Short enough to just post here rater than linking:
Imagine, that you are an intelligent bird with a 360 degrees, panoramic view, flying over a plane equipped with orthogonal x and y axis, clearly visible and – what a coincidence – intersecting just 10 meters beneath you.
I argue, that due to the well known phenomenon of the geometrical perspective, you see in a distance the line which goes North, parallel to the line which goes West. In fact, every direction seems parallel to all other three directions.
Is that right, and why it’s right? How could this be?
Is there an unstated assumption that the panoramic view is accomplished by mapping to a human-evolved ~135 degree field of view? I don’t think this would happen in a brain evolved and trained on panoramic eyes/sensors. It doesn’t happen in reality, where panoramic views exist everywhere and are generally accessed by turning our heads.
Closer objects must appear bigger and this kind of perspective is inescapable for us, cameras or birds.
From here the apparent parallelism of the two, from a single point outgoing lines—follows. How then a 360 degrees vision creature handle this? When the straight road going to the North, is parallel to another straight road going to the West, which is parallel to yet another straight road going to the South? At least in some distance and then to the horizon.
Short enough to just post here rater than linking:
Is there an unstated assumption that the panoramic view is accomplished by mapping to a human-evolved ~135 degree field of view? I don’t think this would happen in a brain evolved and trained on panoramic eyes/sensors. It doesn’t happen in reality, where panoramic views exist everywhere and are generally accessed by turning our heads.
Closer objects must appear bigger and this kind of perspective is inescapable for us, cameras or birds.
From here the apparent parallelism of the two, from a single point outgoing lines—follows. How then a 360 degrees vision creature handle this? When the straight road going to the North, is parallel to another straight road going to the West, which is parallel to yet another straight road going to the South? At least in some distance and then to the horizon.
I have an idea, but first I am asking you. How?