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.
... 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.
So fascinating.
I really wished I could write like that. Probably because of poor working memory (thanks ADHD) I can't hold that much stuff in my head prior to writing. Certainly not a bunch of raw wordless concept blobs (or whatever?) plus flow an form and all that. Jeez. I invariably write things as I go. I might have a vague sense of what I want to write. Certainly nothing "done" before writing.
I can "see" a rough approximation of The Scream in my head. Enough to draw an inaccurate copy. I can draw other stuff (cars, bicycles, cats whatever) by visualizing them to greater or lesser degrees.
My kid has aphantasia and described it like you did. Remembering facts about it but not so much the actual image itself. Interestingly she is quite good at drawing.
I’ve heard that it’s much easier to learn how to draw when you can make an image in your head and trace it down on paper. It’s still possible to become good at drawing with aphantasia but in my case, I can’t make up new imagery from my thoughts so I have never had that as a reason to draw, if that makes sense. I just don’t know what to draw, so I don’t.
Art does nothing for me anyways, so I don’t feel like I’m missing out. I have never looked at a painting, sculpture, dance, theater or other physical forms of expression and felt anything about it. I can only objectively observe it, like ”this painting of a boat is blueish and painted with oil on canvas” or ”this person moves their legs and arms in this fashion while singing about loneliness”. This might be more due to autism than aphantasia though. Still it probably contributes to why I can’t draw.
Interesting. I hadn't considered art might have no effect on some. Interesting that autism could play a role there.
My kid usually draws from a picture or something. I do that sometimes too. (Well I don't draw much anymore).
My wife can't draw. She has tried numerous times. I infer there's some capability of looking at a pic and abstracting it into lines or shades or whatever and then putting that on paper. Well, she doesn't have that.
She does not have aphantasia. So she can see a cat, say, in her mind's eye but can't translate that onto paper I guess?
I suppose the more detailed you can picture something the easier it would be to draw it if you have the ability to translate pic to paper.
I read once an exercise where you have people draw a bicycle without using a picture. The results are often laughably inaccurate. I guess because some folks think they know how the thing works but don't. Or haven't paid enough attention. But presumably if, like me, you have had bikes for years, worked on them, know how they work, and paid attention to all the details you can make a very accurate drawing.
That is interesting. There is undoubtedly some learned skill involved regardless of mind’s eye.
I can draw a bicycle correctly, for the same reasons as you, but it will not be pretty. The frame will be 2 parallel lines all over and it will be drawn from a perfect side angle. I could draw a derailleur the same way, or the insides of several types of steering column.
Based on my life experience being like mild-moderate red-green color blind, I think everyone else sees the same colors except me :(
They say this but we have the color wheel. It is trivial to find clothing that goes together, or colors that can invoke a mood. If we really did have alternative experiences I cant imagine it wouldn't have been qualified, understood, and addressed by marketing already.
Orange and blue means action
https://yesimadesigner.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/9-768x1139.jpg
https://imgix.ranker.com/user_node_img/110/2186618/original/the-dark-knight-films-photo-u19?w=650&q=50&fm=pjpg&fit=fill&bg=fff
https://www.femalefirst.co.uk/image-library/port/1000/f/fantastic-four-group-poster.jpg
http://ayay.co.uk/movies/poster/superhero/daredevil-elektra-teaser.jpg
https://comic-cons.xyz/wp-content/uploads/marvel-cinematic-universe-captain-marvel-movie-poster.jpg
Those are cultural associations though, not biological
Looking at it with the concept of mathematical equivalence in mind, the behavior can be almost the same yet internal representation can still be wildly different
I am skeptical that colors universally bring about moods or concepts. One would have to prove this is true despite cultural conditioning that ascribes meaning to different colors.
I also doubt that each person experiences colors in a significantly unique way. Unless we can show that the receptors in our retinas, or the neurons receiving those signals, behave differently from person to person. I have to wonder if widely appealing art (that uses color) could even exist if we didn't share the underlying mechanisms of seeing and reacting to its colors.
Fair, as long as it is fast action. You wouldn't want to have to make 3 movies of people walking.
I've thought about this my entire life. Just generally, is what and how I see the same as you? It's obviously a matter of how an individual's brain interprets something, so we won't know until we can plant our consciousness in someone else a la Black Mirror.
Even that won't work. Pretend we've figured out how to that. How do we calibrate it? What if I transfer my memories into your mind, but you see the sun as "blue", and so on in my memories? What if you recall a memory where I'm laughing and smiling, but the emotion I'm recalling is what you would call "sadness"?
Either our subjective understanding of reality differs, or the machine doesn't work right. The machine faces the same issue as our language does when it comes to reliability of translating internal states.
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.
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?
Tweaking existing senses does work, but there's limits. There's people experimenting with stuff like implanting magnets in their fingers
Interesting question!
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.