I used to do quite a bit pf acid back in the day and on several occasions caught the eye of someone else doing acid and had a bit of a mental connection. It wouldn’t be a conversation exactly, but an exchange none the less.
One incident in particular stuck with me. At a bar an acquaintance and I were both doing several hits. We were sitting far apart and separated by a pool table when I caught his eye and we started sort of sharing thoughts. I noticed two small dinosaurs fighting beside the pool table, I was doing acid after all, and I thought at him “Holy shit! Do you see that?”. I didn’t hear any words back but the unmistakable impression I got back was “Yeah, I do!” I looked back at him and we laughed at the same time.
The next day I discussed it with him and he agreed that he’d had the same experience. It makes me think that we have much yet to learn about our brains.
Lol, like every time you figure out the meaning of life, the universe, and everything else. That knowledge never survives the trip.
We notice what other people are looking at - and in this case people around you will quickly look at you, then the person staring at you, then back at you again then off to do their own thing. By the time the second or third person near you does this quick little nearly imperceptible dance - you’re going to look around to see what they are looking at. It’s a survival mechanism. It doesn’t even have to be a conscious effort.
This is why it is so interesting to consider the logic of “wrong” models – the more sophisticated model might explain more, but it also conceals all the things that used to be (wrongly) obvious to people before they figured it out.
For instance, I think this question arises because we have forgotten how not to assume that light and vision are aspects of the same phenomenon. But the Greeks just hadn’t thought of that yet. To them, light was the thing that makes an object bright, and vision was the thing that makes you aware of its appearance. Sure, light changes the way things look, but so does paint, or rain; it’s not immediately obvious that light is special. It’s just that everything is black when there’s no light, although that is not something most pre-industrial people would ever experience.
And as ray tracing illustrates, you can (and ancient Greeks did) explain most aspects of vision, like perspective, shadows and reflection, without thinking much about light. Notably, one of the few things you can’t explain that way is rainbows, which is exactly what led Newton to discover the modern theory of light. And the one thing that couldn’t explain was diffraction, which led to a theory of light so sophisticated and arcane that we still don’t bother with it for most purposes.
That said, ancient Greeks probably should have spotted a problem with sending out vision rays, namely, how do they come back to you? It would be interesting to know their thinking there, because as you point out, it has intriguing implications re: the location of consciousness and the nature of cause and effect.
PS I would point out that in a ray-tracing universe, you actually don’t need light sources to actively “suck in” light – if a ray happens to hit a light source, then the colors it has encountered become brighter, but if it ricochets off into space it just stays dark.
Any native New Yorker could have told you that when somebody stares at you, there is no projection or physical force involved; they’re just trying to intimidate you and make you feel like a punk-ass bitch.
