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Turtle visual cortex is non-retinotopic

blog.jordan.matelsky.com

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Re: Turtle visual cortex is non-retinotopic

#21

Post by pantalaimon »

wombatmobile wrote: post #12
whowe1 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you eat meat?

It is possible to eat meat and to value and respect animals. It requires the holding of two paradigms simultaneously. These paradigms are not incompatible or necessarily in conflict with each other. Paradigm 1. Animals are awesome. Wanton killing is wrong. Paradigm 2. Killing animals for food is OK provided the animal is killed humanely, the food is not wasted, and the animal is revered for its contribution. Most peo…

The problem with the meat industry is less the killing of the animals than the lifetime of suffering they have to endure before.

Re: Turtle visual cortex is non-retinotopic

#22

Post by SunlightEdge »

nefitty wrote: post #18
wombatmobile wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can boil paradigms down into whatever you like. What you say I think and feel is not an accurate representation of what I think and feel. It is an indication of what you think and feel.

If that’s your response then what’s the point of trying to rationalize your meat eating? If you like meat that comes from animals that are unnecessarily killed then that’s your prerogative, but don’t try to dress it up in spiritual terms like “reverence”.

Most people eat meat because they like the taste. It's way less ethical than scientific research into the visual systems of turtles.

And the majority of animal research is on pre-clinical treatments for human diseases.

I've always been amazed at how animal rights activists target scientists over the animal farming industry.

Re: Turtle visual cortex is non-retinotopic

#23

Post by signaru »

jsrcout wrote: post #9
FPGAhacker wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is fascinating. But I always get uncomfortable reading stuff like this... I mean, they are placing sensors in a turtle’s brain, physically immobilizing it, aiming its head at a screen for a while, and you generally don’t release something to the wild after that. The ethical thing is considered to be killing it. I get that there are a lot of aspects to modern life that sterilize the gruesomeness of reality. Still m…

I feel you. I made the mistake of looking up a paper on vision in cats once. Once was enough.

while we're at it, don't make the mistake of image searching the author's name.

Re: Turtle visual cortex is non-retinotopic

#24

Post by matthewdgreen »

benbreen wrote: post #6

This topic reminds me of Walter Pitts and specifically his famous paper "What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain" (1959): https://hearingbrain.org/docs/letvin_ieee_1959.pdf Pitts is probably known to HN readership for his early work on neural networks which put him in dialogue with people like Claude Shannon. It's fascinating to see how much that early world of 1940s/50s era computer researchers overlapped with pe…

If you want to build a foundation for machine learning, it sure helps to have a bunch of learning machines sitting around. :)

Re: Turtle visual cortex is non-retinotopic

#26

Post by PretzelPirate »

SunlightEdge wrote: post #22
nefitty wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that’s your response then what’s the point of trying to rationalize your meat eating? If you like meat that comes from animals that are unnecessarily killed then that’s your prerogative, but don’t try to dress it up in spiritual terms like “reverence”.

Most people eat meat because they like the taste. It's way less ethical than scientific research into the visual systems of turtles. And the majority of animal research is on pre-clinical treatments for human diseases. I've always been amazed at how animal rights activists target scientists over the animal farming industry.

Animal rights activists regularly target both. They even go as far as doing sit ins in slaughter facilities to show how gruesome and cruel they are to the animals.

Re: Turtle visual cortex is non-retinotopic

#28

Post by tibbydudeza »

helge9210 wrote: post #10

Colleague of mine was working on research of vision system of a spitting fish. The fish hunts by spitting water at insects sitting on the leaves above the water surface. What they found out that "firing solution" is formed in the retina and passed to the brain to initiate the spit.

Amazing.

Since they hunt in a school they need to predict where the prey will fall due to competition.

The fish will initiate a swim maneuver after observing the first 75ms of the ballistic path of the prey as it falls.

https://www.cs.bgu.ac.il/~ben-shahar/Publications/2018-Ben_T...

Re: Turtle visual cortex is non-retinotopic

#29

Post by whowe1 »

wombatmobile wrote: post #12
whowe1 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you eat meat?

It is possible to eat meat and to value and respect animals. It requires the holding of two paradigms simultaneously. These paradigms are not incompatible or necessarily in conflict with each other. Paradigm 1. Animals are awesome. Wanton killing is wrong. Paradigm 2. Killing animals for food is OK provided the animal is killed humanely, the food is not wasted, and the animal is revered for its contribution. Most peo…

Haha. It's cool that you think that.

Re: Turtle visual cortex is non-retinotopic

#30

Post by pshc »

nomoreusernames wrote: post #25

hey, i dont know much about turtology/tortology, nor do i know much about the eye other than i need glasses because my eyes are a weird shape. could somebody ELI5 please. for us plebs.

I'm also a layperson but my take was that the turtle visual cortex doesn't carry individual 'pixel' signals (and low-level features) like ours does. Instead it immediately turns the pixel signals into a high-level holistic flow of perceptions.
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