9 ms·

Molyneux's problem

122 points by ph0rque 9y ago

m12k 9y ago
I went in expecting an article about how the most enthusiastic and visionary game designers will tend to enthusiastically state their hopes, dreams and visions about the unfinished game they are working on, but will ultimately end up being ridiculed or being called liars when the final game fails to live up to the lofty ideas that they expressed during development. The actual article was interesting too though.
- teawrecks 9y ago
  Well Molyneux is taken, I guess we could call it the Murray effect.
  - LifeLiverTransp 9y ago
    To be honest, when Peters horses stampeded with him, the audience happily went along even with the most unreasonable idea. People like him where and are rare, and the games delivered under the name bullfrog where so legendary - (even though half of them he wasnt involved at all), its was allmost impossible to live up to that avalanch of a reputation that had developed around him. Its a sad thing that the people looking for something to hate- aka the web happend to him. I liked him visionary, and even if only half the vision survived, the games where always excellent.
    - shkkmo 9y ago
      The hate for Molyneux is not just due to him over promising. It is due to him continually lying to his supporters and taking their money to build and launch a F2P mobile game that still receives updates even though they haven't bothered to even post an update their steam community in 3 years. He is still misleadingly selling Godus under "Early Access" on Steam even though he clearly has no plans to continue development and there hasn't been an update in over 3 years.
    - Bromlife 9y ago
      Molyneux was/is such a massive bullshit artist, that he would even make promises in front of crowds that the game devs had never even heard before. He just let his imagination and mouth run wild.
      - LifeLiverTransp 9y ago
        Maybe the line between hoax and avantgard, never tryied before isnt as clear cut as many want it to be. If you venture into unchartered territory, trying things not done before- you are exploring a very branchy maze- and sometimes its only sheer luck keeping you from exploring a promising dead end. To a outsider, or somebody years later, looking down from the knowledgeable mountain of history- such simple decisions seem "strange" and wastefull. But down, in the trenches of today, they where the best move available. Kickstarter money was always play money of those investing, and once it has been used up- what should those developing eat? Love and air from the fans? He runs off with little sums, while at least delivering, while others venture off with full studio budgets and deliver next to nothing?
  - Bromlife 9y ago
    Murray deserves more respect than Molyneux. Where Molyneux was off to the next shiny idea after underwhelming is fans once again, Murray is still working hard on getting NMS to where they promised it would be at launch. Atlas Rises patch brought a lot of much needed content and I'm really looking forward to their latest anounced update. Peter's problem was that he didn't just release the game without all the promised features, he wouldn't even hang around to fix the bugs.
- ekianjo 9y ago
  > but will ultimately end up being ridiculed or being called liars It's well deserved if thats the case. At least if it keeps happening over and over again for the same person.
- _bxg1 9y ago
  Same
- anonytrary 9y ago
  "Plant a seed and watch it grow." is perhaps the most memorable broken promise. I always thought Peter would have continued to do great things had he been born 10 years later. The man's imagination certainly outpaced technology. A tragedy, indeed.
JetSpiegel 9y ago
> if a man born blind can feel the differences between shapes such as spheres and cubes, could he, if given the ability to see, distinguish those objects by sight alone, in reference to the tactile schemata he already possessed? If a sighted person can see an object and distinguish it by touch alone, the opposite must be true.
- Smaug123 9y ago
  It turns out that this is true for sighted people only because sighted people have grown up both touching and seeing objects. Someone who was born blind has not yet learnt the skill of comparing the two sensations. (The experiment which demonstrates this is explained in the Wikipedia article.)
- theoh 9y ago
  You're assuming a symmetry between sight and touch that is unlikely to hold completely. There is an interesting, if largely anecdotal, paper from the 60s. There may be more recent work. http://www.richardgregory.org/papers/recovery_blind/1-introduction.htm http://www.richardgregory.org/papers/recovery_blind/1-introd...
  - readpls 9y ago
    Did nobody read the article? There was an experiment done in 2003 that showed that no, newly-sighted individuals cannot distinguish objects based on existing tactile knowledge.
    - theoh 9y ago
      There is a TON of detailed and interesting information in the article I linked to. It is substantive, in contrast to the yes/no study described on the Wiki page. Yet you felt the need to create a throwaway account in order to complain about any and all discussion in the comments which doesn't hinge on the original link...
- dwighttk 9y ago
  >the opposite must be true. why?
centicosm 9y ago
This reminds me of the bouba/kiki effect in which there is perceptual cross-talk in auditory and perceptual schemata across all humans. It would be interesting to see if a blind person who became able to see would still label the shapes in the same way.
- jwilk 9y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect
  - SyneRyder 9y ago
    Wow, that was fascinating. For anyone else wanting to read the article, I would recommend looking at this non-labelled image first, and choosing which shape you would call Bouba and which you would call Kiki: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e7/Booba-Kiki.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e7/Booba-Ki... If you read the Wikipedia article first, you'll bias your own result on the test / experiment. Also an interesting footnote at the end of that article: "Individuals who have autism do not show as strong a preference. Individuals without autism agree with the standard result 88% of the time, while individuals with autism agree only 56% of the time."
bArray 9y ago
I think it really depends on whether the neurons responsible for handling vision processing have any natural spatial processing ability. It's not obvious to me whether they would or not. My guess is that allowing some time to look around the objects (without being told which is which and without touching them), that they would be able to create spatial relationships for vision processing (sensorimotor loop) and be able to overcome this issue. Once there is some spatial reasoning for the two different types of input, I believe they would begin to build correlations between them (only for very simple shapes). Perhaps an experiment could be made that would answer this by giving a person a completely new sense and asking the same identification problem. I think the skin could be interesting to use as it allows 2D input with the possibility of utilizing existing spatial mapping, yet isn't used (in most cases) for 2D depth feedback. You could attach some device that heats/cools, pokes, pinches or something else to excite nerves based on some depth information. Of course they would be blindfolded and unable to touch the objects. You could make two different types of experiment, one that has spatial mapping to the skin and another that is randomly linked, seeing how long (if at all) it takes for somebody to figure out from the inputs which shape they are observing. My guess is that they could quickly get an intuition for each shape simply by looking at the rate of change of inputs when they move about the object.
zaroth 9y ago
Spoiler alert - after “curing” blindness in a few patients this was demonstrated to be false. There was a more recent article which I saw in the aggs recently, but Google offers up this one from 2011: https://mobile.nytimes.com/2011/04/26/health/research/26blind.html https://mobile.nytimes.com/2011/04/26/health/research/26blin...
- jere 9y ago
  It's a question. How can it be false? And also Locke (who was being asked the question) was right in his answer.
  - zaroth 9y ago
    That is to say, experimentally the answer to the question is no.
  - ajross 9y ago
    Locke was "right" in his answer by dumb luck. Fundamental this question isn't about philosophy at all, it's an empirical matter of science. Without a good understanding of vision and neurology, and the ability to run good experiments based on informed hypotheses, there's no way to answer this. So, sure, Locke guess right based on a flawed (seriously: the basic science was 200 years in the future!) premise. That doesn't say much interesting about the subject.
    - Sharlin 9y ago
      It was philosophy back then; it's science now. A large part of philosophy is about asking questions that don't yet have scientific answers.
      - ajross 9y ago
        Sure. But saying "Locke was right" in a context where we're discussing an experiment run two centuries later certainly seems to be implying some kind of comparable discourse, no? I mean: "Einstein was right" in the context of the Michelson-Morley experiment means that he came up with a predictive theory that was later confirmed by practical scientists. Locke didn't. By scientific standards, he just guessed without any grounding. That distinction is really important! Edit to expand my point: the bottom line is that our current understanding of neurology has no bearing on who was "right" in a 200-year-old discussion, even though they are "technically" about the same subject. It just doesn't matter. If you want philosophy to be a separate domain from science (and we do, for obvious reasons), you need to keep it separate and not use science to argue about who was the better philosopher.
dooglius 9y ago
It seems as though the last paragraph, where the problem is actually resolved, should be a lot more prominent.
jere 9y ago
This is interesting and really counterintuitive for me after seeing the results. I would assume (and still can't shake the feeling) that a blind person would clearly know that a cube/square has corners and a sphere/circle does not. It's hard to understand how that isn't obvious when seeing for the first time. Even if it wasn't immediately understood, one should be able to trace, with fingers or eyes or whatever else, the outline of a cube vs sphere and observe that only one has corners. The act of tracing should match the tactile sensation of moving your fingers around similar objects.
- dooglius 9y ago
  I think it is a mistake to think that what we "see" comes from our eyes rather than from a large, trained visual network in the brain. Consider, for instance, the behavior of the eye's blind spot, or the fact that we perceive objects in one plane of vision despite having two eyes. These effects can't come from just raw data. Someone who hasn't learned/trained that processing is probably going to see something much more strange--do you think you would be able to differentiate between a sphere and a square by looking at hexdumps of bitmap files?
  - MichaelAO 9y ago
    Good point. If you haven't already, check out this talk by Donald Hoffman: https://www.ted.com/talks/donald_hoffman_do_we_see_reality_as_it_is https://www.ted.com/talks/donald_hoffman_do_we_see_reality_a...
emilga 9y ago
At Phaenomenta in Flensburg there's an interesting exhibit that breaks the link between tactile sensation and visual perception: An oval is placed flat on a table, so that you can touch it and feel it's shape. Above it, and parallel to the table, is a lens that distorts the oval so that it looks perfectly circular. When you trace the shape with your finger and keep your eyes closed, it feels like an oval. When you trace the shape by looking through the lens, it both looks and feels like you're tracing a circle. The feeling persisted when I used my fingers to grip it. Only by cupping it with my whole hand did it start feeling like an oval again, despite still looking circular. Pretty cool and weird!
- cmehdy 9y ago
  A few years ago, I was lucky to work with the brilliant Japanese researchers at the Cyber Interface Lab/Hirose-Tanikawa lab (The University of Tokyo). Amongst their projects (involving AR, VR and multi-modal devices), some students explored various ways to play with our perceptions and define more sharply the interactions and priorities of our senses. Incredible experiments involving simple contraptions as well as more advanced VR, and a lot of scientific creativity (see [1], particularly Multimodal interfaces) Amongst those projects, Yuki Ban's "Magic Pot" was very similar to what you described, and I remember being almost upset at the realization that the sense we tend to trust the most (vision) can also drive us in the wrong direction the fastest. (see [2] and [3] for more info) [1] http://www.cyber.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/projects/ http://www.cyber.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/projects/ [2] https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2343470 https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2343470 [3] http://www.drunk-boarder.com/works/magicpot/ http://www.drunk-boarder.com/works/magicpot/
- ogig 9y ago
  This experience seems the same as most described in this very interesting and recent article about virtual embodiment [1]. Seems like we didn't need VR helmets to realize it after all. [1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/02/are-we-already-living-in-virtual-reality https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/02/are-we-already...
- dustingetz 9y ago
  in drumming there is this idea of separating your hands, with training you can play uncoordinated rhythms simultaneously but without training this is very difficult. humans train their whole lives to integrate signals but this is the opposite. i wonder if in VR we will separate the senses
guntars 9y ago
I think this will be pretty obvious to anyone who has meddled with machine learning. Suppose you have a working model of the world (based on your sense of touch) and you now suddenly get more data (sight): {255,254,254,254,255,255,254,253,254,255,254,255,255,255,248,247,255,255,255,254,255,249,228,221,207,204,210,216,247,255,255,236,146,169,184,166,127,88,231,255,255,241,154,155,155,106,96,105,236,255,255,243,156,159,160,113,105,100,238,255,255,247,170,157,164,104,55,103,243,255,254,255,244,214,179,120,182,237,255,254,255,255,255,255,246,244,255,255,255,255,255,255,254,254,255,255,253,254,255,255} Do you see the cube? I'd think not.
- Sharlin 9y ago
  This. Newly-sighted people have no idea whatsoever what to make of the torrent of confusing sensory data they're suddently receiving. Their brains simply haven't grown the really complicated pattern-recognition machinery required to reason about perspective projection, lighting and shading, shadows, colors and textures, and everything else people sighted from birth take for granted.
  - heavenlyblue 9y ago
    Highly contextually dependent: most of the early-detection neurons are exactly what you describe: edge-detectors, color similarity detectors, etc. They become a thing right from the birth of a child and would never develop if the child could never see at all (they have a very rigid structure, so the random development is out of the equation). So you’re clearly touching upon the definition of what is it to “have the vision” and what is it to “obtain the vision” as it’s not binary anymore: there are many levels to “vision”, most of which overlap as well.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- __s 9y ago
  More curious would be to show people a set of cube/sphere datasets & ask them to categorize
- wcoenen 9y ago
jknoepfler 9y ago
I think Molyneux's problem is an excellent example of why Kantian thinking (as he is apologetically understood in the 21st century) is so important, even today. If you follow a modern Kantian line, one of the most important functions of the brain is to provide a common spatial and temporal framework in which it is possible to represent things (a basis for representation). The brain then does the immensely awful work of creating objects in that spatial and temporal basis out of the mess that it gets from optical, auditory, haptic, olfactory systems, as well as information it gets from very strong beliefs we have about the world (think Piaget - object permanence, objects can't be co-located, folk-physics, etc.) We situate a self in that world, and we populate our surroundings with family members, cardboard tubes, music, clouds, walls - every mundane thing. We even build systems of knowledge using symbols in that world, which is rather remarkable (our folk-physics is not the physics we use for engineering, obviously). Consider the problem of remote-piloting a drone. We are capable of shifting our frame of reference from our eyeballs to our droneballs and back again pretty quickly. Your brain is a complex thing - think of how quickly you are able to translate musculo-skelatal movements of your fingers into the correct inputs for the drone. Or say you're wearing headphones and getting auditory input from the drone: how does your brain realize that the sound of someone saying your name (muffled through the headphones) is coming from your friend standing next to you? There is a sort of representational richness in solving these problems that is easy to overlook. I think we've all had the jarring experience of being woken from a dream by a human voice, or a sound in our home, that had one meaning in the dream and another upon waking. Same auditory input, very different processing, but all part of an attempt to project a world that makes sense of your inputs. Experience is a function of our brain working constantly to unify sensation to create an accurate simulation of what is going on around ourselves. The brain does so in a basis language, and its easy to have the mistaken belief that the basis language of space and time is something that "is just there". It is "just there," in the sense that our simulation works pretty darn well for creating a coherent world that we can navigate, but the brain doesn't get it for free - it assumes that basis. I happen to think that the common basis for locating things in space and time is a large part of what makes language possible (how can all agree that "there's a cat on the mat" (or not)), but that's just a silly personal hunch and not a well-considered position. It was a very common mistake in academia ten years ago to think that humans learn the structure of the world from data. We do, but we require a very strong grammar of representation in order to even begin having what we call experiences that it is possible to organize, or learn from (parallel to language learning).
simonhughes22 9y ago
Part of the problem with this is assuming that the person regained their site, they would not initially be able to make sense of the information. Seeing happens as much in the brain as in the eyes. I love how they spoke and wrote back then. It's comprehensible, but it makes clear how differently they spoke back then.
stefkors 9y ago
When reading the title I thought this was named after Peter Molyneux the creator of fable. And the problem was over sharing/promesing game features
- falcrist 9y ago
  I thought it was about Stephan Molyneux.
  - written 9y ago
    I hoped it was not.
jadell 9y ago
This can be directly observed in the case of Shirl Jennings[0], upon whose life the movie At First Sight[1] is based. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirl_Jennings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirl_Jennings [1]http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0132512/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0132512/
dangoldin 9y ago
Reminded me of the McGurk effect (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-lN8vWm3m0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-lN8vWm3m0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGurk_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGurk_effect). I'm constantly surprised by how our brains work.
tiziano88 9y ago
If someone suddenly "switched on" a sonar detector that had been dormant in your body for all your life, would you be able to immediately recognise shapes and structures with it, and relate this new sense to your existing ones? My guess is not.

122 points by ph0rque 9y ago

m12k 9y ago

I went in expecting an article about how the most enthusiastic and visionary game designers will tend to enthusiastically state their hopes, dreams and visions about the unfinished game they are working on, but will ultimately end up being ridiculed or being called liars when the final game fails to live up to the lofty ideas that they expressed during development. The actual article was interesting too though.

teawrecks 9y ago
Well Molyneux is taken, I guess we could call it the Murray effect.
- LifeLiverTransp 9y ago
  To be honest, when Peters horses stampeded with him, the audience happily went along even with the most unreasonable idea. People like him where and are rare, and the games delivered under the name bullfrog where so legendary - (even though half of them he wasnt involved at all), its was allmost impossible to live up to that avalanch of a reputation that had developed around him. Its a sad thing that the people looking for something to hate- aka the web happend to him. I liked him visionary, and even if only half the vision survived, the games where always excellent.
  - shkkmo 9y ago
    The hate for Molyneux is not just due to him over promising. It is due to him continually lying to his supporters and taking their money to build and launch a F2P mobile game that still receives updates even though they haven't bothered to even post an update their steam community in 3 years. He is still misleadingly selling Godus under "Early Access" on Steam even though he clearly has no plans to continue development and there hasn't been an update in over 3 years.
  - Bromlife 9y ago
    Molyneux was/is such a massive bullshit artist, that he would even make promises in front of crowds that the game devs had never even heard before. He just let his imagination and mouth run wild.
    - LifeLiverTransp 9y ago
      Maybe the line between hoax and avantgard, never tryied before isnt as clear cut as many want it to be. If you venture into unchartered territory, trying things not done before- you are exploring a very branchy maze- and sometimes its only sheer luck keeping you from exploring a promising dead end. To a outsider, or somebody years later, looking down from the knowledgeable mountain of history- such simple decisions seem "strange" and wastefull. But down, in the trenches of today, they where the best move available. Kickstarter money was always play money of those investing, and once it has been used up- what should those developing eat? Love and air from the fans? He runs off with little sums, while at least delivering, while others venture off with full studio budgets and deliver next to nothing?
- Bromlife 9y ago
  Murray deserves more respect than Molyneux. Where Molyneux was off to the next shiny idea after underwhelming is fans once again, Murray is still working hard on getting NMS to where they promised it would be at launch. Atlas Rises patch brought a lot of much needed content and I'm really looking forward to their latest anounced update. Peter's problem was that he didn't just release the game without all the promised features, he wouldn't even hang around to fix the bugs.
ekianjo 9y ago
> but will ultimately end up being ridiculed or being called liars It's well deserved if thats the case. At least if it keeps happening over and over again for the same person.
_bxg1 9y ago
Same
anonytrary 9y ago
"Plant a seed and watch it grow." is perhaps the most memorable broken promise. I always thought Peter would have continued to do great things had he been born 10 years later. The man's imagination certainly outpaced technology. A tragedy, indeed.

JetSpiegel 9y ago

> if a man born blind can feel the differences between shapes such as spheres and cubes, could he, if given the ability to see, distinguish those objects by sight alone, in reference to the tactile schemata he already possessed? If a sighted person can see an object and distinguish it by touch alone, the opposite must be true.

Smaug123 9y ago
It turns out that this is true for sighted people only because sighted people have grown up both touching and seeing objects. Someone who was born blind has not yet learnt the skill of comparing the two sensations. (The experiment which demonstrates this is explained in the Wikipedia article.)
theoh 9y ago
You're assuming a symmetry between sight and touch that is unlikely to hold completely. There is an interesting, if largely anecdotal, paper from the 60s. There may be more recent work. http://www.richardgregory.org/papers/recovery_blind/1-introduction.htm http://www.richardgregory.org/papers/recovery_blind/1-introd...
- readpls 9y ago
  Did nobody read the article? There was an experiment done in 2003 that showed that no, newly-sighted individuals cannot distinguish objects based on existing tactile knowledge.
  - theoh 9y ago
    There is a TON of detailed and interesting information in the article I linked to. It is substantive, in contrast to the yes/no study described on the Wiki page. Yet you felt the need to create a throwaway account in order to complain about any and all discussion in the comments which doesn't hinge on the original link...
dwighttk 9y ago
>the opposite must be true. why?

centicosm 9y ago

This reminds me of the bouba/kiki effect in which there is perceptual cross-talk in auditory and perceptual schemata across all humans. It would be interesting to see if a blind person who became able to see would still label the shapes in the same way.

jwilk 9y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect
- SyneRyder 9y ago
  Wow, that was fascinating. For anyone else wanting to read the article, I would recommend looking at this non-labelled image first, and choosing which shape you would call Bouba and which you would call Kiki: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e7/Booba-Kiki.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e7/Booba-Ki... If you read the Wikipedia article first, you'll bias your own result on the test / experiment. Also an interesting footnote at the end of that article: "Individuals who have autism do not show as strong a preference. Individuals without autism agree with the standard result 88% of the time, while individuals with autism agree only 56% of the time."

bArray 9y ago

I think it really depends on whether the neurons responsible for handling vision processing have any natural spatial processing ability. It's not obvious to me whether they would or not. My guess is that allowing some time to look around the objects (without being told which is which and without touching them), that they would be able to create spatial relationships for vision processing (sensorimotor loop) and be able to overcome this issue. Once there is some spatial reasoning for the two different types of input, I believe they would begin to build correlations between them (only for very simple shapes). Perhaps an experiment could be made that would answer this by giving a person a completely new sense and asking the same identification problem. I think the skin could be interesting to use as it allows 2D input with the possibility of utilizing existing spatial mapping, yet isn't used (in most cases) for 2D depth feedback. You could attach some device that heats/cools, pokes, pinches or something else to excite nerves based on some depth information. Of course they would be blindfolded and unable to touch the objects. You could make two different types of experiment, one that has spatial mapping to the skin and another that is randomly linked, seeing how long (if at all) it takes for somebody to figure out from the inputs which shape they are observing. My guess is that they could quickly get an intuition for each shape simply by looking at the rate of change of inputs when they move about the object.

zaroth 9y ago

Spoiler alert - after “curing” blindness in a few patients this was demonstrated to be false. There was a more recent article which I saw in the aggs recently, but Google offers up this one from 2011: https://mobile.nytimes.com/2011/04/26/health/research/26blind.html https://mobile.nytimes.com/2011/04/26/health/research/26blin...

jere 9y ago
It's a question. How can it be false? And also Locke (who was being asked the question) was right in his answer.
- zaroth 9y ago
  That is to say, experimentally the answer to the question is no.
- ajross 9y ago
  Locke was "right" in his answer by dumb luck. Fundamental this question isn't about philosophy at all, it's an empirical matter of science. Without a good understanding of vision and neurology, and the ability to run good experiments based on informed hypotheses, there's no way to answer this. So, sure, Locke guess right based on a flawed (seriously: the basic science was 200 years in the future!) premise. That doesn't say much interesting about the subject.
  - Sharlin 9y ago
    It was philosophy back then; it's science now. A large part of philosophy is about asking questions that don't yet have scientific answers.
    - ajross 9y ago
      Sure. But saying "Locke was right" in a context where we're discussing an experiment run two centuries later certainly seems to be implying some kind of comparable discourse, no? I mean: "Einstein was right" in the context of the Michelson-Morley experiment means that he came up with a predictive theory that was later confirmed by practical scientists. Locke didn't. By scientific standards, he just guessed without any grounding. That distinction is really important! Edit to expand my point: the bottom line is that our current understanding of neurology has no bearing on who was "right" in a 200-year-old discussion, even though they are "technically" about the same subject. It just doesn't matter. If you want philosophy to be a separate domain from science (and we do, for obvious reasons), you need to keep it separate and not use science to argue about who was the better philosopher.

dooglius 9y ago

It seems as though the last paragraph, where the problem is actually resolved, should be a lot more prominent.

jere 9y ago

This is interesting and really counterintuitive for me after seeing the results. I would assume (and still can't shake the feeling) that a blind person would clearly know that a cube/square has corners and a sphere/circle does not. It's hard to understand how that isn't obvious when seeing for the first time. Even if it wasn't immediately understood, one should be able to trace, with fingers or eyes or whatever else, the outline of a cube vs sphere and observe that only one has corners. The act of tracing should match the tactile sensation of moving your fingers around similar objects.

dooglius 9y ago
I think it is a mistake to think that what we "see" comes from our eyes rather than from a large, trained visual network in the brain. Consider, for instance, the behavior of the eye's blind spot, or the fact that we perceive objects in one plane of vision despite having two eyes. These effects can't come from just raw data. Someone who hasn't learned/trained that processing is probably going to see something much more strange--do you think you would be able to differentiate between a sphere and a square by looking at hexdumps of bitmap files?
- MichaelAO 9y ago
  Good point. If you haven't already, check out this talk by Donald Hoffman: https://www.ted.com/talks/donald_hoffman_do_we_see_reality_as_it_is https://www.ted.com/talks/donald_hoffman_do_we_see_reality_a...

emilga 9y ago

At Phaenomenta in Flensburg there's an interesting exhibit that breaks the link between tactile sensation and visual perception: An oval is placed flat on a table, so that you can touch it and feel it's shape. Above it, and parallel to the table, is a lens that distorts the oval so that it looks perfectly circular. When you trace the shape with your finger and keep your eyes closed, it feels like an oval. When you trace the shape by looking through the lens, it both looks and feels like you're tracing a circle. The feeling persisted when I used my fingers to grip it. Only by cupping it with my whole hand did it start feeling like an oval again, despite still looking circular. Pretty cool and weird!

cmehdy 9y ago
A few years ago, I was lucky to work with the brilliant Japanese researchers at the Cyber Interface Lab/Hirose-Tanikawa lab (The University of Tokyo). Amongst their projects (involving AR, VR and multi-modal devices), some students explored various ways to play with our perceptions and define more sharply the interactions and priorities of our senses. Incredible experiments involving simple contraptions as well as more advanced VR, and a lot of scientific creativity (see [1], particularly Multimodal interfaces) Amongst those projects, Yuki Ban's "Magic Pot" was very similar to what you described, and I remember being almost upset at the realization that the sense we tend to trust the most (vision) can also drive us in the wrong direction the fastest. (see [2] and [3] for more info) [1] http://www.cyber.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/projects/ http://www.cyber.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/projects/ [2] https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2343470 https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2343470 [3] http://www.drunk-boarder.com/works/magicpot/ http://www.drunk-boarder.com/works/magicpot/
ogig 9y ago
This experience seems the same as most described in this very interesting and recent article about virtual embodiment [1]. Seems like we didn't need VR helmets to realize it after all. [1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/02/are-we-already-living-in-virtual-reality https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/02/are-we-already...
dustingetz 9y ago
in drumming there is this idea of separating your hands, with training you can play uncoordinated rhythms simultaneously but without training this is very difficult. humans train their whole lives to integrate signals but this is the opposite. i wonder if in VR we will separate the senses

guntars 9y ago

I think this will be pretty obvious to anyone who has meddled with machine learning. Suppose you have a working model of the world (based on your sense of touch) and you now suddenly get more data (sight): {255,254,254,254,255,255,254,253,254,255,254,255,255,255,248,247,255,255,255,254,255,249,228,221,207,204,210,216,247,255,255,236,146,169,184,166,127,88,231,255,255,241,154,155,155,106,96,105,236,255,255,243,156,159,160,113,105,100,238,255,255,247,170,157,164,104,55,103,243,255,254,255,244,214,179,120,182,237,255,254,255,255,255,255,246,244,255,255,255,255,255,255,254,254,255,255,253,254,255,255} Do you see the cube? I'd think not.

Sharlin 9y ago
This. Newly-sighted people have no idea whatsoever what to make of the torrent of confusing sensory data they're suddently receiving. Their brains simply haven't grown the really complicated pattern-recognition machinery required to reason about perspective projection, lighting and shading, shadows, colors and textures, and everything else people sighted from birth take for granted.
- heavenlyblue 9y ago
  Highly contextually dependent: most of the early-detection neurons are exactly what you describe: edge-detectors, color similarity detectors, etc. They become a thing right from the birth of a child and would never develop if the child could never see at all (they have a very rigid structure, so the random development is out of the equation). So you’re clearly touching upon the definition of what is it to “have the vision” and what is it to “obtain the vision” as it’s not binary anymore: there are many levels to “vision”, most of which overlap as well.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
__s 9y ago
More curious would be to show people a set of cube/sphere datasets & ask them to categorize
wcoenen 9y ago

jknoepfler 9y ago

I think Molyneux's problem is an excellent example of why Kantian thinking (as he is apologetically understood in the 21st century) is so important, even today. If you follow a modern Kantian line, one of the most important functions of the brain is to provide a common spatial and temporal framework in which it is possible to represent things (a basis for representation). The brain then does the immensely awful work of creating objects in that spatial and temporal basis out of the mess that it gets from optical, auditory, haptic, olfactory systems, as well as information it gets from very strong beliefs we have about the world (think Piaget - object permanence, objects can't be co-located, folk-physics, etc.) We situate a self in that world, and we populate our surroundings with family members, cardboard tubes, music, clouds, walls - every mundane thing. We even build systems of knowledge using symbols in that world, which is rather remarkable (our folk-physics is not the physics we use for engineering, obviously). Consider the problem of remote-piloting a drone. We are capable of shifting our frame of reference from our eyeballs to our droneballs and back again pretty quickly. Your brain is a complex thing - think of how quickly you are able to translate musculo-skelatal movements of your fingers into the correct inputs for the drone. Or say you're wearing headphones and getting auditory input from the drone: how does your brain realize that the sound of someone saying your name (muffled through the headphones) is coming from your friend standing next to you? There is a sort of representational richness in solving these problems that is easy to overlook. I think we've all had the jarring experience of being woken from a dream by a human voice, or a sound in our home, that had one meaning in the dream and another upon waking. Same auditory input, very different processing, but all part of an attempt to project a world that makes sense of your inputs. Experience is a function of our brain working constantly to unify sensation to create an accurate simulation of what is going on around ourselves. The brain does so in a basis language, and its easy to have the mistaken belief that the basis language of space and time is something that "is just there". It is "just there," in the sense that our simulation works pretty darn well for creating a coherent world that we can navigate, but the brain doesn't get it for free - it assumes that basis. I happen to think that the common basis for locating things in space and time is a large part of what makes language possible (how can all agree that "there's a cat on the mat" (or not)), but that's just a silly personal hunch and not a well-considered position. It was a very common mistake in academia ten years ago to think that humans learn the structure of the world from data. We do, but we require a very strong grammar of representation in order to even begin having what we call experiences that it is possible to organize, or learn from (parallel to language learning).

simonhughes22 9y ago

Part of the problem with this is assuming that the person regained their site, they would not initially be able to make sense of the information. Seeing happens as much in the brain as in the eyes. I love how they spoke and wrote back then. It's comprehensible, but it makes clear how differently they spoke back then.

stefkors 9y ago

When reading the title I thought this was named after Peter Molyneux the creator of fable. And the problem was over sharing/promesing game features

falcrist 9y ago
I thought it was about Stephan Molyneux.
- written 9y ago
  I hoped it was not.

jadell 9y ago

This can be directly observed in the case of Shirl Jennings[0], upon whose life the movie At First Sight[1] is based. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirl_Jennings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirl_Jennings [1]http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0132512/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0132512/

dangoldin 9y ago

Reminded me of the McGurk effect (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-lN8vWm3m0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-lN8vWm3m0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGurk_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGurk_effect). I'm constantly surprised by how our brains work.

tiziano88 9y ago

If someone suddenly "switched on" a sonar detector that had been dormant in your body for all your life, would you be able to immediately recognise shapes and structures with it, and relate this new sense to your existing ones? My guess is not.