So the last thing I want to talk

to you about in this session is

a final way of thinking about vision.
And it's vision as a way of
contending with the inverse problem.
So, I'm kind of beating you over
the head with this diagram and
with the inverse problem.
But it's because, and
we as I've said before,
what I take to be and
the theme of this course is in,
in many ways that the inverse problem,
the difficulty of getting back from
information on the retina to the real
world, and to actions that make sense and
are effective and useful in the real world
depends critically on this challenge.
And remember, I told you this just a few
minutes ago, but let me just say it again,
that the parameters of the real world,
the illumination or
the reflectance properties, transmittance
properties and many, many other aspects
of the parameters of the real world
are all conflated in the retinal image.
And their argument has been in the,
in the course,
that solving this dilemma
doesn't really have a solution,
but contending with this dilemma is
the basic challenge for visual evolution.
This is really I would argue what
vision primarily evolved to do,
in the sense of having to evolve
all of the features of the primary
vision pathway and the pre-neural
aspects of the eye that we talked about.
I see all of these as contributing
with the same fundamental goal.
So just to remind you of things
that we have already gone over
here is the inverse problem
as it applies to geometry.
We talked about this a few minutes ago
in discussing the idea of vision as
feature detection, it's just not possible
because the same retinal image can be
generated by many different
objects in orientations,
sizes, distances in the 3D world.
In this conception of vision, dealing with
the inverse problem really determines
how we see what we do and
in fact, what we see,
while we see all those strange phenomena
that we run over in, in the first session.
And the corollary of that conceptive
vision, which I'm going to, for
[INAUDIBLE] in the next few sessions is

that the peculiar way we see the world,

is really the signature
of the strategy of vision
that is being applied here to solve or
resolve the inverse problem.
So let me just summarize over
the main points that I've made in,
in this session for
the umpteenth time, the challenge for
visual evolution is circumventing
the inverse problem, this is fundamental.
And it should be obvious that any
theory of vision, what, whatever it is.
Feature detection,
efficient coding, inference.
These or any theory of vision has
to come up with a solution or, or
a resolution of the inverse problem.
I, I, I distinguish solution and
resolution, because you can't
really solve the inverse problem.
It's logically unsolvable but
you could certainly contend with it,
and vision has evolved to do this, and
any theory of vision has to
explain how all this is done.
Major options that we've talked
about today are feature detection,
vision by inference,
vision as efficient coding, and vision
based on a way of dealing with the inverse
problem as a more specific strategy.
And with respect to this last option,
in effect,
the goal of reproductive success is
being substituted for our intuition that
the goal of seeing is really seeing
the world in terms of the way it is.
In terms of the parameters that we
measured with physical instruments and
this I think should be clear by now.
That just doesn't help in the way we see
the world as not equivalent to the way we
measure the world and
its parameters with physical instruments.
So that's absolutely essential, and
next time we're going to go on and
discuss this in a more specific context,
seeing lightness in darkness and
lightness in darkness, as I'll
explain to you in the next session.
I relay the most basic
qualities of vision,
without which we can't
see anything at all.