To a blind man the sun is something that offers warmth, but to those that see it is something that offers warmth and light, it exists to both of them but in different ways.

 

Does evidence cause your perspective or does perspective cause your evidence (notice there is no empirical in this question)?

 

Villain,

 

Or perhaps the question is about one's knowledge of the world, compared with the abilities one has to internalize it.

That is, what patterns do you notice and "remember". (Figuring that something has to change in ones brain, to record the pattern in some analog fashion, some representative arrangement that closely mirrors the original pattern.)

 

The blind man "records" that of the Sun that he feels, and hears about from others. It is still the same sun, even in the mind of the blindman and the sighted, at least by virtue of its "common" characteristics. I myself have never looked at the sun long enough to study it, 'cause I was told it would burn out my rentinae if I did. I still have an "image" of it, that I can recall even on a cloudy day, or at night. I would imagine that a blind man is perfectly capable of holding such an "image" of the sun, that would be composed of the analogous patterns in his brain, to the patterns that the sun exhibits to him.

 

Interesting that you say the blind man feels the heat, and sighted people sense the heat and light...when the "heat" is really light in the infrared range. The sighted person is able to focus light in the visible sprectrum onto the back of their eye, where the shape and color of the sun is reproduced, and this "pattern" is promoted into the brain, through the firing or non-firing of specifically arranged rods and cones. All the light from the sun is hitting the blind man, same as the sighted. The sighted man has the ability to resolve it to an objective image directly, through the use of the evolved apparatus of the eye. The blind man, I would imagine, could still retain an objective "image" of the sun, just not one derived through the focusing lens of a human eye. The analogies might need to be different, but the blind man could still know the distance to the sun, the actual size of the sun, the angular size of the sun, the shape of the sun, the radiation it eminates and the nuclear reactions going on inside it, its history and its projected future, the role it played in the formation of the solar system, and its importance to human life, through its role in photosynthesis in plants.

 

Regards, TAR2

Edited April 14, 201213 yr by tar

Neither the blind man nor the sighted, directly sense the ultraviolet and magnetic eminations. We "know" these in indirect ways.

Edited April 14, 201213 yr by tar