# If everyone in history had always been blind

Category: Let's talk

## Post 1 by Voyager (I just keep on posting!) on Wednesday, 29-Jul-2015 19:26:25

Yesterday a friend and I were debating over what a blind human race would be like. She seems to think that if humans had always been blind, we would have some form of super duper advanced technology that would enable us all to drive, fly and everything else, except it would somehow be better. When I asked her how this race would even know about the moon, she suggested that we could use pulses of sound to echolocate it. I pointed out that sound doesn't travel through a vacuum, so she moved on. Naturally we would have to use electrical pulses then, and of course we would also build robots that would do just about everything...including interpreting for the deaf. Coherent, isn't she?
I don't agree with her (can you tell?) Humans are smart. We might still figure out how to build basic shelters, but I can't imagine how we would have discovered things like germs without being able to see them.
So, what do you guys think the world would be like if no one had eyes?

## Post 2 by SilverLightning (I've now got the silver prolific poster award! wahoo!) on Wednesday, 29-Jul-2015 19:57:53

We would have died out before our species even evolved enough to be called a
species. The first babies would have been eaten by a saber toothed tiger, or
fallen off a cliff, or into a fire, or a river, or eaten the wrong berry, or something.
They wouldn't have made it more than a couple weeks at the most, and would
certainly have never been able to mate. If they can't mate, they would never
have flourished. Basically, humans wouldn't exist.

## Post 3 by Shepherdwolf (I've now got the bronze prolific poster award! now going for the silver award!) on Thursday, 30-Jul-2015 13:13:47

Even in the off chance that humans would have proliferated enough to get by, had the intelligence to find stuff out without dying in great enough numbers to kill off the species...yeah, it would have been vastly different.
If all human beings were totally blind, we would never have understood a sighted world, not really. One of the reasons we, as blind people, understand how pivotal sight ends up being is because we're surrounded by sighted humans. I suspect we might have trouble understanding animals who could see, because none of us could. Sight itself would be an abstract.
So we wouldn't waste time trying to get to the moon, because the moon wouldn't exist. We probably would have gone for utilitarian construction over all else, when building. Glass would likely never have been made, because after it was invented, it would have been discarded as being brittle and unreliable. Paper would have mattered much less, if we made it that far. We would not have possessed either the philosophical or technical background for advanced mathematics, because many of them use graphing and the like, which is at its core a sighted endeavor. This likely means that we would never have tried to make things that fly, though we probably would've gotten around to the wheel, and wheeled conveyances of some kind.
But on the whole, I agree with Cody. Sight is so central to existence in a predator-prey environment where all the predators possess the ability that we would simply have been picked off and slaughtered by superior hunters. and for the few who weren't done in, there's always the environmental hazards.

## Post 4 by LeoGuardian (You mean there is something outside of this room with my computer in it?) on Thursday, 30-Jul-2015 14:20:31

Voyager, I find this topic and similar thought experiments interesting.
I find the phrase 'a sighted world' to be trite and juvenile, frankly.
According to eagles, human eyesight would be debilitating at best, at least from a farsighted perspective. But from a nearsighted perspective, humans can see much better than eagles.
In the world according to insects, we live in an infrared world, since much of their tracking comes through the infrared patterns they use to find food especially on leaves.
According to dogs, we live in a black-and-white very olfactory world.
These statements, all of them including 'sighted world' are silly but prove it's up to perspective.
Now leaving aside all the improbabilities of survival of all primates that led up to us -- since all vertebrates and most invertebrates use light in some fashion -- I don't think we can guarantee any sort of technology would develop. For most of human history (prehistory), humans have traveled on foot. The types of distance travel we now experience is so new it's even counter to our evolution. Human eyes and brains didn't evolve to drive, for instance, which is one reason for the high accident rate on the roads. It's also a testament to human neuroplasticity.
I've participated in similar thought experiments before though: What prevents the dolphin or the whate, for instance, from developing technologies?
Also consider how debilitatingly limited human understanding of space has been until very recently in evolutionary time. Humans imagined that air was everywhere, and had various models for domes, etc., that were the "top" above the stars, which they perceived as being smaller than they actually are.
One thing we blind people can't appreciate is that when someone looks at something very far away, it actually *looks* tiny. We just hear things as "far away", but not smaller. Imagine if an adult from far away sounded like a chipmunk not just in voice but footstep, and gradually sounded bigger and bigger until they got closer to you. That's what it's like to be sighted and deal with distance.
So much so, in fact, that forest-dwelling pygmies had the same trouble with that understanding that we blind people have.
In the theoretical universe where humans were blind, our image of distance would be depressingly small.
Just like in the mind set of intelligent birds, human speech is depressingly muddy bland and unvariable. This has been demonstrated at Cornell Labs -- Cornell being the leading university on ornithology (the study of birds).
Life would be different for sure if humans were blind. But if humans were blind, all pre-hominid vertebrates who are now sighted would also be blind, and this goes back to invertebrates even. The first photosensitive cells would not have been selected for in some multicellular organisms. Life on this planet would go much more slowly, as it were, since light travels so much faster than sound or vibration, and I imagine predator / prey dynamics would be very different.
I know H. G. Wells's "The Country Of The Blind" is probably out of favor with the more politically correct among us but it's an interesting look into what could be a blind society, adapted to an eye disease in a particularly temperate and isolated situation.
How would warfare and other primate functions be enacted? How, without predesigned paths, would animals return to their dwellings and other locations.
This all has to assume that light-sensitive cells were never selected for in evolution at all, since having a species come on the scene that cataclysmically lost its ability to see would be as impossible as Cody and others point out.
As to eating the wrong berries? I have my doubts about that. Fear of commiting pica, and even all-out xenophobia, is pretty inherent in a lot of species especially tribal ones. The only species that "eat anything" are those that can digest anything. More likely out of timidity we'd skip out on food items.
As a blind person if (or when) you first saw a whole pineapple, or whole artichoke, for instance, That spiny prickly thing certainly didn't look like food.
In all likelihood, humans if they could survive blind would forfeit berries at all as food items, just like sighted and blind humans forfeited tomatos on account of their resemblance to other extremely poisonous nightshade.
Interesting thought experiments though.

## Post 5 by Voyager (I just keep on posting!) on Saturday, 01-Aug-2015 14:17:25

Leo, you reminded me of something funny that happened when I was in elementary school:
I was about eight years old. Our class was reading a story about penguins on an iceberg. The ice broke in half, leaving one penguin by himself on one half.
The story goes, as his friends drifted away, he watched them grow smaller and smaller.
I blurted out, "This only happens on "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids!"
"Honey, I Shrunk the Kids" is a movie in which a scientist invents a shrink ray and accidentally reduces his kids (and their friends) to the size of insects. There were no shrink rays in this story, I was totally confused and the whole class was laughing at me. My Braille teacher must have heard what happened because later on she used volume and distance to explain relative size to me.

## Post 6 by LeoGuardian (You mean there is something outside of this room with my computer in it?) on Thursday, 06-Aug-2015 12:08:19

Ah yes. I know the movie.
However, this is a factor of light perception that is difficult to grasp without sight, although since you are a science major you can understand it intellectually. everything someone sees is a composit optical illusion anyhow. It's true of all our senses, but the sampling rate of eyesight is just that much higher. Since the image technically gets smaller in size the further away it gets, the viewer (the sighted person) operates under the illusion that the actual entity is decreasing in size, at least until such time as their brain learns it's not an illusion.
They're not actually seeing their world, they're seeing an optical illusion of fragments of their world which the brain uses to create a composit image and the neocortex creates the narrative to match it.
Using touch we already know this, right? If you have guitar callouses on your fingers, a surface will feel smoother to the tip of your finger than it would to the inside of your arm.
It's an illusion. Every single sense we have can play tricks on us. The degree to which the trick can be played is proportional to the sampling rate of the sense in question and the accompanying narrative. If you could hear all the composit harmonics that a bird does, you would be pretty disoriented either forever or until you could create a narrative and a sorting routine to figure it all out.
Same is true if a sighted person suddenly could see everything in the light spectra that insects and some other orders of animals can see. The sampling rate might be the same but the image capture would be completely off and without a narrative to create a composit that poor sighted person in that situation may as well be blind as a bat, for all the usefulness sight would have to them at that time.
Most nonscientific types are pretty uncomfortable with the notion thata great deal of our sensory experience is an illusion, but it is. Most of what we experience is a result of a composit made up of all the fragmentary parts of the narrative.

## Post 7 by Voyager (I just keep on posting!) on Thursday, 06-Aug-2015 12:38:14

For a long time I thought most illusions were only experienced by sighted people. Then I discovered sound illusions like these.
Leo - are there any simulations of what the world might sound like to a bird? Or are there clips of bird song slowed down so we can appreciate the variation that our ears normally can't hear?

## Post 8 by LeoGuardian (You mean there is something outside of this room with my computer in it?) on Thursday, 06-Aug-2015 12:52:03

First of all, audio illusions appear everywhere in nature. Wind is a major creator of audio illusions. I've even experienced the audible version of a mirage and thought I even smelled water, when I was in the desert once as a young person. Wind can sound like water, especially if part of the existing narrative is "Damn! I'm thirsty!"
As to the bird calls slowed down, It's been years since I heard this, but you can probably find it on Youtube if you look for it. When I heard it, it was before Youtube.

## Post 9 by LeoGuardian (You mean there is something outside of this room with my computer in it?) on Friday, 07-Aug-2015 16:31:06

I also want to point something else out that it's easy for us who are blind to miss. I'm sure anyone who was born after the first issue of USA Today and other similar publishing.
This notion that a graphic, visual, text-sparse, very childlike presentation of information is the only way sighted people can get information would insult your grandparents if they were still alive. At least your great-grandparents. This was delivered on to the population, the same way junk food has been.
my Wife's family got a hold of a newspaper from Her birth day, in 1966. What's really interesting, up to the point of being almost unbelievable! is that the types of font size differentiation, spatial relationships, headings, etc. that we all take for granted as a given necessity for sighted people to digest information meaningfully was totally absent.
Believe it or not, when you hear people deriding how Braille is just a "wall of text" and sighted people never have that "unformatted" experience, that's completely inaccurate. Any volume written before modern desktop publishing is pages and pages of text separated into paragraphs where the start of paragraphs were merely indented.
If you read old technical literature, like the Babbage machine of the 19th century, or even the Voder from the World's Fare demonstration in 1929, you're not met with tabular representations, structural outlines, flow charts and diagrams. You're met with a *prosaic* description equivalent to you reading a 16-volume Braille book divided into sections and paragraphs and that is *it*.
Compare that to now -- when an androgynous hipster with a bent towards furry fandom and a gender studies degree can feel all technical and competent because now in Apple's XCode s/he/it can drag a ticking clock onto a canvas to represent a timer to set a response to an action, instead of using a text-based variable name. Never mind that s/he/zhe/thon/it can't understand the relationship between an action, an event and a listener. They can *feel* like they're doing something. It's junk food, no more and no less.
The only reason there isn't the audio equivalent for junk food is it's just too difficult to master and mass-produce onto the market in any meaningful way.
Doesn't make any of this right or wrong, even if some of us are called cynical for laughing at it.
However, it doesn't mean this has to be because it's a "sighted" world. After all, it's only the result of a certain type of technology which acted out a certain kind of exploitation of the senses that enabled this. Other societies which had image-based writing systems didn't have what it took to exploit in the same way.
But it is why people can't focus and read very long, they have to write "TL, DR" or "wall of text", and believe Sherlock Holmes was a historical figure.
Funnily enough, in raising birds I learned that it was best to provide the types of entertainment that kept them visually stimulated, yes, but forced them to solve a problem. You'd be amazed at the attention span of a lovebird or cockatiel working a rope puzzle apart to get a treat. I'm talking hours on end. But if you fill their environment with tons and tons of bright colors, mirrors, images, all the brightest and best of their natural visual environment, they're likely to become neurotic and, for some species, downright mean. I have no idea about humans and other primates, might be interesting to find out about chimps and bonobos. But I do know chimps have been able to focus on paint smearing and other activities for quite a bit of time when some glitz and glitter stimulation was removed from the environment.
When you think about it, it makes sense just as your attraction to junk food does. Just like sugar, salt and fat are pretty rare to find in a paleolithic environment, so are shiny things like water sources, and colorful thinkgs like fruit, things it's really helpful to spot from a distance.
Anyway, don't think it's a given that sight automagically equals a visually glitzy environment with all the trimmings and a fifth-grade reading level. Hell, even when I was in college a couple decades ago they said to write at a tenth-grade reading level for business, before many style manuals were rewritten to include more of the imperative, fewer words, smaller words, and a fifth-grade reading level.
Now all we need is a fools-acceptance movement on Tumblr and the representation will be total and complete.