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+--- Thread: How newborn chicks help settle a centuries-old debate about cognition & our senses (/thread-15904.html)
How newborn chicks help settle a centuries-old debate about cognition & our senses - C C - May 20, 2024
https://theconversation.com/how-newborn-chicks-are-helping-to-settle-a-centuries-old-debate-about-cognition-and-our-senses-229824
EXCERPTS: Irish philosopher William Molyneux wrote a letter to fellow philosopher John Locke. Molyneux’s letter pondered whether a person born blind, who learns to differentiate between a cube and a sphere through touch, would recognise these objects upon immediately gaining sight.
[...] Being focused on the role of experience in people’s formation of ideas and beliefs, empiricists like Locke think that sensory experience is necessary to learn or understand the correspondence between tactile and visual information.
[...] This result would surprise Molyneux and Locke (and possibly modern empiricists) because it shows the brain is wired to make sense of the complexities of the world before we have direct experience with it... (MORE - details)