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.
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.