Take a selfie, lose your soul?

Maria Isabel Garcia

This is AI generated summarization, which may have errors. For context, always refer to the full article.

Take a selfie, lose your soul?
[Science Solitaire] Each time you snap a selfie, it is Descartes, Boyle and Smith, and the ox eye (and a slew of other things) all over again and again and again

The scene could have easily come out of an episode of Criminal Minds. A card-bearing geeky dude takes an eye and removes the back layers until the eye is rendered transparent. Then, in place of the layers that he removed, he stuck part of an eggshell. He now sticks the part-eye, part-eggshell through a hole in a window. So far, what we have is a window with an eye looking at the outside, with its back part to a dark room.  And (creepy sound), what happens? We see a shrunken but a high-fidelity image of the outside scene on the eggshell.

Yes, it is creepy but its intriguing quality is irresistible – like a Popular Mechanics Halloween special is to modern geeks. Except that it is not from a popular magazine but the written thoughts on page 34 of a work published in 1637 entitled La Dioptrique. The thinker is no less than Rene Descartes himself, as the geeky dude consummate in his pursuit to understand how vision works!

The eye was of an ox and his details of his own theories as to how the eye could, by gazing upon a scene, capture it and hold it to form “sight” were simply arresting. He was wrong about many things including how and where the brain receives and make sense of the signals from the eye, but he scored a “bulls eye” on the parts of how light bounces off in the layers inside the eye (refraction).

To me, even just imagining that I can see the image that my own eyes can see, through another kind of eyes (ox eyes or whatever) blows my mind. This is the same thing that happens in an unimaginable number of times a day around the world with hundreds of millions of peoples taking photographs of things, of each other and of course, of themselves. Again (in case you need a reminder): the scene is out there but you click a button and an image of that same scene appears somewhere supremely convenient to you – on a screen! What friggin’ wave of nature makes that even possible?!

I was 3 years old in 1969 when two fellows, George Smith and Willard Boyle, invented the concept, which would make digital photography possible. This is technically called “charge-coupled device” or CCD and in 2009, they shared in the Nobel Prize for Physics for this.

CCD is basically a “light catcher”, detecting a wide range of light (including the ones invisible to the naked eye like infrared) cast on a scene, catching them onto “containers” we know as “pixels” and converting that into electrical signals that could be digitally manipulated. Every friggin’ pixel could be amplified – which is how, depending on the strength of the sensors of your camera, you could just make your two fingers your mimic the motion of chopsticks on screen when you want to enlarge an image and get a closer look, up to a point. And CCD can efficiently “catch light” at 80% compared to the human eye’s 20%.

Have you ever heard of the old belief that if you take a picture of something, you take away their soul? In terms of quantum efficiency, if souls were just all light, then you could really catch “soulfies” better with a digital camera than with older kinds of cameras.  But then again, if souls were made up of things other than light, you should exercise utmost care when you are doing some serious house cleaning.

So whether you know it or not, each time you snap a selfie, it is Descartes, Boyle and Smith and the ox eye (and a slew of other things and people including Newton in the natural history of the eye, light and the history of photography) all over again and again and again!  But we seldom think that. The mass-production of technology has the unintended consequence of diminishing (if not altogether squashing) our sense of wonder about how something works beyond “click” and “press.”

Again, on page 34 of La Dioptrique, which was taken by a digital camera to be reproduced online, Descartes writes his reaction to the image produced by the light hitting the ox eye and on to the eggshell. It translates as ”you will see there, not perhaps without admiration and delight, a painting which will represent in a straightforward way in perspective, all objects which are outside.”

Now, almost 400 years later since Descartes’ optic work was published, “admiration and delight” still abound, but now largely and simply as the self-sealing caption of millions of selfies we take daily.  We always have to be in the scene for something to matter. But there are so many other things going on when you chance upon a wonder other than yourself.  Check your soul, lose the selfie.  – Rappler.com

Add a comment

Sort by

There are no comments yet. Add your comment to start the conversation.

Summarize this article with AI

How does this make you feel?

Loading
Download the Rappler App!