Sentient VS Likely Non-sentient eyes

[Spacescifi]

Cat Vision vs. Human Vision

Cats have 6-8 times more rods in theireyes as compared to humans, whereashumans have more cones in their eyesthan cats. Rods are responsible for peripheral and night vision, while cones are helpful in distinguishing between colors and provide better sight in the daytime.Jun 23, 2015

This is the case with most animal eyes, less color vision, but greater vision in lower light scenarios.To compensate they often have greater smell or hearing.

Yet would that be enough to help them develop a civilization on par with humanity or better?

With less color perception, their visual art scene would be lackluster as would fashion. The idea of matching clothing would matter a lot less as they likely could'nt perceive that anyway in some cases.

Light and dark tones would be their main go to for fashion sense.

As for science, lack of perception of certain colors will hurt, but one could compensate somewhat via great sense of smell.

"All that molten metal looks the same, but that's iron, I can smell it. I have smelled ot before."

I guess smell experience would be a greater factor for science than mere pictures, as smell indentification would be the main ID for things.

Your thoughts?

Edited November 1, 2019 by Spacescifi

[kerbiloid]

Spoiler

"Go on."

 

[Guest]

It's just a matter whether the creature in question is primarily diurnal or nocturnal. Cats are nocturnal hunters, while humans are diurnal. Different lifestyles, different optimization. 

[Scotius]

You are looking at it from the wrong side. Our ancestors got keen, stereoscopic, color eyesight first. It was important for arboreal primates moving along the branches, carefully gauging the distance to next tree and in the meantime scanning their surroundings for threats. And food sources - which would be colorful fruits or insects moving around. Then bipedal apes ventured into the grasslands, become scavengers and started looking for next meal. For example vultures circling above one spot - it would be a good indicator something worth checking is laying on the ground below. And so on, and so on - someone smeared some red ochre on their skin, liked the look - and the fashion started to spread. Someone made a necklace from a handful of colorful shells - pretty, said everyone. Let's look for more shinies. Ooohh, there is smoke rising from the hills - is it another camp? Can we trade? Are they hostile? Let's watch newcomers from afar for couple of days.

And so it went. With every evolutionary step reinforcing our reliance on good eyesight. We learned how to make additional light to offset our poor night vision. We developed lenses to see better at long distances - or better see very small things. We even can pretty well estimate the temperature of glowing hot object by taking note of its color.

Smell, taste, touch don't even come close to equalling the importance of good eyesight for a developing industrial civilization. For example - how would you even have astronomy if you would rely on smell mostly?

[Wjolcz]

Man, those birds and bees with UV vision sure do know how to paint and have great fashion designers.

[Spacescifi]

1 hour ago, Dragon01 said:

It's just a matter whether the creature in question is primarily diurnal or nocturnal. Cats are nocturnal hunters, while humans are diurnal. Different lifestyles, different optimization. 

 

True, I am just lointing out that such animal eyes would make haven civilization like humanity hard if not impossible. Even though they look awesome on humanoids.

I once fiddled with the idea of giving cat-eyed humanoids a cone to rod ratio similar tp humans, but with cat eyes.

But then I realized that the cat pupil would STILL be non-optimal. Why?

Cats have a slightly wider field of vision, which makes sense considering that they have to literally turn their head to look at something (their eyes don't seem to move like ours).

But the main issue is blurriness and lack of depth of focus.

'A cat's vision is sharpest between 2 and 3 feet from its face, and its focus is on the center of what the cat observes rather than on the entire landscape. This is a helpful adaptation when it comes to zeroing in on small prey. Cats also can detect motion much better than humans can.May 15, 2012

. Since the many rods in the cat's retina serve as motion detectors as well as light receptors, anything running across a cat's field of vision is more likely to be detected than something coming straight toward it.

 

Results for a cat humanoid eye civilization?

They will have to get up close to anything they want a clear view of. Like 3 ft at least, and all else except what they focus on will appear blurry.

So cases of surviving multiple attackers at once diminish, since they only have a clear view of one thing they are focusing on at any given moment.

 

Real cats have less of a handicap, since without the extra cones for color, they can detect motion greater with all the rods they have, but human activity adapted cat eyes would trade that for color vision, being no better at reacting to or detecting motion than your average human. About the only advantage they would have is the ability to focus on objects close up without getting distracted.

Good for study I guess.

 

 

29 minutes ago, Wjolcz said:

Man, those birds and bees with UV vision sure do know how to paint and have great fashion designers.

 

Bird vision is an exception, but yeah, humanoids with those could do well, only drawback is having to turn the head to look at stuff since their eyes seem fixed in place.

 

EDIT: Cats can move their eyes in the sockets like us just fine, it's many birds that cannot (although I would not be surprised if there is an exception I am unaware of).

Edited November 1, 2019 by Spacescifi

[Meecrob]

6 hours ago, Scotius said:

How would you even have astronomy if you would rely on smell mostly?

Evidently humans invent it sometime before the year 3000

[kerbiloid]

Can't imagine us without IR vision.

***

The picture is not correct because cats, while being spiritually great, are geometrically small.
So, their horizon is ~sqrt(2 * 6371000 * 0.2) ~=1.5 km far, and almost always closed by landscae details.
Also they can't move as far as a human due to shorter legs, and almost never need it because that place is occupied by other cats.
So, it's like painting a still life painting, painting galaxies on the background but forgetting to paint fruits next to the nose.

Spoiler

9 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

A cat's vision is sharpest between 2 and 3 feet from its face, and its focus is on the center of what the cat observes rather than on the entire landscape. This is a helpful adaptation when it comes to zeroing in on small prey.

This stops the cats from hunting a buffalo, but I would guess, this is an adaptation to a typical distance they can run on their short legs.

Because otherwise mice should see only right under the nose, they don't hunt mice.

11 hours ago, Scotius said:

For example - how would you even have astronomy if you would rely on smell mostly?

They will develop gastronomy.

Also I can't imagine a sentient civilization which can't distinguish by smelling edible berries and mushrooms from toxic ones. They would just get extinct, it's impossible.

9 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

Cats have a slightly wider field of vision, which makes sense considering that they have to literally turn their head to look at something (their eyes don't seem to move like ours).

Probably just because cats have smaller head and longer jaws, so eyes are sitting diagonally.

Herbivorous species tend to have 360° vision with eyes aside, while predators prefer focused vision to estimate distance.
Both us (lemurs) and cats, as well as rodents (our cousins) and deer (cat cousins) were bug-eaters living on trees and below.
Nobody of us wanted to fall from branch on jumping. But the former two have focused eyes, while two others don't.

9 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

Results for a cat humanoid eye civilization?

They will have to get up close to anything they want a clear view of. Like 3 ft at least, and all else except what they focus on will appear blurry.

They will grow bigger brain, bigger skull, bigger head, eat bigger prey...

Spoiler

A human-mass cat evolved from small cats (historically that's so) hears you trying to believe he/she has a 3 ft vision.

 

Edited November 2, 2019 by kerbiloid

[AngrybobH]

how much of vision has nothing to do with the eyes but with the ability to process and retain visual information? What we see clearly isn't that large but our brains fill the rest of our 'vision' in with 'close enough' approximations from visual memory. And we miss a lot of things. Police even say eye witness testimony is often inconsistent with reality.

1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:

They will grow bigger brain, bigger skull, bigger head, eat bigger prey...

Exactly

[StrandedonEarth]

17 hours ago, Wjolcz said:

Man, those birds and bees with UV vision sure do know how to paint and have great fashion designers.

Aw, man, you broke my equipment...

[razark]

19 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

Yet would that be enough to help them develop a civilization on par with humanity or better?

No, and it has nothing to do with eyes.

Cats are absolutely unable to form a civilization.  They sleep 22 hours a day, and therefore are quite unable to engage in agriculture.  This means they will remain hunter-gatherers, rather than being able to develop a food surplus allowing specialization of work.

[Terwin]

38 minutes ago, razark said:

No, and it has nothing to do with eyes.

Cats are absolutely unable to form a civilization.  They sleep 22 hours a day, and therefore are quite unable to engage in agriculture.  This means they will remain hunter-gatherers, rather than being able to develop a food surplus allowing specialization of work.

Nah, they just had to domesticate other animals to do all that hard work for them(looks at cat sleeping on windowsill)

[Spacescifi]

13 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Can't imagine us without IR vision.

***

The picture is not correct because cats, while being spiritually great, are geometrically small.
So, their horizon is ~sqrt(2 * 6371000 * 0.2) ~=1.5 km far, and almost always closed by landscae details.
Also they can't move as far as a human due to shorter legs, and almost never need it because that place is occupied by other cats.
So, it's like painting a still life painting, painting galaxies on the background but forgetting to paint fruits next to the nose.

  Reveal hidden contents

This stops the cats from hunting a buffalo, but I would guess, this is an adaptation to a typical distance they can run on their short legs.

Because otherwise mice should see only right under the nose, they don't hunt mice.

They will develop gastronomy.

Also I can't imagine a sentient civilization which can't distinguish by smelling edible berries and mushrooms from toxic ones. They would just get extinct, it's impossible.

Probably just because cats have smaller head and longer jaws, so eyes are sitting diagonally.

Herbivorous species tend to have 360° vision with eyes aside, while predators prefer focused vision to estimate distance.
Both us (lemurs) and cats, as well as rodents (our cousins) and deer (cat cousins) were bug-eaters living on trees and below.
Nobody of us wanted to fall from branch on jumping. But the former two have focused eyes, while two others don't.

They will grow bigger brain, bigger skull, bigger head, eat bigger prey...

  Reveal hidden contents

A human-mass cat evolved from small cats (historically that's so) hears you trying to believe he/she has a 3 ft vision.

 

 

I thought about that after... that to a cat, three feet is like ten feet away relative to how small their bodies are.

But you are absolutely right, circular pupils are the way to go for larger creatures, and no matter how cool or pretty fictional humanoids with cat eyes look, such eyes make little sense in reality.

Granted cats can see far away, the image just is not clear to them until they get closer, and like was mentioned, three feet is kinda far for a cat. For a humanoid three feet is nothing, so it follows that the larger a creature is, it is an advantage to see farther away rather tgan being restricted to near sightedness.  

Cats can see 20 feet away, but make can only make out the shapes of objects at that distance, not the details.

Result?

 

Cats could not drive a car to save their lives. Much less an airplane.

Edited November 2, 2019 by Spacescifi