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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.
Well that Kiki/Bouba link was a fascinating little rabbit hole you sent me down. I really enjoyed it. Thanks!
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
... they really can't connect spacial awareness from touch to sight? Really?
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.
For reference, this is what a "green man" is:
https://acc-cdn.azureedge.net/mrlnop420media/0005503_green-man-wall-plaque.jpeg
Can you, who easily sees the face, really even understand what it would feel like to look at that image and not see a face?
way more basic: Is the brown I am seeing the same brown you are seeing? Nobody knows.
I had a conversation about this decades ago and it stuck with me. It's bothered me all this time. I have to believe our color perception is at least close if, biologically, we have rods and cones that operate in the same way, and brain structures that work the same. (To keep it simple I'm not considering colorblindness).
What I find really fascinating is some higher level things that I didn't realize were different between people.
Some people see things in their mind's eye and those with aphantasia struggle to do so if at all.
Some can envision and manipulate things in 3d and some have a harder time with this.
Some people like me with ADHD have what is called time blindness, "difficulties with tasks related to time, such as estimating how long an activity will take, sticking to schedules, and recognizing when it's appropriate to start or finish tasks." (Healthline.com). My perception of time is .. limited but it is hard to describe exactly what I'm missing because I don't know what it is like to be normal.
I'm sure there are other examples as well.
Some people have an inner monologue, like they hear a voice narrating their thoughts. I dont have that. I have aphantasia too but apparently there is no relation no matter how weird I think both groups are.
Ah right. That was the one I was forgetting. I'm often talking in my head to think unless I'm thinking visually.
If I may, how does your thinking work?
I'm not so much narrating my thoughts as using words to think things. E.g. in my head I say, "how do they do that? I have to have words to express the thoughts"
Or another example: when I am typing I am basically "dictating", but by speaking inside my head and typing what I "say".
Are you able to just ...conjure concepts and ideas without words, somehow?
There really is no good parable to describe my thought process. It’s abstract. I’m often quicker to conclusions than my peers so there’s that. If I had to look at pictures and read an audio book along the way it would be slower.
I can think about a painting, but it doesn’t appear in my head other than I’m thinking about the facts about it. I know that The Scream by Munch is a ghostly figure holding his head screaming and walking on a.. bridge? That is just remembered stuff about it that I pulled from my thoughts and memories. I don’t know the color theme, direction he’s walking or other details. I can probably spot the real one in a comparison with a similar painting so it’s stored somehow, I just can’t access it as is. I can’t draw for shit.
I can think about a page of a paper that I’m going to write. I can form the concepts, rules, theme, paragraphs and flow of it and have it all done in my head before I start writing. Then I type it down at 100 wpm until the page is full. At no point did I hear anyone narrating or think about what any of the words would look like when printed out. It was all abstract until I started thinking about how to put it on paper.
Can you, who easily sees the face, really even understand what it would feel like to look at that image and not see a face?
I keep tryin but it's lookin at me and it's distracting
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.
Skill issue
Literally.
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.
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.
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.
That's because you have prior experience of both seeing and touching those shapes, so your brain has learned to integrate the different sensations
IIRC, that was what the philosophers concluded would likely be the case.
Tangentially related, but look at an object and imagine what it would feel like on your tongue. Chances are you'll almost always be correct.
I bet that's because we all put a ridiculous amount of things in our mouths as babies.
"And what's the mouthfeel of this one.....mmmmhmmm. Excellent. Next."
Talking like I don't lick random stuff as an adult
I disagree. Dick did not feel the way I expected it to feel at first. That may be an exception though.
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.
Also, this wikipedia page isn't behind a paywall: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molyneux%27s_problem
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.
Science was first called 'natural philosophy'. As we understand the world more, more of philosophy becomes science.
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.
I wish I could just assume this is true.
How is that a "philosophy riddle"? It seems to be a very straightforward yes or no question.
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.
Philosophy used to be more or less just that. Basically science without the actual testing, but just overthinking a problem.
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.
You seem to think that a philosopher's job is to make stoned guys go woah
It does seem straightforward
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.
Sample size: 5
Most of the so called deep questions have already been answered by science or materialism. Just we don't like the answers.
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.
