What, exactly, is relevant about the perception and cognition systems if the signal from rods and cones is clipped or distorted? By ‘blown out’ we are talking about the rods and cones being saturated and unable to respond meaningfully. Your question doesn’t make sense, and I’m neither making claims about nor arguing over what happens in the perceptual system to bad/saturated inputs.

I don’t know what you mean by ‘in the sun’ != ‘at the sun’. I’m the one who said ‘in the sun’ and I was talking about staring at the sun. I’m not sure what your point is, but if you’re trying to say that a game render of looking at the sun is different than the experience of actually looking at the sun, then I wholly agree. A game will (rightly and thankfully) never fully recreate the experience of looking at the sun. If you’re trying to defend &carlosjobim’s claim that human vision doesn’t have an absolute upper luminance limit, then I think you need to back that claim up with some evidence.