
The Scallop Sees with Hundreds of Eyes - sharp11
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/30/science/scallops-eyes.html
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always_good
The hero image doesn't do it justice.

I recommend image-searching "scallop eyes":
[https://www.google.com.mx/search?q=scallop+eyes&tbm=isch](https://www.google.com.mx/search?q=scallop+eyes&tbm=isch)

A beautiful beast.

I also enjoyed the morbidity of the article pointing out how much we have to
learn from these creatures yet also how we sear them in butter.

~~~
matt_the_bass
If you can get them live, you need neither butter or searing. Just a quick cut
with a scallop knife. :)

When diving for them, they definitely see me and will close tight. But unlike
as the article mentions, I’ve never seen them propel themselves away. I have
however seen trails in the sand of where they’ve come from. The impression I
have is they move slowly to better position themselves to capture food.

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p1mrx
Here's another article, containing a cryo-electron microscope image of the
square tiles:

[https://www.sciencenews.org/article/scallops-amazing-eyes-
us...](https://www.sciencenews.org/article/scallops-amazing-eyes-use-millions-
tiny-square-crystals-see)

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mattbierner
Inspiring. Just as our brains combine signals from two eyes, scallop brains
must be able to combine the signals from all of their eyes, but what would
this conception of the world even be like?

It’d be fun to build a headset rig that tries to imagine scallop vision. With
present tech, I imagine this would require some preprocessing to combine the
various eyeball streams into something human eyes could understand. Anyone
done something similar yet?

~~~
erikpukinskis
You already know exactly what their conception of the world is like. When you
look at the world you don’t see two images, you just perceive the presence of
things.

The thing that would make scallop reality different than yours is not the many
eyes, it’s the different body. Because you have fingers and lips you will
perceive a fish differently than a creature with tentacles and gills would
perceive it. We can only perceive that which we can relate to our own bodily
experience.

(Although as humans our layering of cultural references on those bodily
sensations can sometimes lead to the illusion that our perceptions are
abstract.)

~~~
mattbierner
I'm not so sure. Just as language influences how we think and how understand
the world, don't our senses mediate our understanding of reality?

Say there were a hyper-intelligent, speaking scallop. I agree that we could
build a shared language with the scallop for properties as "presence" or
"absence", but the scallop's internal conception of presence and what presence
looks like may be completely incomprehensible to us. Could that scallop then
ever teach a human what presence is without showing it to them? (similar idea
to knowledge argument)

More practically, two points I find interesting about scallop vision:

\- 360 vision from multiple small eyes. How are these inputs combined in the
scallop's brain?

\- Scallop eyes seem to be optimized for seeing contrast and detecting motion.
What would seeing using an array of low resolution, light/darkness sensors be
like?

