You're listening to partially examined life episode 353 part two. we've been discussing Thomas Reed's inquiry into the human mind.

Still talking about seeing, I think a point that I was,

maybe I'll remake, but just one of his critiques of Barclay was that Barclay was so properly fixated on the fact that the qualities of a body out in the world can't resemble the qualities of an idea in the mind that

he missed out on where they actually can resemble each other and he thought that when

somebody experiences shape through touch and experiences shape through

sight that those were just totally different that unless we'd had the experience of getting in there and having both of these things

working together, we see that the correlations. Whereas he wants to argue that Barclay was wrong about that.

The scene figure does resemble the touched

figure in exactly the way we're talking about. It's not that they have the same exact geometry,

but especially even if we're talking about the scene geometry is like projections on the inside of the sphere and then the touch geometry is straight up Euclidean, well especially when you're just talking about one little thing, one specific object that you're focusing on on the sphere. Well a square as

seen very much resembles a square as felt and so again he brings up this blind guy and

says the person who couldn't see, let's imagine we gave him

back sight, but we didn't let him touch anything for a while.

Could he figure out at his own?

Barclay says he could never figure out that that touched image was the same as the scene image and Reed has been saying that yes he could because even as a blind person he could figure out a lot about what scene images would be like,

even though he hadn't experienced them.

So what is this important, I guess, is the question.

There is some resemblance.

The scene image does resemble the thing in the world

in systematic ways. I guess that's the thing. It's not just, well, it's just a fact that when we have this image of some sort, a smell image, then it brings to mind a thing in the world of this type that we've interacted with and there's just nothing more to explain about it.

Reed clearly thinks that there might be a lot more to explain about it, a lot more that science can explore about it of exactly how we get that information

onto the retina, into the brain, blah, blah, blah. I don't think he's against that kind of explanation.

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