Molyneux's problem
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
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!
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/02/are-we-already...
Amongst their projects (involving AR, VR and multi-modal devices), some students explored various ways to play with our perceptions and define more sharply the interactions and priorities of our senses. Incredible experiments involving simple contraptions as well as more advanced VR, and a lot of scientific creativity (see [1], particularly Multimodal interfaces)
Amongst those projects, Yuki Ban's "Magic Pot" was very similar to what you described, and I remember being almost upset at the realization that the sense we tend to trust the most (vision) can also drive us in the wrong direction the fastest. (see [2] and [3] for more info)
[1] http://www.cyber.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/projects/
It's well deserved if thats the case. At least if it keeps happening over and over again for the same person.
I always thought Peter would have continued to do great things had he been born 10 years later. The man's imagination certainly outpaced technology. A tragedy, indeed.
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.
He is still misleadingly selling Godus under "Early Access" on Steam even though he clearly has no plans to continue development and there hasn't been an update in over 3 years.
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?
Peter's problem was that he didn't just release the game without all the promised features, he wouldn't even hang around to fix the bugs.
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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.
And this also means that the order in which the pixels are presented to the NN doesn't matter in the first place. You could pick a completely random (but fixed) permutation and the NN would still learn to "see" in that mess.
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...
And also Locke (who was being asked the question) was right in his answer.
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.
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).
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.
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.
That's a perfectly valid scientific hypothesis, and turns out to be testable and correct.
Science, from Google: the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment.
They hardly need a theory for how you gain those experiences - you gain those experiences by seeing objects and by handling them, obviously.
Granted, they didn't understand Maxwell's equations and photoelectric effects and some complete model of the light-retina-nerves-brain-mind system, but they didn't need that in order to make scientific hypotheses about whether we learn to correlate sensory stimuli with the world around us or if it just automatic.
We know more now (but hopefully not as much as people 200 years from now will know), but that doesn't mean they weren't doing science: the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment
Dumb luck doesn't seem to be the right phrase. Their reasoning seems solid, given their assumptions about the basics of how the human being works.
I mean: "Einstein was right" in the context of the Michelson-Morley experiment means that he came up with a predictive theory that was later confirmed by practical scientists. Locke didn't. By scientific standards, he just guessed without any grounding. That distinction is really important!
Edit to expand my point: the bottom line is that our current understanding of neurology has no bearing on who was "right" in a 200-year-old discussion, even though they are "technically" about the same subject. It just doesn't matter. If you want philosophy to be a separate domain from science (and we do, for obvious reasons), you need to keep it separate and not use science to argue about who was the better philosopher.
While it was entirely possible that Locke's prediction would prove to be incorrect. It was not 'dumb luck' it was an 'educated guess'. 'dumb luck' literally is pretty much exactly the opposite of what occurred here.
But I guess someone actually gaining sight just wants to be done ASAP with those silly experiments and go to the theater ;-)
It should be possible, if the subject is given enough time and approaches the task from a rigorous angle, to deduce that the object must be a cube. through a path like...
eyes -> visual processing of the brain -> logical facts about -> mental model of the object in question -> categorizing the mental model -> determining what the object is.
However, I think, the fundamental issue is that in sight, touch etc, typically the concious/logical part of the brain is not involved in determining objects. probably because this is much to slow. There is dedicated hardware/software that does this as far as i am aware.
There are people with the condition where they cannot name, or identify objects from touch but can from sight, even more interesting some people can identify things from touch with their right hand, but not with their left.
Rigorous logical reasoning requires some axioms, and someone who has just gained his or her sight has no reasonable axioms to apply (or, rather, no way to decide, even on the basis of experience, which axioms are reasonable to impose). Suppose that I felt an object and discovered that it felt the same from all angles. Could I conclude that it tasted or smelled the same from all angles? I don't think that is a reasonable conclusion. Why then should I conclude, with no prior evidence to guide me, that it would look the same from all angles?
You can't 100% assume it.
But if there's no reason to think it's a trick question, and one object does smell and taste evenly, while the other object has multiple distinct smells/tastes...
You can get a pretty good idea.
Empiricism is a philosophy.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e7/Booba-Ki...
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."
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.
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?
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.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirl_Jennings [1]http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0132512/
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).
If a sighted person can see an object and distinguish it by touch alone, the opposite must be true.
How well does practice "on land" or "in the air" map to the same movement under water, with water resistance?
There is an interesting, if largely anecdotal, paper from the 60s. There may be more recent work. http://www.richardgregory.org/papers/recovery_blind/1-introd...
Yet you felt the need to create a throwaway account in order to complain about any and all discussion in the comments which doesn't hinge on the original link...
why?