tilthat: TIL a philosophy riddle from 1688 was recently solved. If a man born blind can feel the differences between shapes such as spheres and cubes, could he, if given the ability, distinguish those objects by sight alone? In 2003 five people had their sight restored though surgery, and, no they could not.
nentuaby: I love when apparently Deep questions turn out to have clear empirical answers.
Yeah, I'm thinking of it kinda like machine learning. To be able to do something like pick a visual thing to match a tactile thing... you need to have had other tactile<->visual experiences. Knowing what a shark edge looks like or feels like requires you to have touched or seen an object with such qualities. Given enough examples, you can generalize, and make estimations about things you've never touched or seen, but we're not born with any of that.