Science & Tech Quote by John Dykstra

Dykstra is smuggling a philosopher's problem into a technician's checklist: perception is private, but the argument about images still has to be public. By opening with sound, he recruits an analogy everyone accepts without panic - you can’t prove your "middle C" is my "middle C", yet we can still tune an orchestra. That move deflates the mystical aura around "seeing" and reroutes the conversation toward what professionals can actually measure.

The red example is doing quiet work. It invokes the classic subjectivity trap (the inverted spectrum problem) and then sidesteps it. He’s not denying that vision is weirdly personal; he’s insisting that shared standards don’t require identical inner experiences. The subtext is a critique of aesthetic absolutism in image debates - the kind that turn into "film just feels real" versus "digital looks sterile" as if those were natural laws rather than engineered outcomes.

Then he lands on the industrial lingua franca: contrast, bit depth, refresh rate. Those terms are a deliberate narrowing of the battlefield. Instead of arguing about soul, argue about signal. It’s also a reminder that the "look" of an image isn’t an essence; it’s a stack of constraints and choices, many of them invisible until they break (banding, motion judder, crushed blacks). Coming from a scientist in a media ecosystem obsessed with vibes, it reads like a plea for epistemic humility: accept that we can’t fully align our eyes, but we can align our instruments. And in modern visual culture, instruments quietly set the terms of what we call reality.