>In 2003, Pawan Sinha, a professor at MIT in Boston, set up a program in India as a part of which he treated 5 patients that almost instantly took them from total congenital blindness to fully seeing.[8][9] This provided a unique opportunity or answer the Molyneux's problem experimentally. Based on this study, on April 10, 2011, he concluded that the answer, in short, to Molyneux's problem was "no". Although after restoration of sight, the subjects could distinguish between objects visually as effectively as they would do by touch alone, they were unable to form the connection between object perceived using the two different senses.<p>That is a really counterintuitive result for me. I always assumed that one could construct a spatial model of something by touching it, without that directly being related to vision.
The problem is fascinating in itself, but I don't see why it is classified as an unsolved problem in <i>philosophy</i>.<p>From the article:<p>"The resolution of this problem is <i>in some sense</i> provided by the study of human subjects who gain vision after extended congenital blindness."<p>The solution is <i>purely</i> empirical, not philosophical.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsolved_problems_in_philosophy" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsolved_problems_in_philosoph...</a>
With respect to Molyneux and Locke, while I believe they get the general idea right, I believe they get the actual answer wrong. The answer to Molyneux's problem should be "yes" --- the newly sighted can correctly associate the shapes.<p>A sufficiently educated and intelligent person with congenital blindness would be able to correctly differentiate the shapes. Say, for instance, had Locke been born blind and still educated as rigorously. Of the many deductions that could be performed, the motion of the head with eyes fixed looking around the border of an object in space approximates the motion of the hand tracing the same object. Many other deductions are possible. All you need are reasonable assumptions about the acclimatization process, e.g., the patient can have a suitable amount of time to adjust to being sighted but cannot touch anything during the process.<p>It is fascinating to think about the idea of disconnected senses, but as so commonly happens, fascination with an idea leads to sloppy thinking, especially among the educated.<p>The reason why the empirical studies of the patients from India are wrong, despite being interpreted as giving a concurring answer, is that the blind have traditionally been given feeble educations, lacking in the type of rigorous thinking necessary to solve the problem. Historically it was challenging to teach abstract reasoning to the blind, and for this reason many were not taught. See Herzog's documentary "Handicapped Future" for tragic examples in relatively wealthy 1960s West Germany. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handicapped_Future" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handicapped_Future</a><p>The five patients in India who could not afford simple but life-altering surgery were sure to be poor in addition to being blind, and so surely must have received awful educations. Compounding this are their young ages.<p>A sufficiently motivated, newly-sighted Locke would've gotten the answer correct.
Wow, that's really cool.<p>Now I have an additional question. Assume at one point you were able to see and touch things, then lost your sight, then regained it. I'd think that while blind, you'd still try to form images of things you touched, and then be able to recognize them after your sight was recovered.<p>If that's true, then the connection between the senses would not be fundamentally impossible, but rather a learned behavior.
I expected to read about Peter Molyneux's problem of producing and selling games he dreams up around strange concepts, which I thought became so well known that it got an official name and put in Wikipedia.<p>But this was more interesting !
I think that if the previously blind person analyses the shapes in the right way, they'd be able to tell which one is the sphere and which one is the cube:<p>The only things the person would be able to gain from just touching the objects is that the sphere is "the same all over" and the cube is "not the same all over", to dumb it down considerably. If the newly unblind man looks at the objects in a similar way and considers symmetry, I think he would be able to tell that one is infinitely more symmetrical than the other and would be able to deduce that the shape that looks the same all over would be the sphere.<p>Does that make sense?
This reminded me of a feature of Esref Armagan, a blind Turkish painter, who was never sighted.<p>Skip to 7 minutes to see him paint a building he's never been to before, with 100% correct perspective.<p><a href="http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x9ig6p_esref-armagan-blind-painter_creation#.UXxhv0BDuzA" rel="nofollow">http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x9ig6p_esref-armagan-blind-...</a>
Surely this is not a hypothetical anymore or one with merely one test case - see <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_prosthesis" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_prosthesis</a> for example.<p>It seems obvious to me that it takes some time for people to get used to using a new sense - particularly for higher-order abilities. Differentiating 'round' from 'hard edged' is probably a fairly simplistic function which your brain should be able to quickly figure out, but I don't see how it can just be instant.