The Philosophy of Sight Without Vision

“See” in the English language is an extremely ambiguous term. It may apply to the perception and subsequent interpretation of light waves or it may mean “understand” or “experience positive proof of existence of.” To one particular cross-section of the world’s population, though, it has a very different meaning. To visually impaired people (VIP’s) it means to touch, hear, or some combination of the two. People are trained at birth to rely on their vision as the most important and accurate sense, thereby equating sight with experiencing positive proof of other objects’ existence, so we VIP’s take “to see” to mean “to experience positive proof of existence of an object by using the most accurate sense available,” in addition to the traditional secondary definition “to understand.” When a visually impaired person says “I see it,” referring to a chair that a sighted person indicated was in the walkway, the VIP means that he or she has discovered it through touch—tripping on it or having found it with a cane, considered an extension of one’s arm. So what is it that a VIP “sees?” When a sighted person “sees,” in the physical perception sense of the word, they experience light waves hitting the retinae and being translated into a mentally understandable concept. When a VIP “sees,” he or she has physical contact with the object, the sensations of which are then transferred to the brain where a similarly mentally understandable concept is created, or takes in sound waves, which are again interpreted by the brain. Which, if either, of these two types of sight is a more definite proof of existence of an object? We will start with analyzing the ability of each of these three senses (vision, touch, and hearing) to be fooled, by both human efforts and natural conditions, beginning with vision, then moving to touch, and finally hearing.

Anyone who has ever seen a magician perform at a circus or fair or other such venue is aware of the concept of an optical illusion. This is the manipulation of psychological patterning and overstimulation to produce false imagery. Take, for example, the red and green cross experiment usually one in the middle-school classroom at some point. A student colors a large red cross on a white sheet of paper, then takes a blank sheet and holds it behind the one with the red cross. The student then stares at the red cross for over a minute, and then quickly removes the red cross page so he or she is now staring at the blank sheet of paper. 90% of these students will tell you that they see a green cross on the blank sheet, even though they know the sheet to be completely white. This occurs because the eye’s rods and cones responsible for working with red light tired after a short period of time, less than 30 seconds, but the mind knows it is still observing the red cross so for the remainder of the experiment it generates the cross image while the red rod and cone pairs regenerate and re-energize themselves to continue producing. But by the time they are prepared to do this the red cross is now gone. The cross image still fixed in the brain will remain for a few seconds while the eye reorganizes the rods and cones responsible for the new color and the green rods and cones take over for a moment, being the strongest in the eye. By the very nature of how the eye works, different cells working in shifts in tandem with cerebral compensation images, we ‘see’ false images all the time. In fact, more than 40% of all visual perception is psychologically stimulated! Then there is the pretentious number of petty magicians floating around the entertainment industry to consider. Both natural and man-made optical illusions are such common, everyday occurrences that we cannot reasonably accept our own vision as an accurate picture of the world around us.

Somatosensory perception, or the somatic senses, include tactile contact, temperature, and pain. These sensations are transferred from somatic receptors through nerves in the spinal column to the cerebral cortex. Only temperature receptors can be triggered without direct contact with another object, but all of the various types of somatic receptors can be internally triggered, that is, activated without external contact. For instance, cocaine addicts often refer to “coke bugs” to name a symptom of long-term usage where the consumer feels the sensation of a bug crawling across his or her skin, or a similar itching sensation. This is not actual touch since the somatic senses have not made contact with another surface, so it is considered a somatic illusion. These are much harder to generate than optical illusions because the somatic sensors do not rely on an intermediary physical phenomenon, light waves, to generate their information packets.

The aural sense, hearing, is generated in much the same way as vision is, through senses stimulated by waves. However it differs in the fact that the wave perceived by the auditory system is the thing perceived, while the visual senses merely detect a collection of light waves bouncing off an object. Sound waves are vibrations through the air generated by two objects or two parts of an object contacting each other. Aural illusions are much more difficult to create but much more convincing, since they play more on psychological tendencies and expectations than the actual sensation manipulation itself. A person creates a sound similar to something his or her audience expects to hear, such as replacing similar-sounding words like “sick” and “six” in the traditional sheep riddle. “There were twenty six/sick sheep. One died, how many were left?” The speaker may use either “sick” or “six” and the responder’s answer will vary depending on his or her interpretation of the similar-sounding word. Because sighted people pay very little attention to their hearing in proportion to the amount of attention they delegate to interpreting visual perceptions they are much easier to fool with tricks like this, or strange echo effects in rooms or off out musical instruments. This is not manipulating the sound wave itself, but producing a different wave than the one expected that is close enough to slide under the radar.

So, what a visually impaired person “sees” when they say that they “see” something is either the physical presence of the object against their somatic sensors or the sound that object makes against another object, or a combination of both. Given that it is extremely easy to manipulate a person’s interpretation of sound waves I would say that hearing cannot be too heavily relied upon as evidence for an object’s existence. How many times have we heard voices on the winds, or the ocean in the cup of a seashell? However touch is a much more concrete experience of an object’s existence, since it can only be fooled by internal means and these are difficult to effect. All of this, of course, hinges on mental interpretation of the physical sensations, and only can be assigned to physical, tangible entities such as chairs, tables, and cabbages. To deal with unobservable entities like emotions and nanoscopic matter we must delve into the subject of “seeing” as “understanding.”

When a VIP “sees” anger, or joy, or any other emotion in another person he or she does not have the luxury of its physical manifestation in body language and facial expressions to assist in interpretation. Instead he or she must rely on context, history, and sound waves. As the latter has already been previously discussed we will focus on context and history for this section of the discussion. In this case, “see” means “understand,” which can be interpreted to mean having gathered information relating to the topic and assembled it into a logical order. The gathering of information part comes from history and context. History, in this context, refers to the VIP’s foreknowledge of the emoter’s character and temperament, and of basic human psychological responses. If there is little or no history between the two people then the VIP must rely totally on his or her understanding of human natural tendencies and responses. Context, for the purpose of this paper, refers to the conversation and related actions in which the emotion exists. Interpretation of these two things allows a person to understand, and therefore “see” emotion.

Cells and viruses and other such unobservable entities are a little harder to deal with. Unless the instrument used to generate reactions to these items’ existence, such as microscopes and spectrographs, use audio output systems instead of visual outputs, then a VIP can have no experience at all of these objects without a second person translating the data into audio or Braille or Nemith code, a tactile mathematics system. Without trusting another person’s interpretation of the data produced by reaction-generating instruments a VIP cannot have positive proof of existence of any of that class of object.

Given all this discussion about which senses work most reliably and produce the best data, can we use “seeing” as proof of an object’s existence? What difference is there between sensory data and mathematical data that are perceived through the senses? How do we know that the mathematics we perceive through our sight or hearing or touch exist any more than the direct sensory perception itself? Sensory data is much more directly derived information than mathematics, which relies on the senses to gather the beginning data, then to interpret it when the results are spat out, so it is quite an indirect way of experiencing positive proof of an object’s existence. I believe we can consider our sensory data as valid proof of existence of an object given reasonable interpretation paradigms based on logic and a suspicious intellect prepared for deceptive conditions. Since we have no proof that these objects do not exist and some types of albeit dubious data that claim they do is it not reasonable to conclude that for all practical purposes our senses provide us with convincing evidence that objects we perceive do indeed exist.