Monetary Value of My Senses, Part One: Sight
Suppose Superman came up to you tomorrow and offered you a lump sum of money for one of your senses. He would give you so many dollars and in exchange you would lose your sense of taste or hearing. No pain, no disfigurement, just the loss of sense.
A nice thing to say about myself (if you were interested) is how much each of my senses is worth to me. Let's start with the sense-category of sight.
I say category because although all seeing is done by the eyes, there are really a bunch of separable operations that take place when we look:
1) Depth perception. Depth perception is a tricky one. You take it for granted until you cover one eye. Then eveything looks like Citizen Kane but all of a sudden you are walking into chairs.
The trouble is that traditional stereo-optic depth perception is not the last word. We also have size cues to determine how far away something is, and I am not sure that counts as a sense. Even if it does I am not sure I would sell it. I don't have a good idea of what life would be like without the ability to compare objects' perceived size to their ideal size. So let's stick to traditional depth perception.
In this wicked world there may be obstacles to avoid but we can do that by walking gingerly. There aren't too many predators to outrun any more, and everything does look kind of cool when it's all flat. So I could let my depth perception go for $50,000.
2) Peripheral vision. Scientists say that our peripheral vision is much worse than we think it is, that we can't even distinguish color with it. Apparently we just "fill in" (or ignore) our peripheral vision and focus on anything we want to really see in the true sense of the word. All we really use it for, as I understand, is detecting motion.
So without peripheral vision I couldn't catch a baseball or drive a car. Surprise surprise I couldn't do those things anyway. And I would probably get used to how annoying it was after a few weeks (Like looking into a coupla goddamn paper towel rolls I would say). $20,000, enough to buy the car I won't be using.
3) Color vision. Okay I will be the first to admit color is beautiful. The washed-out color is half the reason I hated those Lord of the Rings movies. And flowers wouldn't be the same in grayscale. Still, black-and-white movies can be more interesting than their color counterparts. (Citizen Kane got to be a great movie without engaging many of our senses didn't it?) And the lovely colors of the world are almost offset by the mauves and hunter-jacket oranges.
And on a pure utility level color cues don't help much. That medium-bright apple-shaped thing you see is almost certainly an apple whether it is green or gold. The traffic light on top is "stop" and the one on bottom is "go". I would sell my color vision for $400,000.
4) Night vision. Night vision is the worst. Longtime readers of my blog will remember that I fantasize about perfectly dark rooms. This would be ten times easier to achieve if I did not have those pupils and irises making me sensitive to the smallest fraction of a lumen. Just when you think you've sealed out all the light, you adjust to the darkness and it's the same thing all over again.
Still I guess that night vision is sometimes useful like if you are trying to find your way through a haunted forest at night or maybe you have been sealed in a dungeon and need to find the passageway out. Adventure game stuff. Who does that in real life? Still you never know. My night vision is worth about $0 to me. I could take it or leave it.
5) Overall vision, i.e. not being blind. I don't have much esteem for the sense of sight as most people I guess. I'm with Hellen Keller. I'd rather be blind than deaf. The only things I would have problems with are lurching into furniture and reading. And I would probably learn where the furniture was after a little while.
I gather that when you go blind, your visual cortex rededicates itself to interpreting Braille, which is otherwise very difficult to learn. Would that happen if I sold my sense of sight to Superman? If so, 5 million dollars. If not, 20 million. In unmarked bills.
A nice thing to say about myself (if you were interested) is how much each of my senses is worth to me. Let's start with the sense-category of sight.
I say category because although all seeing is done by the eyes, there are really a bunch of separable operations that take place when we look:
1) Depth perception. Depth perception is a tricky one. You take it for granted until you cover one eye. Then eveything looks like Citizen Kane but all of a sudden you are walking into chairs.
The trouble is that traditional stereo-optic depth perception is not the last word. We also have size cues to determine how far away something is, and I am not sure that counts as a sense. Even if it does I am not sure I would sell it. I don't have a good idea of what life would be like without the ability to compare objects' perceived size to their ideal size. So let's stick to traditional depth perception.
In this wicked world there may be obstacles to avoid but we can do that by walking gingerly. There aren't too many predators to outrun any more, and everything does look kind of cool when it's all flat. So I could let my depth perception go for $50,000.
2) Peripheral vision. Scientists say that our peripheral vision is much worse than we think it is, that we can't even distinguish color with it. Apparently we just "fill in" (or ignore) our peripheral vision and focus on anything we want to really see in the true sense of the word. All we really use it for, as I understand, is detecting motion.
So without peripheral vision I couldn't catch a baseball or drive a car. Surprise surprise I couldn't do those things anyway. And I would probably get used to how annoying it was after a few weeks (Like looking into a coupla goddamn paper towel rolls I would say). $20,000, enough to buy the car I won't be using.
3) Color vision. Okay I will be the first to admit color is beautiful. The washed-out color is half the reason I hated those Lord of the Rings movies. And flowers wouldn't be the same in grayscale. Still, black-and-white movies can be more interesting than their color counterparts. (Citizen Kane got to be a great movie without engaging many of our senses didn't it?) And the lovely colors of the world are almost offset by the mauves and hunter-jacket oranges.
And on a pure utility level color cues don't help much. That medium-bright apple-shaped thing you see is almost certainly an apple whether it is green or gold. The traffic light on top is "stop" and the one on bottom is "go". I would sell my color vision for $400,000.
4) Night vision. Night vision is the worst. Longtime readers of my blog will remember that I fantasize about perfectly dark rooms. This would be ten times easier to achieve if I did not have those pupils and irises making me sensitive to the smallest fraction of a lumen. Just when you think you've sealed out all the light, you adjust to the darkness and it's the same thing all over again.
Still I guess that night vision is sometimes useful like if you are trying to find your way through a haunted forest at night or maybe you have been sealed in a dungeon and need to find the passageway out. Adventure game stuff. Who does that in real life? Still you never know. My night vision is worth about $0 to me. I could take it or leave it.
5) Overall vision, i.e. not being blind. I don't have much esteem for the sense of sight as most people I guess. I'm with Hellen Keller. I'd rather be blind than deaf. The only things I would have problems with are lurching into furniture and reading. And I would probably learn where the furniture was after a little while.
I gather that when you go blind, your visual cortex rededicates itself to interpreting Braille, which is otherwise very difficult to learn. Would that happen if I sold my sense of sight to Superman? If so, 5 million dollars. If not, 20 million. In unmarked bills.
posted by apk01004 at 2:43 AM
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