Molyneux's Problem

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PPR has been, IMO, a bit boring, as-of-late, so I went web surfing, in search of a philosophy topic----and, I totally stole this off of Wikipedia (and my dog/human one, off another website).

If a born-blind person can feel the differences between shapes, such as spheres and cubes, could they, if given the ability to see (but now without recourse to touch), distinguish those objects by sight, alone?

There was a very long New Yorker article by Oliver Sacks about his case study of a man who had been blind since childhood, but regained sight through a surgery. But he still functioned like a blind man.

He needed intense coaching from scientists (who probably learned more from him than they could teach him)led by Oliver Sacks . The upshot is that a great deal of "seeing" involves learning. And we who are born with sight are not conscious of that.

The guy had trouble walking without a cane, and with judging distances, and also with facial expressions.

My guess is that we play with toy cars as children to help to integrate our tactile sense with our visual. This is how a tiny replica of a car feels, and that over there is how a full sized car looks. So a blind person might indeed have trouble recognizing the site of a cube as being the same thing as the tactile "picture" he has in his head of a cube. The guy in the case study had problems recognizing a photograph of an apple in a magazine as being the same thing as an apple in front of him because he still relied on touch to get the shape of an apple.

The article was turned into a book, and then became the basis of the 1999 movie "At First Sight" starring Val Kilmer, and Mira Sorvino.

It got mixed reviews, but is true to some of the original story.

I've heard just how much trouble programmers have in training deep learning and neural networks in terms of vision, also that the only reason seeing is so easy for us is just how much of our brains are dedicated to it. I think of that much of the brain either being in entropy or being colonized under different uses being exposed to sight for the first time at maturity and yeah - I would figure that sight would be a challenging and even stressful process.

A modern version ....with 'campin cat' in mind

Unlike cats, humans are blind to the ultra-violet light spectrum.

So, a human can see dry cat-urine carpet, and yet, not actually see the urine.

The same is true of body fluids.

Under UV light, the human can suddenly see these things.

However, can the human now distinguish between cat urine and say body fluids by mere sight?

This is a toughy, for me..... OTOH, I'm a very visual person, so I figure that when a person was blind, and FELT the difference between a cube and a sphere, they could visualize it----but, maybe, if they've never seen them, how can they visualize them?

OTOH, I'm wondering if, when they SAW the objects, could they go-back in their mind, and recall what the objects FELT-like, and be able to realize that one was clearly smooth (sphere), while one had "points" / rough edges (cube), and so-forth, and distinguish them, THAT way?

Like I said above: the article "To See, and Not See" by Dr. Oliver Sacks in the May 10, 1993 issue of the New Yorker pretty much takes on that exact question head on in a real life case.

Cant seem to be able to link to it. But you can find it somehow (online, or in a library).