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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

Sure. But saying "Locke was right" in a context where we're discussing an experiment run two centuries later certainly seems to be implying some kind of comparable discourse, no?

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.

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The thing is, philosophy in this case was using the knowledge available and applying reasoning to drawn conclusions.

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.

Actually Locke here just agrees without providing more justifications. It would have been more interesting if he had provided a counter-argument instead. For instance, "while it's true that this man hasn't learned how what he felt looks, he can to some extend apply logic; he knows that the sphere feels the same from every direction of touch and he can observe that one of the objects looks the same from every direction; so he can conclude that this object is the sphere".

But I guess someone actually gaining sight just wants to be done ASAP with those silly experiments and go to the theater ;-)

Good point and this 'logical' way of determining an object is a cube is something i wondered about as well.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astereognosis

> 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...

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?

> Could I conclude that it tasted or smelled 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.

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