

What People Cured of Blindness See - adamnemecek
http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/people-cured-blindness-see

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dognotdog
This is rather more interesting from a machine learning point of view than
philosophy. For instance, it seems a blind person does know about space from
touch, but cannot innately identify space from visual information. What can we
infer about the way our brains process sensory information from this fact?

~~~
theoh
There's an interesting account here:
[http://www.richardgregory.org/papers/recovery_blind/recovery...](http://www.richardgregory.org/papers/recovery_blind/recovery-
from-early-blindness.doc) which contains the following passage about a man who
recovered his sight:

"In view of his depressed state, we felt it best not to undertake formal
tests. We did, however, ascertain that he was able to find his way about
without the use of his eyes, and that he could detect the presence of houses
and doors by the echoes from his footsteps. He was still fascinated by
mirrors, and he still noted improvement in his ability to see. In particular,
he said that he noted more and more the blemishes in things, and would examine
small irregularities and marks in paint work or wood. Quite recently he had
been struck by how objects changed their shape when he walked round them. He
would look at a lamp post, walk round it, stand studying it from a different
aspect, and wonder why it looked different and yet the same."

I think the last line is interesting. There is a conflict between the spatial
reconstruction and the optical appearance.

~~~
raverbashing
This reminds me of trying to localize yourself using a very narrow field of
vision, where you see things but it's hard to paint the picture of the
environment

(It may even be possible that the person has some kind of shortsightedness, I
didn't see the article)

~~~
theoh
Yes. In fact there is a tradition in art theory of making a distinction
between close vision (involving movement of the eye across a surface) and
distant vision (in which the whole scene can be taken in at once).

It's actually a fascinating bit of intellectual history, though I am not sure
whether it counts as objective scientific knowledge.

It started with the sculptor Adolf von Hildebrand and was developed by Alois
Riegl into the notions of "haptic" and "optical" vision. Wolfflin then
expanded that distinction into five polarities (linear vs painterly, plane vs
recession, closed vs open, multiplicity vs unity, clarity vs complexity). In
mathematical terms haptic seeing is concerned purely with manifold surfaces
whereas the optical can also represent non-manifold geometry.

Even more significance was later hung on that structure by the philosophers
Walter Benjamin and Deleuze and Guattari. In particular the haptic is
associated with surface, with smooth spaces of the mechanical, of trajectories
and motion, while the optical is associated with volume, with striated spaces
of the organic, of hierarchy and stasis. "parametric" vs. "implicit" if you
like.

It's a bit of a philosophical rabbit hole!

~~~
longingforlight
Ooooh. I never knew that there was this model of these different types of
vision! I am a congenitally blind person who can (occasionally) find a way to
make myself see a tiny bit better, and a lot of what I do is allow my eyes to
wander up and down different surfaces. I basically pretend that they are
fingertips. I am much less good at the other types of vision, but I've played
around with them a bit; it's like I am hurling my body through space. I can't
access the New Yorker article but I suspect my experience is different because
I have always felt sighted even though I've never had vision. I really suck at
being a blind person and thus am incredibly motivated to figure out how sight
works, because I can already tell that I'm a visual learner (and an artist)
and sight makes so much intrinsic sense to me.

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otakucode
I don't understand why this article so entirely avoided an extremely important
factor - the youth of those being cured. If you give sight to a 3 year old or
a 10 year old or even a teenager, their chances of developing normal sight are
good. If you give it to someone after puberty, their chances drop quickly,
getting worse the older the brain is. Neuroplasticity never goes away entirely
(as was believed before), but it is still radically reduced compared to during
childhood and especially adolescence.

~~~
longingforlight
I do think that's true, but if you're like me and never identified with
blindness or fully adapted to it, I think your potential for sight restoration
is still good. (I'm 28).

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guelo
I don't think these experiments answer the philosophical question. The
philosophers were assuming that the blind would have perfect vision once they
were restored. But it turns out that the brain needs a long period to learn
how to see. During that learning period the brain will slowly learn how to see
roundness. A better, though unethical, experiment would be to somehow prevent
a restored sight person from seeing any spherical objects for a long period
and then show them a spherical object.

~~~
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
I can't see anything unethical in that, it's just highly impractical (which is
why it might be difficult/expensive to find test subjects).

But my guess is that there isn't actually any "spherical" vs. "non-spherical"
distinction at the level of processing that is (presumably) untrained in blind
people, but rather some more general recognition of sharpness of objects'
edges of which spheres are just an extreme case, and _that_ would be pretty
much impossible to control for, as you'd need the test subject to live in a
"uniform sharpness environment", which would have to include their own body's
shape(s) ...

~~~
Ensorceled
> I can't see anything unethical in that

Really?

"We're going to give you sight but not let you see anything round for 2 years.
So we need to keep you in this cage unless you are blind folded."

Yeah. No ethical issues here ...

~~~
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
Please explain why it would be unethical to do that with someone who agrees to
it for a payment of 10 Mio. USD and with the option to leave at any time with
only partial payment. And while you are at it, please also explain why testing
of new drugs with unknown effects on human subjects is not unethical (or is it
according to your opinion?).

~~~
fortruce
They couldn't possibly consent to such when they have no idea what they are
actually giving up. If someone who was previously able to see then went blind
was given the same choice, then they would have a basis from which to value
sight and make an informed decision of consent; however, I don't think a
person who has never seen before can possibly give valid consent to such an
experiment.

~~~
philh
That's a strange way to put it.

Suppose I'm deadly allergic to all fish and fish-tasting foods. Now someone
comes up with a way to cure that, so I can eat fish for the first time. And
then they say, "actually, we'd like to see what happens if someone first
tastes salmon several years after they first taste haddock", and they offer me
a lot of money not to eat salmon for two years. Can I consent to that, even
though I don't know what I'm giving up with salmon? What about if I started
with no taste at all?

(N.B. This isn't meant to be a knock-down argument against your position. I
disagree with your position, and this is _an_ argument against it, but it's
not my true rejection. My true rejection is along the lines of "you have no
right to tell people what they can and can't agree to", but I don't care to
get into that.)

~~~
CocaKoala
"You have no right to tell people what they can and can't agree to"

I know you said you don't care to get into this, but I'm honestly curious;
where do you draw the line (if at all) on that position? Because the concept
of enforcing an inability to consent to things is the basis behind minimum
wage laws, age-of-consent, the unenforcibility of draconic EULAs and non-
compete clauses, and probably some other laws that I can't think of which are
wholly designed to protect people from being able to make terrible choices
that hurt not only themselves, but the rest of society by validating that
choice as a potential option.

I'm not trying to slag on you and I recognize that you don't want this to turn
into a debate where everybody shouts at you, and that's probably what's going
to happen if you respond; I'm just curious about the boundaries of your
position.

~~~
philh
A fair question.

I try not to be dogmatic. Sometimes, bad decisions have externalities that
justify forbidding them. I don't think that's the case in this particular
instance. To briefly address your other examples-

Minimum wage: in this case, I think the economic factors probably outweigh the
freedom-of-contract principle. (I'm on the fence about what the economic
factors actually support.)

Age of consent: I think there's a meaningful sense in which children are not
"people" for the purpose of entering contracts.

EULAs and non-competes: I haven't spent much time thinking about this. Off the
top of my head, I feel like these should be enforceable, but not as currently
implemented. Like, suppose before I let you buy my software I get you to mail
in a signed form saying that you have read the EULA and agree to its terms.
Then I think I should be able to enforce the EULA against you.

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drdeadringer
I recently read Robert J Sawyer's "WWW Trilogy", in which the main character
has her blindness cured via technology [not a spoiler; reader knows this going
into the first book].

The main character's acclimation to and approach to sight throughout the
trilogy was interesting, and I recommend in view of this article.

