tilthat: TIL a philosophy riddle from 1688 was
recently solved. If a man born blind can feel
the differences between shapes such as
spheres and cubes, could he, if given the
ability, distinguish those objects by sight
alone? In 2003 five people had their sight
restored though surgery, and, no they could
not.
nentuaby:
I love when apparently Deep questions turn
out to have clear empirical answers.
This reminds me of the Kiki/Bouba effect with congenitally blind individuals (blind from birth).
Basically, sight is needed for people to associate the sharp shape with Kiki and the rounded shape with Bouba. People that are blind from birth don't really make this association, but after they gain sight they do!
There is something in our brains that links sound, the feel of a shape, and the visuals of a shape the same way for almost everyone, but it needs to actually experience them first to make the connection.
There's no need to be snobbish about "apparantly Deep questions" like they were idiots. They genuinely didn't know - that's why it was an interesting question
I mean, apparently. The brain is so weird, it's really really difficult to even imagine what it's like to experience certain things that other people do. For example, sometimes people have their corpus callosum (the membrane between the hemispheres that allows them to communicate with each other) severed to prevent certain types of seizures, and afterwards they lose the ability to see "green men" as faces.
i think i can understand it by proxy, there are numerous optical illusions where your perception of something flips back and forth (like the duck-rabbit) and i've experienced seeing (and hearing) things that others laugh at or find interesting and it took me several days for it to finally click in the brain and from then on i couldn't unsee it again.
Sight is a combination of raw data input and interpretation of that data. It turns out that if you miss a critical window of learning early in life, you are almost certain to never learn how to interperet that data correctly even if you gain the ability to see. Many people who have gained sight after being blind from birth find it simply overwhelming and regret the medical intervention. Richard L. Gregory's "Eye and Brain: The Psychology of Seeing" is a fascinating read on this topic. Even those with sight fail to interpretet things properly depending on their experience - for example, someone who lived in a dense forest all their life (where they never had the opportunity to see anything from a distance), is likely to think that the elephants are the size of ants if they are viewed from afar. A lot of brainpower goes into learning how to see in early life, and if you miss that, it's over.
I wonder if this would extend to any attempt to augment human sight. Like, if we could implant new cells in someone's eyes, identical in function to the ones that let them see colors, but these new cells detect, say, ultraviolet, would their brain be able to figure out what to do with the data?
you can't either. IF I were to give you some object that was irregular in shape and then asked you to find said object among other irregular objects by sight, you'd probably fail. Those people had their brains wired to "no sight" for at least some time, if not since birth. The brain would have to rewire existing connections with senses it doesn't like to connect at the best of times.
I could imagine it being difficult to conceptualize without the ability to visualize, but yeah, I find it hard to believe, too. Between cube and sphere, at the very least, I'd expect them to realize the pointy bits are probably the corners of the cube, not a flat surface.
What does a pointy bit look like to someone who has never seen one ? You have years of experience matching your visual input of the world around you with your tactile experiences, it's easy to forgot how much of our basic knowledge is learned at a young age.
Given our current understanding of the human brain, I would've argued that this answer was rather obvious.
Even though the human brain is excellent at abstracting thoughts and performing logical reasoning, it needs time to adjust to a new sensory input, which it wasn't exposed to before. This is what learning is.
It would be good to know how those people approached those shapes. Did they just look at those to "intuitively" decide or did they also think, i.e., reason, about it?
And yet, I feel like I can perfectly imagine what it would be like to lick anything that I have previously touched with my feet or fingers, despite never having experienced the sensation on my tongue before, and knowing that the nerves on my tongue perceive texture entirely different to my hands.
Edit: just scrolled down and saw that people are discussing this exact phenomenon.
In fairness you spend a lot of your childhood licking everything you come across. I bet your tongue has touched many more of those objects than you can remember.
There are different kinds of tactile cells present both in the human skin as well as in the human tongue. Among those are nociceptors, Merkel-Ranvier cells and Meissner's corpuscles. While the density may vary, e.g., Merkel-Ravier cells are concentrated in the finger tips, those are still contributing to similar sensations wherever you have them. Those are not new sensory "devices" which are suddenly attached to your brain. Your brain is already familiar with inputs from those cells and has learned to interpret their signal patterns. This is why I would say that it's not challenging for you to imagine the perception of texture on your tongue, even though you mainly felt it on your skin before. You can also imagine feeling a similar texture of an object on your arm, even if you just touched it with your feet or hands before. Taste, however, is something different. You probably licked a rock or two when you were an infant or child, and tasted and smelled a lot of the world surrounding you. That's why you might even be able to imagine the taste of objects to a certain degree. (Of course, this becomes more difficult the more complex the taste is and depends on your exposure on different taste components and associations with objects where you typically find those.)
Getting sight at some point later in life, while being born blind, is like plugging in a new sensory device to your brain. It needs time to learn how to interpret the input signals, but after some time of training, it will be able to distinguish colors, shapes, objects, etc.. Having sight is nothing a blind person can relate to via other sensory information in any way, since sight is entirely depending on functional eyes (and specific neural pathways in the brain).
A good example of how the brain adapts to such new sensory inputs is Neil Harbisson.
This is a guy who has a colour-blindness and got a brain implant which coded colour into sound waves, such that he can "hear" colours. After some time of adapting he even started to dream colours as sounds. https://www.bbc.com/news/av/technology-29992577 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mc2fOI9vLzo
First, how can you restore sight to someone who never had in the first place? Second, anyone got a link to any details about these folks who were apparently born blind but had sight surgically granted to them?
Nevermind. I found this article that talks about this exact topic.
how can you restore sight to someone who never had in the first place?
Semantically, it implies that their bodies were born with the capacity for sight, but something occurred, either in utero or when they were very young, to rob them of it. Also, the subjects in the experiment all had some very minor visual capacity, like the ability to distinguish the direction light was coming from. They just didn't have visual acuity.
in vitro means in glass, as in a petri dish. and in vivo is just like, in a living body generally, not necessary just fetuses. So, I'm thinking maybe you were going for in utero?
Sry, idk when I'm being a pedant or a helpful person who appreciates language, well, words. Grammar can get fucked.
I'm just going to write here, that there are different type of Blindness! For certain people like the ones from the article, there is something in the eye blocking vision of the outside, and we now have the capacity to take it off, restoring eyesight
Well theoretically I could blindfold you, give you a complex 3d object to touch up for about half an hour, make you step back, place the object into a large container full of similar objects, then remove the blindfold and ask you to look for the object in the container.
Science is philosophy, at least it was created by philosophy. Logic and reason are insufficient to understand the world and answer questions well. We sort of knew this, that's why philosopher argue. Scientist uses empirical evidence, so they only have to argue about the collection of evidence. If they disagree with a result they can collect the evidence themselves and verify. This made the development of human knowledge much more effective.
It's so effective its displaced philosophy and theology. We see science as something different. However, science is just a philosophy with a single approach the scientific method.
That time was the begging of the scientific revolution; natural sciences were known as natural philosophy. And scientists were more like philosophers, eg Descartes, Bacon, etc.
In one of his biographies, Newton is described as the last magician, and the first scientist.
What is now called science was once part of philosophy. So questions of philosophy were more broad in the past than now. But philosophy is also still very interested in the findings of science. These aren't exclusive areas of interest.
If you closed your eyes and felt a sphere and a cube you'd be easily able to feel and picture the shapes in your mind because you knew what a sphere and cube looked like before you closed your eyes.
Blind people "see" or experience the world completely different
They have no image in their mind what a sphere or cube would look like. They have only their idea of feeling it.
Seems like an easy conclusion to draw that the blind person would be able to tell the shapes. Sharp corners vs. round object.
But saying that they can't tell the difference, which they can't, seems like a stretch because it's almost unbelievable to someone who can see.
And there's no way to know if they could or couldn't tell the difference without a blind person actually doing the experiment. They couldn't test it, so all they would do was think and debate.
Philosophy is vast. Some branches of it work with thought experiments that seem impossible to be tested/confirmed/solved or, at least, cannot be tested/confirmed/solved yet.
The brain in a vat may be confirmed someday, for example, if we indeed are living in such a situation and it is later revealed. Still, the problem behind would probably persist so I'd defend the thought experiment is useful. The one the post is talking about was impossible to test so it could only be speculated upon, but now it has been tested. Others are more elusive, like Mary's room or the dozens of ethical ones.
Philosophy was thought to be the understanding of fundamental truths more real than reality, but a lot of it was simply developing constructs that help us understand the world and survive. Even if we find a theory of everything that can mathematically describe the fundamental rules of the universe and existence, that might simply be a construct we use to help us understand the actual rules. It would be the closest thing to a form that would be more real than the material world, but it might only be an image of it.
Most philosophers didn't believe that we could be machines without an immaterial soul, but as we learn more about the brain and body, the things that can't be better explained by material mechanisms dwindles. I don't know for sure that there isn't a human soul, but if it does exist, it will probably never be detectable. I don't think it should change how we decide to live, as we should live well even if there is no afterlife.
Unless we all die, science will probably discover every rule and emergent principle that can be discovered. We'll never have every specific detail and account of our surroundings, but we'll be able to infer how our observations likely came about.
True. Science allows us to change and refine our assumptions by giving us an increasingly accurate image of reality. The other branches of philosophy can help us process and use that information, as science has no inherent direction.
The original premise was based on general geometric shapes. Spheres and cubes. Your proposal is closer to asking them to identify somebody they know by photograph.
Even that's assuming the average person could distinguish their own butthole from another butthole by feel alone. I don't know if that's true and I don't like the idea of conducting experiments to find out.
If a man born without smell suddenly had his olfactory abilities fully restored, would he like the experience of his own farts? Would he be offended by the smell of bacon and pancakes? Would he be invigorated by the aroma of fresh brewed coffee?
No. No he wouldn't. Because he'd literally never experienced any of those things before and therefore would have no point of reference.