From:	Ereskanti@***.com Ereskanti@***.com
Subject:	On Cybereyes
Date:	Tue, 14 Sep 1999 00:43:39 EDT

In a message dated 9/13/1999 2:05:32 PM US Eastern Standard Time,
gbmaill@***.de writes:

> > Y'know, if that's true, then WHY do they cost so little essence? It
doesn't
> totally
> > make sense.
>
> That's because cybereyes are just eyes and no additional chips for the
optic
> center. See the "Blindness" flaw in SR Companion.
> Anyway, can anyone imagine if there can be something like a cybernetic
> optical center? Where would it be connected to? I don't know much about the
> brain but I know that one of the big mysteries in science is the question
> how an image gets from the optical center into consciousness.

I've always wanted to laugh at the medical research field when it came to
this area. "Visual Cues" are a vast collection of stuff influencing the
(meta?)human mind. Photoreceptivity due to (Bio)Chemical response is a
*very* simple function in many places. "Eyes" are just the one area where
their level of complexity astounds science, not the function itself.

Ultimately, IMO it would all come down to having a machine capable of
translating the photochemical responses/triggers that happen into a response
mechanism that something else can "understand". We've actually done this in
the modern world, but on an electromagnetic level. If you are reading this
letter, you are seeing one product of this development.

John is correct in that exactly "how" the mind understands all those
responses and does so is an astounding function of the mind. Me personally I
just like to think of it from the POV of *one* concept of AI development.
Whenever a large enough cluster/network of interconnected devices are
achieved, "awareness" is attained by the macro-organism. Collections of said
organisms that are themselves interconnected in this manner create full
functional "Beings". AKA: ourselves.

*IF* it were possible to come up with something that could inter-relate all
those electrochemical/photoreceptive response mechanisms (for some reason, a
legion of tiny Video Gnomes living inside my head come to mind ;-) and thus
"mimic" the effect of the human eye, it would be possible to correlate that
information into a form the mind itself could then understand.

As to the idea of replacing the Optic Nerve/Damaged Neural Ganglia, that
becomes a more frightful task that at least for now, SR does now get into
with regards to full cloning in a way they have made accessible to the player
characters.

-K