Asklemmy

Think of sight kind of like hearing and sonar, but confined to a cone of detection that is almost 180 degrees wide, and maybe about 45 degrees up, and 45 degrees down. This field of vision is incredibly detailed at the center of focus, which is a spot around 6 degrees wide. Detail drops away rather quickly, the further away from your center of vision it gets. The visual information isn't missing, it's just not coming in at the same fidelity, like background conversation when you're listening to one person. You can get more information by shifting your gaze/focus as needed.

Imagine reading braille, but the pad of your finger is just a patch of skin in the middle of a large field of skin, like on your back. In order to read, you'd have to stick the entire page to your back, and then move that center of focus all over the page. You'd feel the braille all over your back and recognize it as such, but you'd only be reading that one spot. That's roughly what shifting your gaze is like.

Light is like loudness, in that too much of it hurts, and wipes out detail. When there is very little light, detail gets wiped out as well.

Think of the visible light spectrum like the notes of the musical scale, where the note F always sounds like an F, regardless of the octave. The colors do seem related to each other in a similar manner as musical notes; orange does look like it fits between red and yellow, the way that C sharp/D flat fits between C and D.

Seeing is to the eyes what hearing is to the ears. Just as you can hear sounds, tones, and voices that tell you about the world around you, seeing allows people to perceive light, shapes, colors, and movements. Imagine being able to 'feel' everything around you without touching it, from a distance. It's like sensing the presence, shape, and texture of objects, but from afar and all at once. Colors, which are a significant aspect of vision, can be likened to different tones or pitches in sounds. Just as a high note feels different from a low note, different colors have their own 'feel' visually. Overall, seeing is a way of sensing and understanding the environment from a distance, much like how you can hear someone talking from the other side of a room

If there's nothing between you and an object you can feel it at a distance. Texture is a little dulled, and some textures are easier to feel than others, but there's also a whole second kind of texture that we call color. As light gets dimmer it gets harder to feel the difference between those textures, and it gets harder to feel the distance to things, until there is nothing left but a single all encompassing flat texture at a single unknowable distance which we call dark.

Also, some objects only partially block your ability to feel what's behind them, and things like windows are designed to be so easy to feel through that it's hard to feel them at all. Unless they get dirty. Then you can feel the dirt on them.

I assume that, over time, you've memorized where everything in your living space is. You have some idea of what shape the space around you takes.

Seeing is knowing what shape a space takes without trial and error. The depth of a room or the texture of a couch. Knowing where an item is without having to touch it, or be told where it is.

How it feels... it feels safe. Seeing makes me feel safer. That's the only word that comes to mind.

Like hearing but with color.

No, seriously, it's impossible to accurately convey. You can talk about the mechanics, the use cases, what you can do with it, but you cannot convey "how it is", same as a bat cannot convey "how sonar is".

It's like knowing where everything in front of you is without having to touch or hear it. Sight works with your other senses too. For example, if a pillow is laying on the floor in an unfamiliar room I'll know what shape it, how far away it is, and that if I pick it up it'll feel soft. If the pillow was really gross looking I'd be able to tell without smelling it first.

A million fingers going in all directions to sense how far everything is away from you and tell what property’s things probably have

I would describe it as a cacaphonic symphony that you eventually get used to. It packs as much information into one sense as you can get from your other four put together.

Much like how you can discern an individual instrument type in a symphony, sight lets you discern individual objects from afar, and gives you a mostly accurate summary of its basic properties.

Also much like with sound, it can be very appealing or unappealing, depending. There's an intrinsic beauty to the sense itself though. Every object has color, for instance, and color is more like smell. It can give you hints about what something is, but its mostly an arbitrary blend of different "flavors" that combine to create more complex examples.

It's the super-sense, the one sense that binds them all. When one of your other four detects something, your first instinct is to locate it with sight to determine more information before you do anything else. You "look at it" first. Almost without fail.

It's like Sex to me, I'll never get it

Like echolocation on crack

I think I might mention something about perspective and about lines. How everything in essentially flattened into 2d, so everything has a contour. So it is like feeling a 2d shape on say a table, like a circular dish, but what you are seeing is actually a 3d ball.

Further, things can be obscured by other things that are closer, which are in front. It's a bit like tracing the dish with your finger, but not knowing that there is a smaller dish hidden beneath it. For example a ball is behind another ball.

Things that are further away are smaller than things that are closer. As the ball moves further away, the 2d contour becomes smaller. So in the analogy from before, the dish would shrink until it becomes too small to sense.

Finally, instead of just having a few fingers to trace these contours, we have millions of them, so we can effectively sense all contours all at once and tiny notice changes in real time.

Well I suppose I could extend the analogy further by saying that colors are like the physical textures that you feel when moving your finger over an object. The dish could be made from wood, plastic, porcelain and so on, and it is like we have fingers all over the dish at every point at once. Such textures, just like the colors, can be quite intricate.

I could go on but let's leave it at that.