Since this part deals with how we see the world and how our organizing ideas of the world are in the seeing, I would like to share an excerpt of my book which deals with this question the other way around: how would we perceive the world without an organizing idea?
“That we don’t ‘see’ the meaning of (or in ) the world, let alone the world as it is, but that the perception of meaning is an acquired skill that we learn from birth, is well known from the fact that it takes several weeks until newborns start to recognize their parents’ faces. They don’t move their eyes between two images and they see only objects that are 20-30 cm away, holding their gaze for only a few seconds. For babies, the world is only a kaleidoscope of fuzzy images without meaning.
Interestingly, we can gain a glimpse into what it is like to be in such a state of ‘meaningless awareness’ from those grownups affected by congenital cataracts and that could be treated later. ‘ Congenital cataract ’ is an organic anomaly present at birth that clouds the eye’s natural lens and that can result in ‘amblyopia’ –that is, a disorder of sight in which the brain fails to process visual stimuli. In the 1930s, Marius von Senden described, for the first time, the perception of space and shape in the congenitally blind before and after operation. When the sight of previously blind patients was restored, and their bandages were taken off, the patients did not see the world as assumed. Instead, what they experienced was only a blotch of chaotic colored patches that meant nothing to them. They needed time and exercise to make any sense out of it.
The issue is not new. It was already debated in the 17th century and is known as the ‘Molyneux problem’ . In 1689, the French philosopher William Molyneux conceived of the following thought experiment.
Suppose a man is born blind and has learned to recognize objects only by touch. For example, this person can distinguish, by the sense of touch, a sphere from a cube but has never seen them by the sense of sight. Now suppose that he suddenly can see. Molyneux questioned whether, if the sphere and cube were placed on a table, the man would be able to say which was the sphere and which was the cube without touching them.
The question was debated among bright minds, like John Locke and George Berkeley, who essentially agreed that when our mind can’t build a relation between the tactile and sight worlds, the answer to Molyneux’s question must be negative. The connection between the two worlds must be established by experience.
In 2011, neuroscience could furnish an answer. An Indian research project, ‘Project Prakash’ , that treats blind children, and with their help, tries to find answers to scientific questions about how the brain develops and learns to see, showed that Locke and Berkeley were right. Indeed, it turns out that in the treatment of congenitally blind children (8-17 years old), once they gained sight, they failed to visually match objects that were previously known to them only in the form of tactile information. Therefore, transferring tactile to visual knowledge is not an innate ability. However, this ability developed quite rapidly and their skills in relating the vision-touch information had improved a few days after sight onset and was almost restored in the range of months.
These were only some of the many anecdotes which make it clear how data is not understanding. Meaning and sensory input are ontologically two distinct categories. If we don’t realize this point, then a plethora of paradoxes, apparent inconsistencies, and strange consequences appear.
The question is: In what sense is science immune to these perceptual illusions? Isn’t science a construct of meanings too? Are things like matter, particles, strings, neurons, etc. objectively real in the world or are they on the same ontological footing as any subjective experience of meaning, such as the vase and the two faces of the Gestalt figure?
The only thing we can be sure of is that we have perceptions. We construct our world representations, not by knowing something which is out of us but always and inevitably by some computation which takes a subjective experience of perception at its foundation. It all comes down to perception. The world around us is constructed in our minds from sensory information of perception. One thing is sensory perception as such and another is the emergence of a mentally bounded semantic object which arises from these phenomenal events.”