Tim Doucette, a blind astronomer who built the Deep Sky Eye Observatory | Hacker News Reader

Tim Doucette, a blind astronomer who built the Deep Sky Eye Observatory

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85 pointsnoyesno17 comments

Off-topic, but I was watching this golf instructional video from the 70’s or 80s by Gary Player. And he’s talking about all the different golfers he’s played with and he mentions this blind golfer,

“Blind golfer offered to play me a round for $100/hole. He had two rules. We play his home course and we tee off at midnight.”

Initially when I made the comment I was hurrying and forgot the blind gentlemen’s name. It was Charley Boswell. Just thought his name deserved to be in my original comment but too late to edit ..

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charley_Boswell

Human evolutionary history may beg to differ in that the nervous system has evolved to be optimal for processing input from the natural senses; but the mighty truth is it is all mere signals. With sufficiently biochemically sophisticated interfaces, and potentially medicine to ease the adaption, any signal source can become a sense. I must underline that a link between "a sense" and the neurvous system can be monodirectional but "should" be bi-directional; if we give a person a sense as the ability to percieve the traffic of an arbitary server, we will be humane and ALSO give them the eyelids to ignore and open their perception of the ports. Which parts of the brain are best for such interfacing? I believe the commonly spread understanding of the notion of a sense must be uncomplete; were one sense closed, there is no reason we could not put two senses in its place. I imagined sort of graph structure connecting senses but this intuition hide away partially, and I cannot elaborate it further now...

In case it’s interesting, the book Livewired talks about this. The author also has a company called Neosensory which converts sound into physical vibrations on a wristband

> any signal source can become a sense.

A new sense?

That's unheard of. We can map any signal to an existing sense, but not create a new sense/sensation.

That would be one of the most relevant developments in human history and a gigantic step towards cracking the whole qualia problem.

I suppose the extreme version of the parent comment's vision would be to develop entirely new neurological circuits that can process, interpret, and integrate some arbitrary new source of data in the world. I agree that that's kind of unimaginable now, but give infinite monkeys infinite typewriters and one of them will probably hook up the company's sales data to a new section of cortex just to see what would happen.

I read a more interesting takeaway, perhaps: that we can — and do — develop new "senses" for any given signal we can perceive. A possibly-shoddy example of this is what social media does to us: the social networks provided everyone with a novel social sense, and indeed everyone who uses social networks perceive and attenuate to that sense in different ways.

This has practical implications: given that we don't have infinite cognitive capacity or even much moment-to-moment bandwidth, we should be careful about which of these digital senses have our attention.

There're obvious links here to "augcog" (augmented cognition; [1]), but also I feel like Ackoff's five assumptions about "management misinformation systems" are relevant somehow[2].

Interesting to think about!

[1]: Especially DARPA's work and similar — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_cognition#DARPA's_Au... [2]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2628680

If one's eyes were replaced with the signal generator, I believe the parts of brain that process vision normally could adapt to this almost as well aa if a "new" sense had evolved. Full adaptation may require that it's done as a child or use of some drugs / theraphy. Perhaps trasncranial stimulation could be used in one form of adaptation theraphy.

if you can't view the video in the link from your location, it's on youtube too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHKopqVI_cw

Also: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/day6/episode-290-russian-doping-ass...

That's an unfortunate URL abbreviation https://www.cbc.ca/radio/day6/episode-290-russian-doping-ass

Remarkable power of resilience and passion! Tim Doucette's story is incredibly inspiring

Not available in my location: "There was a problem providing access to protected content."

Please let me know if someone has a mirror/alternate link.

he sees better than other people for this use case

Cant watch from my location, just want to know if he is the inspiration for the blind character in my favourite movie, Contact.

I couldn’t play the video on iPad OS Safari. Just FYI. Sounds interesting.

This was so heartwarming

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