Three data points from which to infer a possible result for this thought experiment:
AFAIK, feral children rescued after the age for developing language passed have extreme difficulty learning words and abstract concepts. Their vocabulary ends up limited to about 400 words, all about simple, concrete things, and they don’t develop past that. This despite them having had several years of sensory stimulation.
Some people who go into coma and remain conscious while unable to provide any feedback. Eventually their despair ends, and their minds settle into a dreamlike state that may last for years, during which they construct fantastical worlds, sometimes partially awakening due to some perceived external stimulus, followed by falling asleep again. Once they get out of the coma and back into a proper awakened state their memories of those imaginary events becomes fuzzy and fades.
The human visual cortex requires movement as much as color for visual processing to function or even, I suspect, to develop. You may try this yourself: fix your sight on a single point devoid of any mobile stimulation, while managing to not move your eyes at all, and it’ll shutdown, your field of vision filling with something akin to grayness irrespective of whatever it is your eyes are fixed on.
Your thought experiment seems to be a combination of all three. Such a mind would be incredibly crippled from a cognitive standpoint, and even if it managed to somehow developed something at all in that department (maybe the whiteness is imperfect so it caught on the smallish of variations?), it’d be in a permanent state of dreaming about the raw sensory input of “noise” (which is what pure whiteness is, maybe the closest to “nothing at all”), without any possibility of any abstractive mental counterpart to that one single sole raw sensory reference, as there’s nothing to compare it to to draw distinctions.
Then, once you put it into any other environment it’d develop somehow, but by that point most of his neural pathways would have atrophied, so whatever this mind developed would be orders of magnitude simpler than a feral children could do. I imagine it’d be mostly in a vegetative state, simply empty.
Three data points from which to infer a possible result for this thought experiment:
AFAIK, feral children rescued after the age for developing language passed have extreme difficulty learning words and abstract concepts. Their vocabulary ends up limited to about 400 words, all about simple, concrete things, and they don’t develop past that. This despite them having had several years of sensory stimulation.
Some people who go into coma and remain conscious while unable to provide any feedback. Eventually their despair ends, and their minds settle into a dreamlike state that may last for years, during which they construct fantastical worlds, sometimes partially awakening due to some perceived external stimulus, followed by falling asleep again. Once they get out of the coma and back into a proper awakened state their memories of those imaginary events becomes fuzzy and fades.
The human visual cortex requires movement as much as color for visual processing to function or even, I suspect, to develop. You may try this yourself: fix your sight on a single point devoid of any mobile stimulation, while managing to not move your eyes at all, and it’ll shutdown, your field of vision filling with something akin to grayness irrespective of whatever it is your eyes are fixed on.
Your thought experiment seems to be a combination of all three. Such a mind would be incredibly crippled from a cognitive standpoint, and even if it managed to somehow developed something at all in that department (maybe the whiteness is imperfect so it caught on the smallish of variations?), it’d be in a permanent state of dreaming about the raw sensory input of “noise” (which is what pure whiteness is, maybe the closest to “nothing at all”), without any possibility of any abstractive mental counterpart to that one single sole raw sensory reference, as there’s nothing to compare it to to draw distinctions.
Then, once you put it into any other environment it’d develop somehow, but by that point most of his neural pathways would have atrophied, so whatever this mind developed would be orders of magnitude simpler than a feral children could do. I imagine it’d be mostly in a vegetative state, simply empty.
This sounds correct to me, so if someone has an objection, please explain.