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.
I actually felt like my pointy bits method was entirely disconnected from experience. Yeah, they see abstract garbage, but they'll still see anomalies in this abstract garbage. And they were able to feel anomalies on the cube.
It does take some thinking to make a guess like that. And they may have still been completely overwhelmed with sight in general. And again, I don't know what the methodology in these tests looked like. But yeah, just summarizing it as "they could not" seems entirely unhelpful.