Molyneux problem

The origin of what is known as the Molyneux problem lies in the following question posed by William Molyneux to John Locke: if a man born blind, and able to distinguish by touch between a cube and a globe, were made to see, could he now tell by sight which was the cube and which the globe, before he touched them?

I am still puzzled by this question.

Your views...

Originally posted by Hydrono
The origin of what is known as the Molyneux problem lies in the following question posed by William Molyneux to John Locke: if a man born blind, and able to distinguish by touch between a cube and a globe, were made to see, could he now tell by sight which was the cube and which the globe, before he touched them?

I am still puzzled by this question.

Your views...

I think they would be able discern the objects

Depends wether he was told what a globe and cube looked like.

Locke himself was of the opinion that the blind man, at first sight, would not be able with certainty to say which was the globe and which was the cube, whilst he only saw them.

I think no, by what I´ve heard blind people can only distinguish the objects after they touch them.

I think so, because as the blind man touched the objects, in his mind there would be enough of mental understanding to see the edges of a square are not smooth because you would feel them more sharply with your hands.

Your brain can construct mental images of what it feels, to a basic extent. Try it with objects that you've never seen before that like your freind has or something, you will be able to tell the difference if there is any significant difference between the two.

Interesting question

The trick in this one is neuro development. A blind man's visual system would be pretty much useless. The area of the brain that would have been used for it will have no doubt been specialized for something different, likely other senses.

So, a very important question would be, how much sight does this person recieve?

The visual system is not set up perfectly when you are born. Your brain continues to develop, and it is ONLY because of the environment that we live in that we can discern the objects around us. For instance, if you put kittens in a box that has no horizontal lines, they will be unable to see them properly when they are older. So in a very specific answer, no. Just turning on the sight of a person whose brain has developed to being blind will not let them distinguish between a cube or a sphere. In fact, they would be lucky to EVER see, let alone distinguish 3 dimensional objects. (this is a little off... if they had YEARS to develop, they may come out with fairly decent vision, provided they are still young enough).

However, if we assume that he is given the equivelent of a fully functional adult visual system (with no loss to other functioning) then clearly he could. This is because both touch and visual information go through a region of the brain called the thalmus that would activate similar "corner" or "round" receptors in the somatasensory and visual cortecies. This is really only possible in a though experiment like this, as there is NO POSSIBLE WAY that someone born blind would have the proper visual receptors for "corner", and even if it did, there would be no association in the thalmus and other regions between physical "corner" and visual "corner"