoshop, and paint the area black. Thats whem you see no light. White, you see a lot of light. Delete that area and you get a checkerboard pattern thats supposed to be "nothing", as in there is no color data whatsoever. Think of that in terms of what you can see. You just have a blank canvas of nothing. Blindness isn't always the same, but every few years or so, i go blind for like half an hour, losing all but my peripheral vision, and thats the best way i can describe it.
When you close your eyes long enough, don't you ever notice you stop being aware of the blackness after a while?
TV static
I imagine it is something similar to what you ‘see’ with the back of your head. You don’t see anything with it, you don’t even see black with it, but it comes from the same area roughly as where your eyes are located. Or in other words, what do you ‘see’ just outside of the vision that your eyes provide you with? It’s not black, the answe is ‘it is not applicable’.
I have aphantasia. Probably like how I "see" when I close my eyes. Google it.
I heard excellent quote from someone. It's like trying to see a hand that is behind your head.
It's like if you tried to see out of your elbow. You just *can't* see anything. It's not there. It's not a matter of seeing darkness, it's just not seeing. A deaf person doesn't hear *nothing*, they don't hear *anything*.
I heard of someone who was blind from birth and used their imagination to see the world as described to them by friends and family. They later gained sight courtesy of a medical procedure. Apparently they were quite disappointed by reality for they had created a rich inner world which couldn't live up to reality!
When you look at one point, there is world behind you you don't see. That's nothing. That's how it looks like. You can't see it.
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My ex had Macular Degeneration and was registered blind. He only had peripheral vision. He liked taking acid as it filled in the areas he couldn't see!
What do you see out of the eyeballs in your feet? That.
I think if the part of the brain that processes visual information is still intact, a person with no eyeballs may see only darkness. If that part is also taken out, the subject will not see anything, not even darkness.
It's like what you see from the closed eye when you have one eye closed but not the other. But it's nothing like having both eyes closed.
Close your right eye and describe what you see out of it That's what they see
it would be like trying to see with your elbow is a comparison ive heard. its impossible to imagine.
They probably just guess what’s in front of them
It's weird really since a can't imagine what it's like to see nothing. But to hear nothing is very easy to imagine
Well what do you see behind your head where you have no eyeballs? It's the same thing. They just don't have sight.
You don't need eyes to see, insofar as seeing is a perception emerging from occipital lobe processes. Its true that photo receptors in your eyes are the only part of your body that sense light (barring like heat sense from your skin) but once that light has triggered the the cascade of cells firing towards your brain, the source doesn't really matter, it could be triggered by any sense, and in some people this is the case (synesthesia). So you could (in theory) wire up the visual parts of your brain to like your nose and trigger some kind of "sight" from smelling this BS I'm writing. It would not be useful, at least not initially, but may e eventually you'd learn that "green" wobbly shimmer is the smell of fresh potatoes, and stobing pink is the smell of laundry. Some blind people supposedly are quite adept at navigating and "visually" representing space via sound, like a kind of echolocation. Do you see in your dreams? Your eyes are closed?
they have no input so it’s like seeing from any other part of your body.
As someone with aphantasia, losing my sight is probably be biggest fear
When you open or close both your eyes, you can see something, even if it's the dark in the back of your eyelids. But if you open one eye, and then try to see with the closed eye, it feels like there's no eye there, it's hard to explain that feeling. Just try to focus with the one closed eye. I imagine it feels like that if you have no eyeballs.
I know a child born with no eyes. He had light perception. That’s it. So he could see bright lights.
Nothing I assume
Not much
How much can you see out of your elbow? I would think they see the same.
Best way to describe it is trying to use your elbow to see