Seeing red

[The Grand Nudger]

 Why is the visual field 2D? 

Because your eyes are incapable of penetrating many objects, you can only see what is presented to your field of vision.  Ie, there are positions in which you cannot see both the front and back of something.

You would not be able to detect the right patterns in the pixel information if it was organised in a 1D array... 

We don't need any particular number of "d", because however many "d's" your eyes are capable of perceiving, that isn't fed directly as is to you brain, nor is your brain capable of seeing like an eye as far as we can tell.  

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would not be able to detect pixels that were next to each other or diagonal to each other. So it has to be a 2D array and that's how it's physically organised in the brain with this topographical map received from the retina. 

We perceive in 3d, not 2...we can only draw in 2.  I can only see the front of a subaru, but I perceive the rear of the same despite my inability to commit that 3d concept to a 2d page.  I can percieve it, i can even simulate it, I cannot replicate it.  That's a limitation of the surface upon which we impose the image.  

And from the brain's perspective it presumably needs to be structured like that so that it can be interconnected correctly retaining that topographical information. So the system is forced to represent the array in a 2D manner because of the constraints of how it will be accessed further down the line... eg for detecting lines etc in needs to know where one pixel sits in relation to another. So all these constraints force it into a specific configuration functionally and structurally. I just wonder if roughly the same thing happens phenomenally, and that therefore colour is the only way to represent/label the 'pixels' in a perception that already looks like it has been forced into being a 2D visual field (well 3D but 2D in terms of how it is in your head), given all the other constraints.

We are forced, as a system, to represent a 3d perception in a 2d manner because the surfaces we use to represent them are limited to 2d.   We, clearly, are not.  The "specific configuration", both structurally and functionally, necessary to differentiate between variables is awfully general. We label that same phenomena by it's placement in a spectrum described mathematically. That's just -one- other way to perceive "color", as a number.