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.
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.
Sure, as I said, without the ability to visualize, this may be tricky. But I’m imagining this test as them being given enough time to think about it and feel the shapes and maybe even count the pointy bits. At the very least, I’d expect an educated guess that’s likely correct, if they’re only discerning sphere and cube. Of course, a lot depends on how these tests were performed.
How do you expect them to know what pointy bits even look like?
I don’t expect them to know. I’m saying, if they’re given time to think about it, I’d expect them to make an educated guess that’s likely correct.
Pointy bits feel thin, unlike the rest of these shapes. So, if they’re given only the sphere and the cube to feel, they could remember that the cube had 8 pointy bits, the sphere did not.
Of course, a lot depends on how these tests were performed and what “they could not” actually means.
You’re still assuming an ability to connect shapes to vision, even if what you’re assuming is the most basic connection. Keep in mind these people had absolutely nothing to base their visual experiences on. I’m sure that given a few minutes to play with the objects they’d begin to map their visual inputs to mental models, but at first, it’ll all look like abstract garbage
It’s not that they don’t have a sort of 3d model of a cube in their mind, it’s that their 3d model of a cube includes absolutely nothing visual, which is virtually impossible for us to even imagine
Though it’s virtually impossible to do, I like to imagine that their 3d object memories are analogous to data in a raw text file, representing every attribute of the object. However, they don’t have the software (vision) to visually render it, or vice versa turn visual objects into “data points in files”.
Since their brain is reading the file without visually rendering the object, the results of this experiment could be similar to us not recognizing a digital 3d object by reading the raw data without rendering it.
Or, on a musical note, similar to not recognizing a composition just by looking at the sheet music. Then, if you didn’t even know what music sounds like, it’d also be an even greater challenge to imagine any sound at all by just looking at sheet music, midi files (raw data or visualized), raw data of an audio file, or a visual spectrogram or waveform.
I actually felt like my pointy bits method was entirely disconnected from experience. Yeah, they see abstract garbage, but they’ll still see anomalies in this abstract garbage. And they were able to feel anomalies on the cube.
It does take some thinking to make a guess like that. And they may have still been completely overwhelmed with sight in general. And again, I don’t know what the methodology in these tests looked like. But yeah, just summarizing it as “they could not” seems entirely unhelpful.
Could they tell that there are eight pointy bits? A cube only has between four and seven pointy bits, visually, although the seventh pointy bit would be pointing at them, and I’m not convinced that someone who’s never seen before would be able to process what a corner looks like head on. If they could pick the items up to move them around, then they’d simply be able to tell by touch. Even if it was rotating on a turntable or something, they’d have no way to map the two dimensional image onto a three dimensional object in their mind. You can easily visualize how it looks to make one rotation of a cube, but if you’ve never visualized before, you’d have no way to translate what you’re seeing to the model you have in your mind.
100% agree on wanting more than just “they could not,” though
Also the whole bit with how eyes give a flattened 2D perspective from a distance of 3D objects they previously only has felt as 3D shapes directly in their hands
And there’s two of them, giving slightly different images (but without the whole circuitry developed at a young age that manages to calculate distances from the slight differences between the two images… hell, they might even lack the circuitry that corrects for the images being upside down, at that!).
… So, they’ll have to experience the world through its reflection in a biiig spoon.
You’re assuming their brains have had enough time and experience at that point to perceive the pointy color blob as an object