Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be blind? No, I don't mean like that time where you decided to see if you could go a whole day with your eyes closed and ended up in the hospital with a tea kettle on your head and third-degree burns. I'm talking about what it would be like to have no concept of what sight is at all.
Did you ever think about that? Do you realize that people who are blind from birth HAVE to think only in words, because they have no idea what anything looks like? Nothing at all. Think about how difficult it would be to explain sight to someone who had no clue what it was? It would be impossible. As a fun way to see how hard this would be, find someone colorblind and try to explain how colors work. They'll think you're insane or something. Probably. I'm not colorblind.
And what about deaf people? Wouldn't that just be insane? How the hell do you explain*sound to a deaf person. Sound is confusing enough already. How exactly ears work is still incredibly baffling to me. So how would a deaf person be able to figure it out. That would probably make their heads explode.
Or what about explaining any one of the five senses to someone who was born without it, and never knew that everyone else didn't have the same problem. I have a feeling someday this is going to happen to me. Like, there's a sixth sense that everybody decided not to tell me about. I guess it lets you, I dunno, detect pancakes or something. That would be awesome.
*In this scenario, we are assuming that you are writing down your explanations on a piece of paper or something.
I used to think about this all the time. Like, imagine trying to explain "blue" to a person who has been blind since birth.
ReplyDeleteSeriously.
How.
Say spoon to a blind man, and he'll think about how a spoon feels, what it does, how it tastes, maybe even how it smells. And he'll picture it more vividly in those respects than you ever will. It's silly to think they'd only think of it as the word.
ReplyDeleteLet's say everyone in the world couldn't feel a thing, except for one guy. Humanity hasn't designed a single item for touch. If there was one guy who could feel, he would go insane. He can experience something no one else can even imagine, suffers a concept totally unrecognizable to the rest of the world. How could he sleep on beds not made for nerve endings, how could he eat food that scratched unbearably across his mouth and throat?
Wow, that was actually really deep. At the same time, a world that couldn't feel would die very, very quickly.
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congenital_insensitivity_to_pain_with_anhidrosis
Yes, pain is certainly important.
ReplyDeleteI'm thinking along the lines of what it would be like to meet an alien race that has some sort of sense that we don't. WEIRD.