Images are in the eye of the observer

[phiwum]

Originally Posted by Shostak

There’s the problem, too, of an Image or Illusion only sensing conscious beings and not their inanimate or vegetative surroundings.

If I understand Henry's idea correctly, it goes something like this:

An image, let's say, requires the perception of a conscious being in order to perceive anything. It's as if the image has a rudimentary sort of telepathy, but even that's not quite accurate.

Let's take eyesight, for example. We have an image J near a single conscious being X. Let's say the two are around a corner from each other. Then J can see anything which is in both his visual field and also the visual field of X, but nothing else. If you imagine two sight cones emanating out, one from J and the other from X, then J can see things in the intersection of the two cones, but nothing outside that intersection.

(Honestly, it would work in an odder way than that, I'd think, since X may be seeing a face of an object while J cannot see that face at all because it's blocked by a different face. But it would be reasonable to say that J can see any *objects* that are in both his and X's fields of view, rather than any particular feature in the overlap.)

It's a little too weird for my tastes, I'm afraid. It's much stranger than saying that J can't see anything that his caster can't see, which I've heard suggested before.

In practice, I wonder whether there are enough little rodents and such about that images would still generally see anything in their vicinity. Even a spider has IQ 2, so would suffice to allow a nearby image to see everything that the spider could see. I guess that most of the time, this restriction wouldn't be much of a restriction at all (unless, I suppose, that spiders and other insects can't see very far).