
Molyneux's problem - ph0rque
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molyneux%27s_problem
======
emilga
At Phaenomenta in Flensburg there's an interesting exhibit that breaks the
link between tactile sensation and visual perception:

An oval is placed flat on a table, so that you can touch it and feel it's
shape.

Above it, and parallel to the table, is a lens that distorts the oval so that
it looks perfectly circular.

When you trace the shape with your finger and keep your eyes closed, it feels
like an oval.

When you trace the shape by looking through the lens, it both looks and feels
like you're tracing a circle. The feeling persisted when I used my fingers to
grip it.

Only by cupping it with my whole hand did it start feeling like an oval again,
despite still looking circular. Pretty cool and weird!

~~~
ogig
This experience seems the same as most described in this very interesting and
recent article about virtual embodiment [1]. Seems like we didn't need VR
helmets to realize it after all.

[1] [https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/02/are-we-
already...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/02/are-we-already-
living-in-virtual-reality)

------
m12k
I went in expecting an article about how the most enthusiastic and visionary
game designers will tend to enthusiastically state their hopes, dreams and
visions about the unfinished game they are working on, but will ultimately end
up being ridiculed or being called liars when the final game fails to live up
to the lofty ideas that they expressed during development. The actual article
was interesting too though.

~~~
teawrecks
Well Molyneux is taken, I guess we could call it the Murray effect.

~~~
LifeLiverTransp
To be honest, when Peters horses stampeded with him, the audience happily went
along even with the most unreasonable idea. People like him where and are
rare, and the games delivered under the name bullfrog where so legendary -
(even though half of them he wasnt involved at all), its was allmost
impossible to live up to that avalanch of a reputation that had developed
around him.

Its a sad thing that the people looking for something to hate- aka the web
happend to him. I liked him visionary, and even if only half the vision
survived, the games where always excellent.

~~~
Bromlife
Molyneux was/is such a massive bullshit artist, that he would even make
promises in front of crowds that the game devs had never even heard before. He
just let his imagination and mouth run wild.

~~~
LifeLiverTransp
Maybe the line between hoax and avantgard, never tryied before isnt as clear
cut as many want it to be.

If you venture into unchartered territory, trying things not done before- you
are exploring a very branchy maze- and sometimes its only sheer luck keeping
you from exploring a promising dead end.

To a outsider, or somebody years later, looking down from the knowledgeable
mountain of history- such simple decisions seem "strange" and wastefull. But
down, in the trenches of today, they where the best move available.

Kickstarter money was always play money of those investing, and once it has
been used up- what should those developing eat?

Love and air from the fans? He runs off with little sums, while at least
delivering, while others venture off with full studio budgets and deliver next
to nothing?

------
guntars
I think this will be pretty obvious to anyone who has meddled with machine
learning. Suppose you have a working model of the world (based on your sense
of touch) and you now suddenly get more data (sight):

    
    
      {255,254,254,254,255,255,254,253,254,255,254,255,255,255,248,247,255,255,255,254,255,249,228,221,207,204,210,216,247,255,255,236,146,169,184,166,127,88,231,255,255,241,154,155,155,106,96,105,236,255,255,243,156,159,160,113,105,100,238,255,255,247,170,157,164,104,55,103,243,255,254,255,244,214,179,120,182,237,255,254,255,255,255,255,246,244,255,255,255,255,255,255,254,254,255,255,253,254,255,255}
    

Do you see the cube? I'd think not.

~~~
Sharlin
This. Newly-sighted people have _no idea whatsoever_ what to make of the
torrent of confusing sensory data they're suddently receiving. Their brains
simply haven't grown the really complicated pattern-recognition machinery
required to reason about perspective projection, lighting and shading,
shadows, colors and textures, and everything else people sighted from birth
take for granted.

~~~
heavenlyblue
Highly contextually dependent: most of the early-detection neurons are exactly
what you describe: edge-detectors, color similarity detectors, etc. They
become a thing right from the birth of a child and would never develop if the
child could never see at all (they have a very rigid structure, so the random
development is out of the equation).

So you’re clearly touching upon the definition of what is it to “have the
vision” and what is it to “obtain the vision” as it’s not binary anymore:
there are many levels to “vision”, most of which overlap as well.

------
zaroth
Spoiler alert - after “curing” blindness in a few patients this was
demonstrated to be false.

There was a more recent article which I saw in the aggs recently, but Google
offers up this one from 2011:

[https://mobile.nytimes.com/2011/04/26/health/research/26blin...](https://mobile.nytimes.com/2011/04/26/health/research/26blind.html)

~~~
jere
It's a question. How can it be false?

And also Locke (who was being asked the question) was right in his answer.

~~~
ajross
Locke was "right" in his answer by dumb luck. Fundamental this question isn't
about philosophy at all, it's an empirical matter of science. Without a good
understanding of vision and neurology, and the ability to run good experiments
based on informed hypotheses, there's no way to answer this.

So, sure, Locke guess right based on a flawed (seriously: the basic science
was 200 years in the future!) premise. That doesn't say much interesting about
the subject.

~~~
kbutler
Locke and Molyneux had a hypothesis: "Not. For, though he has obtained the
experience of how a globe, how a cube affects his touch, yet he has not yet
obtained the experience, that what affects his touch so or so, must affect his
sight so or so; or that a protuberant angle in the cube, that pressed his hand
unequally, shall appear to his eye as it does in the cube."

They didn't have an experiment that could test this hypothesis. When we were
able to perform an experiment, their hypothesis turned out to be correct.

This isn't "dumb luck" any more than Einstein's theory of general relativity
being confirmed by the precession of mercury.

And it doesn't have anything to do with neurology - it's about the structure
of the mind and perception, rather than the anatomy of the brain, eye, and
hands (software, rather than hardware).

~~~
ajross
That hypothesis was wrong though. It's just word salad, they didn't have a
theory for how one "obtains" "experience", or for how that "what affects" can
be transfered or not between senses.

And it's fine as _philosophy_ , because you're allowed to do that. But it's
not science, shouldn't be called science, and you shouldn't be using a
scientific result based on proper hypothesis testing and _two centuries of
theory work_ to argue about who was the "better philosopher".

Not. Science. That's my only point.

~~~
vokep
I may agree with you that it is not science. However I disagree with the
reasons you use to back this up.

They did have a theory for how one obtains experience, a basic one (the senses
collect info about the outside world and...thats it, experience gained!)

It really sounds like you're claiming philosophy is not a science, which
doesn't really make sense. Philosophy is certainly a unique kind of science,
one where hypotheses must be made on nebulous difficult to define concepts,
and lots of things are difficult or impossible to test. However that doesn't
automatically make it not scientific. Just because theories are untestable
doesn't mean science cannot be done with them. Because they aren't truly
untestable, they just aren't entirely testable. You may not be able to
prove/disprove a given theory, but you can test a group of theories, limit it
to "okay, we can't tell which theory is true, but it absolutely IS one of
these theories, not any others" And quite possibly as other science advances,
previously untestable aspects may become testable and the list can be
shortened.

To claim that philosophy isn't science is to claim it cannot make any
objective progress, which is something I definitely disagree with.

------
centicosm
This reminds me of the bouba/kiki effect in which there is perceptual cross-
talk in auditory and perceptual schemata across all humans. It would be
interesting to see if a blind person who became able to see would still label
the shapes in the same way.

~~~
jwilk
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect)

~~~
SyneRyder
Wow, that was fascinating. For anyone else wanting to read the article, I
would recommend looking at this non-labelled image first, and choosing which
shape you would call Bouba and which you would call Kiki:

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e7/Booba-
Ki...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e7/Booba-Kiki.svg)

If you read the Wikipedia article first, you'll bias your own result on the
test / experiment.

Also an interesting footnote at the end of that article:

"Individuals who have autism do not show as strong a preference. Individuals
without autism agree with the standard result 88% of the time, while
individuals with autism agree only 56% of the time."

------
jere
This is interesting and really counterintuitive for me after seeing the
results.

I would assume (and still can't shake the feeling) that a blind person would
clearly know that a cube/square has corners and a sphere/circle does not. It's
hard to understand how that isn't obvious when seeing for the first time. Even
if it wasn't immediately understood, one should be able to trace, with fingers
or eyes or whatever else, the outline of a cube vs sphere and observe that
only one has corners. The act of tracing should match the tactile sensation of
moving your fingers around similar objects.

~~~
dooglius
I think it is a mistake to think that what we "see" comes from our eyes rather
than from a large, trained visual network in the brain. Consider, for
instance, the behavior of the eye's blind spot, or the fact that we perceive
objects in one plane of vision despite having two eyes. These effects can't
come from just raw data.

Someone who hasn't learned/trained that processing is probably going to see
something much more strange--do you think you would be able to differentiate
between a sphere and a square by looking at hexdumps of bitmap files?

~~~
MichaelAO
Good point. If you haven't already, check out this talk by Donald Hoffman:
[https://www.ted.com/talks/donald_hoffman_do_we_see_reality_a...](https://www.ted.com/talks/donald_hoffman_do_we_see_reality_as_it_is)

------
bArray
I think it really depends on whether the neurons responsible for handling
vision processing have any natural spatial processing ability. It's not
obvious to me whether they would or not. My guess is that allowing some time
to look around the objects (without being told which is which and without
touching them), that they would be able to create spatial relationships for
vision processing (sensorimotor loop) and be able to overcome this issue. Once
there is some spatial reasoning for the two different types of input, I
believe they would begin to build correlations between them (only for very
simple shapes).

Perhaps an experiment could be made that would answer this by giving a person
a completely new sense and asking the same identification problem. I think the
skin could be interesting to use as it allows 2D input with the possibility of
utilizing existing spatial mapping, yet isn't used (in most cases) for 2D
depth feedback. You could attach some device that heats/cools, pokes, pinches
or something else to excite nerves based on some depth information. Of course
they would be blindfolded and unable to touch the objects.

You could make two different types of experiment, one that has spatial mapping
to the skin and another that is randomly linked, seeing how long (if at all)
it takes for somebody to figure out from the inputs which shape they are
observing.

My guess is that they could quickly get an intuition for each shape simply by
looking at the rate of change of inputs when they move about the object.

------
dooglius
It seems as though the last paragraph, where the problem is actually resolved,
should be a lot more prominent.

------
jadell
This can be directly observed in the case of Shirl Jennings[0], upon whose
life the movie _At First Sight_ [1] is based.

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirl_Jennings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirl_Jennings)
[1][http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0132512/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0132512/)

------
dangoldin
Reminded me of the McGurk effect
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-lN8vWm3m0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-lN8vWm3m0)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGurk_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGurk_effect)).
I'm constantly surprised by how our brains work.

------
simonhughes22
Part of the problem with this is assuming that the person regained their site,
they would not initially be able to make sense of the information. Seeing
happens as much in the brain as in the eyes. I love how they spoke and wrote
back then. It's comprehensible, but it makes clear how differently they spoke
back then.

------
tiziano88
If someone suddenly "switched on" a sonar detector that had been dormant in
your body for all your life, would you be able to immediately recognise shapes
and structures with it, and relate this new sense to your existing ones? My
guess is not.

------
stefkors
When reading the title I thought this was named after Peter Molyneux the
creator of fable. And the problem was over sharing/promesing game features

~~~
falcrist
I thought it was about Stephan Molyneux.

~~~
written
I hoped it was not.

------
jknoepfler
I think Molyneux's problem is an excellent example of why Kantian thinking (as
he is apologetically understood in the 21st century) is so important, even
today.

If you follow a modern Kantian line, one of the most important functions of
the brain is to provide a common spatial and temporal framework in which it is
possible to represent things (a basis for representation). The brain then does
the immensely awful work of creating objects in that spatial and temporal
basis out of the mess that it gets from optical, auditory, haptic, olfactory
systems, as well as information it gets from very strong beliefs we have about
the world (think Piaget - object permanence, objects can't be co-located,
folk-physics, etc.) We situate a self in that world, and we populate our
surroundings with family members, cardboard tubes, music, clouds, walls -
every mundane thing. We even build systems of knowledge using symbols in that
world, which is rather remarkable (our folk-physics is not the physics we use
for engineering, obviously).

Consider the problem of remote-piloting a drone. We are capable of shifting
our frame of reference from our eyeballs to our droneballs and back again
pretty quickly. Your brain is a complex thing - think of how quickly you are
able to translate musculo-skelatal movements of your fingers into the correct
inputs for the drone. Or say you're wearing headphones and getting auditory
input from the drone: how does your brain realize that the sound of someone
saying your name (muffled through the headphones) is coming from your friend
standing next to you? There is a sort of representational richness in solving
these problems that is easy to overlook.

I think we've all had the jarring experience of being woken from a dream by a
human voice, or a sound in our home, that had one meaning in the dream and
another upon waking. Same auditory input, very different processing, but all
part of an attempt to project a world that makes sense of your inputs.

Experience is a function of our brain working constantly to unify sensation to
create an accurate simulation of what is going on around ourselves. The brain
does so in a basis language, and its easy to have the mistaken belief that the
basis language of space and time is something that "is just there". It is
"just there," in the sense that our simulation works pretty darn well for
creating a coherent world that we can navigate, but the brain doesn't get it
for free - it assumes that basis.

I happen to think that the common basis for locating things in space and time
is a large part of what makes language possible (how can all agree that
"there's a cat on the mat" (or not)), but that's just a silly personal hunch
and not a well-considered position.

It was a very common mistake in academia ten years ago to think that humans
learn the structure of the world from data. We do, but we require a very
strong grammar of representation in order to even begin having what we call
experiences that it is possible to organize, or learn from (parallel to
language learning).

------
JetSpiegel
> if a man born blind can feel the differences between shapes such as spheres
> and cubes, could he, if given the ability to see, distinguish those objects
> by sight alone, in reference to the tactile schemata he already possessed?

If a sighted person can see an object and distinguish it by touch alone, the
opposite must be true.

~~~
cirgue
I teach whitewater kayaking, and part of what I teach is the kayaking roll,
which involves being underwater with your eyes closed and executing a series
of body and paddle movements. No matter how many times someone has seen a
video demonstration of the technique underwater, they still are completely
spatially disoriented the first few times they try the move. That's because
it's completely new to them, and they've never actually had to map the series
of physical sensations they experience onto movement without visual cues. I
would bet the same is true of blind people: we recognize squares or circles
because being born sighted, we have mapped our visual perception onto touch
and onto language from an extremely early age. If you never went through that,
there's no way you could recognize a square or a circle, because visual
information doesn't fit anywhere into your understanding of how you observe
space. We don't give kids physical toys just for their entertainment, they're
also for building the link between visual, tactile, and language awareness.

~~~
deltron3030
>No matter how many times someone has seen a video demonstration of the
technique underwater, they still are completely spatially disoriented the
first few times they try the move.

How well does practice "on land" or "in the air" map to the same movement
under water, with water resistance?

~~~
cirgue
Not especially well. It's kind of helpful to understand conceptually what's
going on, but ultimately the physical sense on land is completely different,
and the student will still think almost entirely in visual terms unless
they're already accustomed to taking coaching and have uncommonly good body
awareness. Most of the time it's faster to just start the student off
underwater and begin the process of learning that mapping between movement and
touch without the visual part.

