Abstract
For millions of years, biological creatures have dealt with the world without being able to see it; however, the change in the atmospheric condition during the Cambrian period and the subsequent increase of light, triggered the sudden evolution of vision and the consequent evolutionary benefits. Nevertheless, how from simple organisms to more complex animals have been able to generate meaning from the light who fell in their eyes and successfully engage the visual world remains unknown. As shown by many psychophysical experiments, biological visual systems cannot measure the physical properties of the world. The light projected onto the retina is, in fact, unable to specify the physical properties of the world in which humans and other visually ‘intelligent’ animals behave; however, visual behaviours are habitually successful. Through psychophysical evidence, examples of the functioning of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) and a reflection upon visual appreciation in the cultural and artistic context, this paper shows (a) how vision emerged by random trial and error during evolution and lifetime learning; (b) how the functioning of ANNs may provide evidence and insights on how machine and human vision works; and (c) how rethinking vision theory in terms of trial and error may offer a new approach to better understand vision—biological and artificial—and reveal new insights into why we like what we like.
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Notes
A neuron is a specialised cell for the transmission of electro-chemical signals.
Glia cells are non-neural cells in the nervous system. Their main role is to provide structural support to neurons. They are not directly involved in the transmission of signals.
Synapses are connections between neurons and a target cell. The role of synapses is to allow communication by receiving or transmitting chemical signals.
In biology an event, in the form of energy, that provokes and activates a receptor cell.
Biological creatures gifted with photoreceptors able to transmit information about the outside world.
Images should be intended both as the light pattern detected by the retina, as well as the visual result of the processed light-pattern, meaning its visual representation—e.g., the image of a cat.
It is important to highlight that a light pattern does not resemble the physical world, nor any ‘image’ of the world produced by the human brain. A light pattern should be intended as the light configuration that is perceived, determined by its frequency of occurrence and its consequent usefulness (for more, see Purves et al. 2015., Yang and Purves 2004 , Rao et al. 2002).
On 11 of May 1997, after a 6-match game, Deep Blue beat the world-best chess player—Garry Kasparov. The Deep Blue’s win had an important symbolic significance in the advancement of ‘intelligent’ machine–artificial intelligence.
Reinforcement learning, in machine learning’s context, refers to the ability of an agent to learn by trial and error without supervision. Reinforcement learning, unlike supervised learning, does not require any labelled data. In the context of machine vision, a labelled data, for instance, might be a photograph in which the objects represented are specified—e.g., a cat, an apple or a house. Labels are usually obtained by asking annotators—humans—to make judgments about the content of a given image.
Visual appreciation refers not only to the aesthetic appreciation of a work of art but also to the ability to analyse, describe, interpret and make connections between works of art and their cultural context.
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Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Olli Tapio Leino for his continuous support, to Patricia Armati for her comments and to Dale Purves for his guidance in writing this paper.
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The writing of this paper was possible thanks to the financial support of the School of Creative Media-City University of Hong Kong and the University Grants Committee, Hong Kong, SAR, China.
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Treccani, C. The brain, the artificial neural network and the snake: why we see what we see. AI & Soc 36, 1167–1175 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-020-01065-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-020-01065-0