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.
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.
To add to this, we've eaten a lot of spheres and cubes as adults as well, it would be strange if you couldn't tell a cherry from a watermelon cube by feel alone