Dave Brown

Yes, but can they see?

Ah axe yuh, mah children, CAYUN THEY SEEYUH??

I like the part where it suggests that their eyes are co-processors that their small brains offload visual recognition to. Which means you don’t have to feel too bad, because it just means that having incredible processing power in our heads to do all the work has just lead us to go with relatively simple sensors up front (and if evolution is about anything, it’s about finding the cheapest effective solutions).

If I remember correctly, human eyes do the same — retina contains a built-in implementation of things that look like Fourier (or is it DCT? there should be a reason why we can tolerate JPEG…) or wavelet transforms. Some animals have things like motion detection within retina — however those use large amount of input (a section of bitmap) to produce very limited amount of output information (“is there a small moving object in this direction?”).