Qualities of an object that constitute its appearance are first received and dealt with by the eye. Thus even in its most literal, down-to-earth definition, we are tipped off right away that vision has as much to do with the seer as with the seen: the eye itself is only a mediator, a middleman. An eye with no brain behind it, either organic or otherwise, might as well be blind. But when eye and brain collaborate, as they must, we are apparently then doomed never to know where the objective leaves off and the subjective begins. As Elspeth Huxley says, "How much does one imagine, how much observe? One can no more separate these functions than divide light from air or wetness from water."
Or as Buckminster Fuller puts it, everything we see is inside our own heads. And hell, I might as well quote Robert Anton Wilson, too: "Hypnotized subjects shown a green circle and told that it is red will see it as red. This is because we see with brain-plus-eye." As Annie Dillard reminds us, only the simplest animals see the universe as it is. This means an amoeba knows more than a rocket scientist about the true nature of reality.
In Wim Wenders's hallucinatory film Until the End of the World, a character invents a camera that can record visuals for the blind. It's more than a camera, because it also records the experience: how the user's individual brain reacts. It records the bio-chemical event of seeing, and therefore does not "divide light from air or wetness from water."
We see what we learn to see. In Magical Child, Joseph Chilton Pearce describes how a kitten, if kept for the first few weeks of life in a chamber with vertically striped walls, will grow up able to see only up-and-down lines. It will avoid running into the vertical legs of a chair, but will bump into the horizontal rungs.
Oliver Sacks writes about a patient who had been able to see for the first ten years of his life but was then blinded by cataracts. At age fifty, successful surgery removed the cataracts, but his restored vision was not in good working order. With practice, Sacks' patient became able to maneuver around the house with the approximate skill of a sighted person after some practice with a blindfold. He bought toy objects such as cars and buildings, to familiarize himself with how the shapes felt to the touch, which would enable him to recognize their life-size counterparts. People in this situation need to learn to make sense out of the incoming visual stimuli, and it's a gradual process. The Gospel of Mark includes the story of a blind man's sight restored. He then sees "men as trees, walking."
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