Well that Kiki/Bouba link was a fascinating little rabbit hole you sent me down. I really enjoyed it. Thanks!

I mean, apparently. The brain is so weird, it's really really difficult to even imagine what it's like to experience certain things that other people do. For example, sometimes people have their corpus callosum (the membrane between the hemispheres that allows them to communicate with each other) severed to prevent certain types of seizures, and afterwards they lose the ability to see "green men" as faces.

For reference, this is what a "green man" is:
https://acc-cdn.azureedge.net/mrlnop420media/0005503_green-man-wall-plaque.jpeg

Can you, who easily sees the face, really even understand what it would feel like to look at that image and not see a face?

Skill issue

Sight is a combination of raw data input and interpretation of that data. It turns out that if you miss a critical window of learning early in life, you are almost certain to never learn how to interperet that data correctly even if you gain the ability to see. Many people who have gained sight after being blind from birth find it simply overwhelming and regret the medical intervention. Richard L. Gregory's "Eye and Brain: The Psychology of Seeing" is a fascinating read on this topic. Even those with sight fail to interpretet things properly depending on their experience - for example, someone who lived in a dense forest all their life (where they never had the opportunity to see anything from a distance), is likely to think that the elephants are the size of ants if they are viewed from afar. A lot of brainpower goes into learning how to see in early life, and if you miss that, it's over.

you can't either. IF I were to give you some object that was irregular in shape and then asked you to find said object among other irregular objects by sight, you'd probably fail. Those people had their brains wired to "no sight" for at least some time, if not since birth. The brain would have to rewire existing connections with senses it doesn't like to connect at the best of times.

And yet, I feel like I can perfectly imagine what it would be like to lick anything that I have previously touched with my feet or fingers, despite never having experienced the sensation on my tongue before, and knowing that the nerves on my tongue perceive texture entirely different to my hands.

Edit: just scrolled down and saw that people are discussing this exact phenomenon.

I bet that's because we all put a ridiculous amount of things in our mouths as babies.

"And what's the mouthfeel of this one.....mmmmhmmm. Excellent. Next."

I disagree. Dick did not feel the way I expected it to feel at first. That may be an exception though.

how can you restore sight to someone who never had in the first place?

Semantically, it implies that their bodies were born with the capacity for sight, but something occurred, either in utero or when they were very young, to rob them of it. Also, the subjects in the experiment all had some very minor visual capacity, like the ability to distinguish the direction light was coming from. They just didn't have visual acuity.

Also, this wikipedia page isn't behind a paywall: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molyneux%27s_problem

Science is philosophy, at least it was created by philosophy. Logic and reason are insufficient to understand the world and answer questions well. We sort of knew this, that's why philosopher argue. Scientist uses empirical evidence, so they only have to argue about the collection of evidence. If they disagree with a result they can collect the evidence themselves and verify. This made the development of human knowledge much more effective.

It's so effective its displaced philosophy and theology. We see science as something different. However, science is just a philosophy with a single approach the scientific method.

That time was the begging of the scientific revolution; natural sciences were known as natural philosophy. And scientists were more like philosophers, eg Descartes, Bacon, etc.

In one of his biographies, Newton is described as the last magician, and the first scientist.

Philosophy used to be more or less just that. Basically science without the actual testing, but just overthinking a problem.

What is now called science was once part of philosophy. So questions of philosophy were more broad in the past than now. But philosophy is also still very interested in the findings of science. These aren't exclusive areas of interest.

You seem to think that a philosopher's job is to make stoned guys go woah

It does seem straightforward

If you closed your eyes and felt a sphere and a cube you'd be easily able to feel and picture the shapes in your mind because you knew what a sphere and cube looked like before you closed your eyes.

Blind people "see" or experience the world completely different

They have no image in their mind what a sphere or cube would look like. They have only their idea of feeling it.

Seems like an easy conclusion to draw that the blind person would be able to tell the shapes. Sharp corners vs. round object.

But saying that they can't tell the difference, which they can't, seems like a stretch because it's almost unbelievable to someone who can see.

And there's no way to know if they could or couldn't tell the difference without a blind person actually doing the experiment. They couldn't test it, so all they would do was think and debate.

Science is a branch of philosophy