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by photon137
4794 days ago
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Education here is not an overriding factor. The way a congenitally blind person "imagines" abstract representations of shapes is substantially different, primarily because the physical wiring of the visual cortex and indeed a lot of the brain would be very different when compared to a person who could see. The dimensionality of their world, despite being the same as that of the sighted ones, may not involve the same descriptive system - ie maybe "polar" (just an example) coordinates would be more "natural" to them than a Cartesian system. It's simply a problem of what gets mapped to what in the absence of mapping channels we take for granted. Education is probably not a significant variable here. |
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Education and intelligence mean there's a significant variation in people's abilities to infer, to the point that particularly talented people get write-ups in 'Guinness Book of World Records.' and human-angle stories at the end of nightly news bulletins.
So the assumption that it's a binary answer to Molyneux's problem seems to be the first error. There would be certain individuals, who when adjusted to sight enough to work out the ratios of this color to that color could find enough data to make a choice that's better than a random guess.
However the fascination with this question isn't around those individuals who'd pass the test. It's fascination with the idea that most of us wouldn't, because as you outline the absence of input through the visual cortex mean the brain would not be able to make simple mappings sighted people feel are inherently 'natural'.