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Abstract

I think there are three aspects of this problem which people will have views about. The first is the question of what subjective experience is evoked by a discharge in “off” (or off-center) units. I agree with Baumgartner and Jung that it is probably the sensation of black, or darkness. A stimulus which causes a discharge in such units in the cat, evokes in us a sensation we would label black; the correspondence is quite close, and I cannot think of any facts which contravert it, but I do not feel too happy about it for this reason. The relation between “off” units and blackness involves processes which we do not understand the physiology of at all — the business of attaching the linguistic label “blackness” to the sensation, for instance. Where so much of the relation is beyond our understanding, I am reluctant about being too dogmatic.

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© 1961 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Barlow, H. (1961). Initial Remarks. In: Jung, R., Kornhuber, H. (eds) Neurophysiologie und Psychophysik des Visuellen Systems / The Visual System: Neurophysiology and Psychophysics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-49763-6_41

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-49763-6_41

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

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