Good questions.I'm pretty sick with the flu right now so I'll post some links to cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman's work that can explain the illusions and more.His 'internalist' leaning theories are the only ones that I personally find acceptable philosophically and logically:
http://www.amazon.com/Visual-Intelligen ... 0393319679
http://www.cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/ConsciousRealism2.pdf
As for the persistence of visual data during times of blinking,I have some thoughts:
It has been shown experimentally that our perception times have a limit and if we are presented with two or more events within this window,we will still only percieve one event. As well,we can close our eyes and very often see after images. So,the external objects of perception are still a part of a chain of events that persist in our conscious awareness according to some 'externalist' theories.So I'm wondering if we can say the same for visual perception during blinking.
As part of the mystery,there's also the facts that entanglement exists and might be the same phenomenon as 'measurement' (which is relevant to information),time doesn't exist for light and it turns out we have 'biophotons' in our brains...hmmmm My bet is that all of this is important.
(I've said before that "we don't have light in our heads",but as I've now learned this isn't quite true.But this still doesn't mean that there's a miniature theater in the skull...)
"Our brains process sound faster than they process light but light moves faster than sound so our brains are constantly shifting reality so the world synchs up. Only when someone is standing 30 yards away do we see and hear the world exactly as it is - that's when you're brain, sound and light are in perfect harmony. The rest of the time we are living in a world of lies. Lies are what make the world make sense, ergo, the truth hurts."
- Patrick Jane (The Mentalist: Redshirt)
This hints at the so called 'binding problem' which is by no means solved,most especially by material reductionist theories.IMO,I think that one day maybe 'quantum entanglement' and multisensory binding will be shown as related.
Here's a paper that explains the binding problem nicely.It proposes a solution that I think you may like SL.It also lines up with persinger's stuff:
"
To further emphasize this point, it is illuminating to consider replacing the
neurons of the brain involved in processing this task, with people.We can imagine
an artificial retina that captures the same information than enters the human
eye and processes that information through a functionally equivalent neural network
as the brain, but with a network of people rather than neurons. Just as in the
brain, the information is dissected and processed by parallel and serial lines of
feature detectors and information processors (in this case all people) by some
kind of signaling process (perhaps hand shakes) to generate an output — the -
terminal person-processor issues some kind of verbal report. This person neural
network could perform exactly the same informational processing task as
performed by the neurons in your brain and generate the same verbal report, but
who would see the triangle? Each person in the neural network sees only the signal
from incoming neuron-persons (a sequence of handshakes) that correspond to a
single feature—perhaps the thickness of one of the lines or its orientation. There is
no person-neuron that sees the whole triangle. No one is puzzled by the illusion.
The imaginary person neural network acutely illustrates the binding problem.
The network is constructed from conscious agents. It inputs information, processes
that information and generates an output, just as the neuronal brain. Just as
in the brain, the information corresponding to the triangle is scattered and distributed
through the network. Every component of the network performs its computation
task but there is nothing or no one in the network that even knows there is a
triangle out there."
http://www3.surrey.ac.uk/qe/pdfs/mcfadden_JCS2002b.pdf"The closer you get to the meaning;the sooner you'll know that you're dreaming" -Dio
