It took massive amounts of number crunching to create movies like James Cameron’s Avatar. Yet I am able to create more realistic and genuine worlds in front of my minds eye, on the fly.
You think you can. When you imagine a Dragon, it’s very clear. But once you start trying to put it onto paper, you realize you don’t really know how the wings are attached to the body, or how the wings and forelimbs connect, or how the hind limbs fold, etc.
Just like the mind can imagine “a dragon”, it can also imagine the perception “and all the details are complete” without being able to actually fill out all the details if you ask it to.
And while you can imagine the details of some scenes (familiar scenes, or if you’re a good artist), you can only do it on a small section, you’re not summoning a fully detailed scene in your mind. Rendering Avatar requires getting the details for every inch of the screen, simultaneously.
And while you can imagine the details of some scenes (familiar scenes, or if you’re a good artist), you can only do it on a small section, you’re not summoning a fully detailed scene in your mind. Rendering Avatar requires getting the details for every inch of the screen, simultaneously.
Yes, but I can jump to any inch and simulate it on the fly if I want to. If I take my room or garden, I can simulate any part. Even the fine details of leaves. And the same is true for completely new environments.
I can’t draw those scenes. But some people can. I never learnt to draw...
The point was, doesn’t this require a lot of number crunching? Big numbers, for what its worth...
Ask such a blind mathematician to calculate an abstruse property of a geometric figure with randomized values down to the, say, 60th decimal place. Will they be able to do it? After all, it’s a trivial amount of computation compared to what you imply is going on in their heads when they do the math that so impresses you.
A general counter-example to your post is dreams: in a dream, one usually feels sure of the reality and convincingness of the dream (and when one has cultivated the rare & unusual skill of doubting dreams, then one can do things like lucid dreaming) and yet there’s hardly any information or calculation involved. Have you ever tried to read a book in a dream? Has an excellent logical argument been explained to you in a dream and then you tried to remember it when you woke up? I’ve heard both examples before, and when I was working on lucid dreaming & kept a dream journal, I did both, to no effect.
What’s going on is more a case of domain-specific calculating power being hijacked for other things, heuristics, and people looking where the light is.
(Why was research into fractals and chaotic functions delayed until the ’50s and later, when the initial results could often be shown to stem from material in the 1800s? It doesn’t require much calculating power, Mandelbrot did his weather simulations on a computer much weaker than a wristwatch. Because the calculating power required, unlike geometry say, was not one that fits nicely into the visual cortex or requires extremely few explicit arithmetical calculations.)
A square inch would require much less number crunching than a whole scene in Avatar; there are also details that humans don’t easily imagine right—the way light is reflected on a necklace, the way ambient light colors shadows, the way the skin ripples when muscles move underneath. Those things are expensive to compute, but your mind can get away with not imagining them right, and still think it looks “right”.
Those things are expensive to compute, but your mind can get away with not imagining them right, and still think it looks “right”.
This is probably right, but I would have to device a way on how to better estimate the precision with which a human brain can simulate a scene.
One could also look at how long it takes a modern supercomputer to simulate an inch of a frame minus some light details. Although I perceive my imagination to be much more photo realistic than a frame from the movie Avatar.
I don’t think it’s very meaningful to compare one’s subjective impression of detail, and a computer rendering with too much precision; those are pretty different things.
The reasons for why I think humans are worse at imagining detail than they usually notice:
I like drawing, and often I could imagine something clearly, but when I tried to put it on paper I needed a lot of tried to get it right, if I managed to. Some things—expressions, folds in clothes, poses—are surprisingly difficult to get right, even when we see them all the time.
When playtesting the user interface of games, we sometimes ask the playtesters to draw what they saw on the screen. Often huge obvious stuff is missing, and sometimes they even draw things that weren’t on the screen, and come from another game.
Those are just rough impressions, but I don’t think it’s useful to go much further than rough impressions on this specific topic.
There are artists with sufficient visual and spatial cognitive abilities that can do exactly what you claim cannot be done—to imagine and sketch out new anatomies on the fly.
The mind projection fallacy is confusing properties of your thoughts with the environment, in this case it would be to think that because your imagination of something was imperfect then it really was fuzzy in the real world. Confusing the way you think with the way others think is called the typical mind fallacy.
You think you can. When you imagine a Dragon, it’s very clear. But once you start trying to put it onto paper, you realize you don’t really know how the wings are attached to the body, or how the wings and forelimbs connect, or how the hind limbs fold, etc.
Just like the mind can imagine “a dragon”, it can also imagine the perception “and all the details are complete” without being able to actually fill out all the details if you ask it to.
And while you can imagine the details of some scenes (familiar scenes, or if you’re a good artist), you can only do it on a small section, you’re not summoning a fully detailed scene in your mind. Rendering Avatar requires getting the details for every inch of the screen, simultaneously.
Yes, but I can jump to any inch and simulate it on the fly if I want to. If I take my room or garden, I can simulate any part. Even the fine details of leaves. And the same is true for completely new environments.
I can’t draw those scenes. But some people can. I never learnt to draw...
Blind mathematicians can even imagine higher dimensions.
The point was, doesn’t this require a lot of number crunching? Big numbers, for what its worth...
Ask such a blind mathematician to calculate an abstruse property of a geometric figure with randomized values down to the, say, 60th decimal place. Will they be able to do it? After all, it’s a trivial amount of computation compared to what you imply is going on in their heads when they do the math that so impresses you.
A general counter-example to your post is dreams: in a dream, one usually feels sure of the reality and convincingness of the dream (and when one has cultivated the rare & unusual skill of doubting dreams, then one can do things like lucid dreaming) and yet there’s hardly any information or calculation involved. Have you ever tried to read a book in a dream? Has an excellent logical argument been explained to you in a dream and then you tried to remember it when you woke up? I’ve heard both examples before, and when I was working on lucid dreaming & kept a dream journal, I did both, to no effect.
What’s going on is more a case of domain-specific calculating power being hijacked for other things, heuristics, and people looking where the light is.
(Why was research into fractals and chaotic functions delayed until the ’50s and later, when the initial results could often be shown to stem from material in the 1800s? It doesn’t require much calculating power, Mandelbrot did his weather simulations on a computer much weaker than a wristwatch. Because the calculating power required, unlike geometry say, was not one that fits nicely into the visual cortex or requires extremely few explicit arithmetical calculations.)
A square inch would require much less number crunching than a whole scene in Avatar; there are also details that humans don’t easily imagine right—the way light is reflected on a necklace, the way ambient light colors shadows, the way the skin ripples when muscles move underneath. Those things are expensive to compute, but your mind can get away with not imagining them right, and still think it looks “right”.
This is probably right, but I would have to device a way on how to better estimate the precision with which a human brain can simulate a scene.
One could also look at how long it takes a modern supercomputer to simulate an inch of a frame minus some light details. Although I perceive my imagination to be much more photo realistic than a frame from the movie Avatar.
I don’t think it’s very meaningful to compare one’s subjective impression of detail, and a computer rendering with too much precision; those are pretty different things.
The reasons for why I think humans are worse at imagining detail than they usually notice:
I like drawing, and often I could imagine something clearly, but when I tried to put it on paper I needed a lot of tried to get it right, if I managed to. Some things—expressions, folds in clothes, poses—are surprisingly difficult to get right, even when we see them all the time.
When playtesting the user interface of games, we sometimes ask the playtesters to draw what they saw on the screen. Often huge obvious stuff is missing, and sometimes they even draw things that weren’t on the screen, and come from another game.
Those are just rough impressions, but I don’t think it’s useful to go much further than rough impressions on this specific topic.
p.s.: it’s “devise”, not “device”
Mind Projection Fallacy.
There are artists with sufficient visual and spatial cognitive abilities that can do exactly what you claim cannot be done—to imagine and sketch out new anatomies on the fly.
The mind projection fallacy is confusing properties of your thoughts with the environment, in this case it would be to think that because your imagination of something was imperfect then it really was fuzzy in the real world. Confusing the way you think with the way others think is called the typical mind fallacy.
Oops.
Agreed—I was thinking of that in the third paragraph; when it is possible, it’s still pretty slow—faster than drawing, slower than rendering.
(Without requiring amazing artists, I think a lot of people would be capable of imagining their bedroom at a high level of detail.)