Giving blind people sight illuminates the brain’s secrets
By Rhitu Chatterjee at Science Magazine
So, what does all of this convey about the innate and/or learned reactions our brains have to the world around us? And the communication that goes back and forth between biological imperatives built into our genetic self and the more problematic experiential self that can learn to react to illusions of this sort such that the brain is no longer able to trick us into believing something that is not true?
Al of this reminds me somewhat of the debates that pop up from time to time [still] between Noam Chomsky and others in regard to the brain in the development of specch and language. The parts that are innate and the parts that are rooted more in other factors-- healthline.com/health/child … nate-skill
Whereas for me it revolves more around the fact that one way or another we learn to use language to communicate, but then often find ourselves confronting any number of “failures to communicate”.
How then does sense deprivation factor into this? And what of those deprived of sight and sound from birth who regain these faculties. What of illusions of all kinds for them?
Then the age old philosophical quandary that revolves around “Tabula Rasa”: “built in mental content” versus postpartum “experience and perception”. Which of course is applicable to all of us with or without “sense deprivation”.
Okay, but what if you can’t see either straight lines or corners. How does the brain adjust in allowing you to understand the world without any visual cues at all?
Giving blind people sight illuminates the brain’s secrets
By Rhitu Chatterjee at Science Magazine
But for those born blind there is no alternative but to work with the brain in allowing the other senses to fill in the blanks in regard to understanding the world that they are born and raised in. Either that or relying on the sight of those who can see and trusting them to describe the parts where sight is most important in providing them with an accurate description.
But here again that will pertain by and large to those entities and relationships in which an accurate description can be made. In other words, the either/or world. But when it comes to value judgments and moral and political assessments, the sighted are no less “in the dark” in regard to all that would need to be known about sets of circumstances in which vision doesn’t bring you any closer to the “whole truth” than being blind. Those able to have their vision restored don’t just become more prescient in their is/ought world interactions.
And for many, they will fall back on religion – Gods and Goddesses – to anchor their self to what some construe to be “blinded by the light” frames of minds.
So, I wouldn’t imagine that, in regard to the arguments I make in my signature threads, discussions I might have with those who are congenitally blind or have had their vision restored or who were always sighted would really be much different.
Unless of course they actually would be. So, there’s a part of me that wonders whether it might be helpful if I were to go into a blind community online and explore this with them. Or would their reaction be more or less the same as the reaction I get from many here? It all revolving less around vision itself and more around seeing what they do. Even when not being able to see at all.
Giving blind people sight illuminates the brain’s secrets
By Rhitu Chatterjee at Science Magazine
Ever and always: genes and memes intertwined in an exchange that can result in either a tug of war or in complete collaboration. But: change for the better or worse depending on a point of view. Those who were once blind but then acquire vision can spend endless hours playing video games or become involved in any number of activities that actually impact others in the world around them. And, for me, that’s what it always comes down to: with or without sense deprivation, or with and then without, tell me about the behaviors you choose. Tell me about how and why you connect the dots between what your senses tell you about the world and your part in it.
Then the part where your own sense of reality comes into conflict with that of others. What here can be communicated with the least amount of dysfunction? And, where dysfunction becomes greater and greater, the parts that I focus in on: identity, value judgments and political economy.
Still, the biological imperatives themselves are ever fascinating:
Spatial imagery. The space between objects. How sighted people work that out and how those who are born blind work it out. Then the part where those who are born blind but then gain their sight come to grasp the space between objects differently. What the brain does all on its own here and what can be learned by the mind’s “I” to make the world more intelligible.
Even the fact of experiencing space that you were never able to visualize would make for a fascinating discussion.
Below is a link to a New York Times op-ed on “whale eyes”. It’s an essay/video relating to just one of the many conditions that the brain can produce relating to vision. And it is about how one person sees the world and is seen by others in the world. About being “normal” and being “different”.
Speaking of the historical, existential relationship between our own individual assumptions about sense deprivation and reality in the world around us…
Why Did the Nazis Sterilize the Blind? Genetics and the Shaping of the Sterilization Law of 1933
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 July 2019
Amir Teicher
Tell me that attitudes about blindness are not in turn embedded in particular historical and cultural and experiential contexts? Back then millions were “thrown” at birth into a world in which the Nazis propagated a totalitarian ideology such that “for all practical purposes” any number of people who fell into any number of demographic categories were dealt with…grimly.
Were some who were blind sent to the death camps as well? Or were they “only” sterilized so as to prevent furure generations from acquiring this “defect”?
Or imagine the fate of those who were both blind and mentally ill.
My own debilitating quandary of course revolves around the nature of my moral philosophy: that it is rooted subjectively in dasein.
And, thus, that, philosophically/scientifically, there does not appear to be an argument able to demonstrate that all rational and virtuous human beings are obligated to oppose the Nazis. That in the absence of God “all things are permitted” in that all things can be rationalized inter-subjectively [in any particular community] given particular historical and cultural and experiential contexts.
Yes, there is always that part of me that has doubts about this. After all, I can’t imagine a “new experience, a new relationship, or access to new information and knowledge” that would result in my believing that the Nazis are not wrong about this. But that’s not the same as demonstrating that all others are in fact morally obligated to believe the same. Unless, perhaps, there is an argument that does establish it. And, if so, note it. Or link me to it.
Okay, there’s no doubt about that. Genetically, there are hundreds of medical conditions that one can come into the world afflicted with. That’s an objective fact. But deciding which afflictions warrant sterilization or a trip to the death camps? How can that not be anything other than predicated on particular political prejudices rooted in dasein?
Like Nazi legislators are, what, philosopher kings? And, what, “science” can’t be at the beck and call of the Nazis as with any other totalitarian dictatorship?
Continuing on [as a sighted person] trying to grasp what being blind might have been like given a context in which being blind [for me] would have been particularly frightening.
Blind Jews in the Third Reich
by Gabriel Richter
At the Braille Monitor website
Again, being blind is always going to be experienced in a particular set of circumstances. As dasein. Here you are not only blind but are a Jew during the reign of the Nazis in Germany. But as an individual Jew who is also blind you can experience the world around you in any number of different ways. Just as in being a Jew who is sighted.
That for me is the crucial thing in regard to any degree of sense deprivation. There is how you come into the world with an affliction relating to your senses, and there is the particular world that you come into. So, the deprivation will always be more or less ominous depending on how lucky you are to be “thrown” into a world with the least amount of obstacles.
From my frame of mind, what would be particularly disturbing is that you find yourself in a world where others wish to persecute you, harm you, even destroy you. Yet you are unable to see them. What might that be like for those who do not have access to loved ones who can see for them? This is the “general fear” I believe most sighted people might have about becoming blind. Or being born blind. As long as your life is within your control and you are surrounded by others who can be there for you when seeing is especially important, you are able to give less thought to the fact that you are blind. But in more turbulent times when the life that you live from day to day is upended…then what?
It would be interesting to read of those experiences among the blind back then. How were they able to cope or even persevere against all odds.
Blind Jews in the Third Reich
by Gabriel Richter
At the Braille Monitor website
The Union of Blind Academics.
Again, how many sighted people would imagine the existence of something like that. The blind interacting in communities that are a part of and apart from the world that sighted people often just take for granted.
And yet in this organization of blind men and women – academics no less! – who no doubt experienced prejudice and discrimination living among the sighted majority, are able to conspire to create prejudice and discrimination all their own by excluding the “wrong” blind people.
In other words, politically, blind or not, human beings are more than capable of rationalizing almost anything when they set about to make distinctions between “one of us” and “one of them”.
I merely focus in on how this is more a manifestation of dasein than of arguments able to justify such behaviors.
Of course here things can get tricky because, as with the sighted, individual blind men and women will often accept something not because they believe it is true but because they know what the consequences might be if they dare to speak their minds and oppose it. Here dasein can often given way to the brute facticity of power itself. Something is done because those in power have the capacity to enforce it not because it is necessarily the right think to do.
Blind Jews in the Third Reich
by Gabriel Richter
At the Braille Monitor website
Again, it is one thing for us [blinded or sighted, a Jew or not a Jew] to think back on this and imagine what we would do. And another thing altogether to have actually lived through this experience and been faced with the consequences of choosing the “wrong” behaviors.
Or, say, connecting the dots between the Holocaust and the creation of the state of Israel. What does being “blind” to reality consist of here? Instead, moral and political values can be passed down to the next generation regardless of how they come into the world given their sense perceptions or lack thereof.
See how it works? We can’t understand the perspectives of others due often to the fact that we did not live their lives. What can we know with absolute certainty about being a traitor, about being a Marxist, about being a Jew, about being a blind veteran? If, given the life we did live, these things were never really a part of it.
And here of course there is no distinction made between blind and sighted Jews until blindness itself was deemed to be condition that warranted sterilization.
Blind Jews in the Third Reich
by Gabriel Richter
At the Braille Monitor website
Hate propaganda, anti-Semitism, experimentation fever, Jews, blind Jews. Reacting to it as we are now as opposed to actually being back there and living it from day to day.
Here the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein takes center stage.
There are the gaps between how we react to these things here and now and how those back then experienced it “in reality”. There is what we are able to accumulate about the world around us that is in fact true for all of us, and what is instead embedded in subjective prejudices.
What can philosophers, scientists, sociologists, psychologists, political scientists etc., tell us about the “human condition” that might enable us to grasp the most rational and virtuous assessments…of back then and right now?
Armbands for everything. Once you start assuming that those who are different from you need to wear armbands – and patches and other tell-tale reminders that they are different from you – the sky is the limit. You may not have been the one wearing them back then but there are any number of moral and political and spiritual objectivists still around today that would like to being them back for something that you are. And those with sense deprivations are no different. Given the right – wrong? – set of circumstances the “human-all-too–human” assessment of our “civilized” world can go in any number of demographic/normative directions.
Can a Blind Person Be a Racist?
Osagie K. Obasogie
At the Scientific American website
Adapted from Blinded by Sight: Seeing Race through the Eyes of the Blind published in 2013
Let’s start with this:
“Approximately four out of every 10,000 children are certified as blind before their first birthday, but the statistics supporting this information are not considered reliable. It is difficult to determine if a newborn is blind because babies are extremely nearsighted during their first few months of life.” Reference* website.
So, however reliable the statistics may or may not be, it seems clear that only a small percentage of people come into the world unable to actually see the difference between those with one rather than another skin color…or with one rather than another facial feature with which sighted people are able to make such distinctions. So how much will be written or discussed about race taking blindness into account?
Instead, for those blind from birth – or soon thereafter – who grow up to be racist, how can it not be largely as a result of the same reason some sighted children grow up to be racist? They are taught to be by parents or families or communities that are themselves racist.
It then just becomes a matter of how racism is understood by those unable to actually see the racial distinctions between us.
I am beginning to see what You are getting it, and as i was halfway, the thought occured, instead of sense deprivation identity and dasein, could it be more effective to entitle it: self image- self concept and role?
But then the literary allusions may miss theirark
The significance of equating blindness with cognitive gaps could be more relevant in this nomenclature
The context here is a specific one of blindness or ocular segregation.
The cognative lapses are equated with blindnesd, and wether it is congenital and absolute or it had latency and suddenly receded must be put into focus.
The relationship between conceptual and phenomenological ‘blindness’ may not even have a cause, or it may be a case of mysterious conjunctitis , as Jung called it.
Levi Bruhl suspected as such between cultural differences, and I suspect they can be used between the brains of various species as well.
The way such associative and disassociative functions work, may appear pre-determine the type of deprivation which can cause the changes occurring to the levels of apprehension, which in turn, can variably effect (&) affect the sense of identity- identifiable varients that cause a limitation to re-associate formerly acquired senses of meaning.
The sense of deprived information may loose the signal, as it were, at the limit of an unlikable breach of experiencing objective criteria.
Therefore , the flux or gestalt between the cognative sense and the affective signal may become unretreable.
Thereby making the effort to find context a seemingly futile effort.
Note: I put the sense of sight into context, whereas a more general sense of meaning could be attributed by including those of sound, smell and ‘feel’ as well to gain an all around feeling toward how Jung may have attribute it.
If course, Iambigious, You may have meant the request for content in a deconstructed to absurd levels of apprehension, but for that slight please don’t accuse me of being without any humor at all
“Therefore , the flux or gestalt between the cognative sense and the affective signal may become unretreable.”
…and, given a set of circumstances construed by someone sighted, someone once sighted and then blind and someone born blind, how they might cogitate differently in regard to something revolving around the points raised above pertaining to such things as Nazi Germany and racism.
“Therefore , the flux or gestalt between the cognative sense and the affective signal may become unretreable.”
…and, given a set of circumstances construed by someone sighted, someone once sighted and then blind and someone born blind, how they might cogitate differently in regard to something revolving around the points raised above pertaining to such things as Nazi Germany and racism.
[/quote]
me no says;
It’s either language or lack of context that bothers You.
Very simply , self image-concept-role is similar to Your descriptive model as the title suggests - for blindness corresponds to cognitive disassociation or non-association.My suggestion bears more toward association per identity then actual literal deperevation of sensation.
The sense sepeevation can effect the relationllship between Dasein-and identity but what’s missing is the sense of that sense through which this happens
Sense depeicatiom within the context You are using is blindness literally, whereas sense deprevation entails all senses acting in concert.
This is tantamount to a relational matrix which pprovides a cognitively developed signal.
A self image singularly . such as 'blindness-. can not even describe this process but maybe as a metaphor. If that’s all You intended then it satisfies the intrinsic language game.
You say your posts [like the ones above] are not a hoax. But all I can note is that to me they often read as intellectual gibberish. Can I prove that? Nope. But this thread wasn’t created for that. It was created to explore “sense deprivation, identity and dasein” given such contexts as Nazi Germany and racism.
