How extraordinary?

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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3AgO6H0H98[/youtube]

I know that from a commonsense level it is quite extraordinary that a man born without eyes can paint pictures that those with can appreciate. But at around 5:53 the narration says "what Esref's MRI shows is groundbreaking. Vision involves more than just the input brought in from our eyes. Vision, it turns out, also involves our ability to understand space."

I know that, in general, this is a very remarkable case. But how is the fact that vision involves more than just input from our eyes at all remarkable? As far back as Kant, it's been theorized that we don't just receive raw sense data tabula rasa, but rather we interprete that sense-data using innate theoretical constructs (and, indeed, misinterpretation of that data is responsible for quite a bit of parnormal seeming nonsense). As a matter of fact, I thought this fact was well accepted under the new materialist paradigm - that there is no fine line between folk-theory and observation when it comes to sense-datum.

Am I missing something here?

This is the Discovery Channel. Do you expect *real* science, or sensationalized science? If you want the former, then avoid your television or things from that television like the plague.

I have often wondered how blind people configure space without having ever seen it.

I really haven't watched the Discovery Channel since I was preadolescent and just came across this video browsing the interwebs. But, yeah, that Channel certainly is getting pretty bad - I mean, they've started to include Ghost stories ... GHOST STORIES, for the shake of rationality!

I suppose because space is an innate idea, so to speak, and it can be configured based on input alternative to the eyes (i.e. tactile inputs).

Our neurology is rather distant from our preception of it (I'm less radical than Patricia Churchland and regard a least some of our folk psychology constructs as useful and applicable. But I'd admit that some of our preinclinations will turn out to be wrong.).

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzT0jHJdq7Q[/youtube]

Last edited by Master_Pedant on 20 Jun 2010, 7:43 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Are you saying that you don't believe in ghosts? They obviously make sense, I mean, what else will happen to the soul we have inside us that experiences our qualia??? It will be either heaven, hell, purgatory, or ghosthood.

The same thing that happens to the image on a computer screen when you smash the back of the monitor - the phenomena ceases to exist (in spite of my Dennett reading, I still find it hard to completely disregard the notion of some sort of "representation" thesis).

I feel this is deeply wrong, therefore it must be. You're going to hell.

About my belief in a sort of scaled back, weakly emergent, inner world or my disbelief in ghosts?

For not letting Jesus into your heart, by which I mean not believing a large number of spiritual and historical ideas, many of which outright absurd.

You, SIR, are backwards and must be put into an asylum for such inanity!