As u/tasareinspace pointed out, different people perceive different signals in different ways.

As an additional example, going into your option of "seeing nothing," I lost all sight in one eye at a young age due to glaucoma damaging my optic nerve. Anything on that side is outside my field of view, just like everything behind you is outside your field of view. It's not black or dark is it?

Look at it this way: the camera is working, but the cable is cut, so instead of a blank screen you have a "No Signal" message.

It varies wildly. Most people that are blind have at least some vision though, so it's rarer that people go from sighted to total, at least in a quick enough way to really notice things.

Some examples I've heard are

- All black with a purple spot in the middle

- Lazer light shows, with the beams bouncing around

- Religious iconography and trippy scenes that were unrelated to what was going on

I'm not totally blind, but I do have patches of total blindness. Mine are a light blue grey, like robins egg blue, with a purpley medium grey static on top of it. In the beginning, I saw a lot of shapes moving over and around each other, like a narrow alleyway full of giant thanksgiving parade style balloons trying to shove past each other. The style of them reminds me of the Babar cartoon, if I remember right.

Hello! I am not a blind person (I work with blind people and my daughter is blind, that's why I'm here) but blindness is a symptom, not the condition itself. So there's dozens of different 'ways' or reasons that someone loses their vision, and all of them are different. This link only covers a few of them, but you can see that different eye conditions see things differently. $1 . And even those images don't show the range of how people see. Someone with, say, Retnitis Pigmintosa might have lost all their vision, or just have 'light perception' which is just being able to tell if it's light or dark. This video is also really good $1 .

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I can't seem to find the exact number right now, but only like 10-20% of people who are legally blind are completely blind (ie: seeing only blackness). So most blind/visually impaired people might be able to see shadows, or if it's dark or light, or some bright lights, or things very very close or at certain angles.

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I know this doesn't REALLY answer your debate, but I hope it helps!