Disrupted Space

Below I discuss the story of a man who goes from blind to sighted, and how his experiences shed light on our reality and what it might be like to experience reality differently. Perhaps our experiences, if we could view 4 dimensions, would be similar to Virgil's below:

In Oliver Sacks "To see and not see," he describes the story of a man who has lived almost his whole life blind, and his experience as he recovers his sight. He documents his struggles and perceptions and life, up until he loses his sight again.

"We, with a fiffl complement of senses, live in space and time; the blind live in a world of time alone. For the blind build their worlds from sequences of impressions (tactile, auditory, olfactory), and are not capable, as sighted people are, of a simultaneous visual perception, the making of an instantaneous visual scene. Indeed, if one can no longer see in space then the idea of space becomes incomprehensible and this even for highly intelligent people blinded relatively late in life."

Virgil can move in Space without truly understanding it. Are there dimensions that we move through without understanding or perceiving it? Can we move through or perceive time if only we had another sense? We move through time as though we are a point on a ray- only able to perceive each moment as it comes. If we could suddenly see more of time, would we have to learn and struggle as Virgil does? Probably- senses aren't innate. This implies a lot of things- that our human perception of the world, our sense of reality, isn't explicit. We perceive reality in a very subjective way, with senses that we have evolved. But reality, or space and time, could be very different- with space itself not being straight, but actually curved, as we discussed earlier.

I wonder if there is a way we could create a visual reality that doesn't make any sense, in VR perhaps, that can simulate the confusion that Virgil first experiences when he first regains his sight. The rules about light, perspective, color, movement, are all broken in some way.

Back to Virgil- the transformation of blind man to seeing man seems almost like a complete transfer to a different dimension, like he's gone to a different world- and when he returns to his tactile world, he is much more at home. 

It must have been completely bizarre to him how 3d objects appear to have different forms as they rotate in space, and can look completely different from each angle. It is similar to how a resident of flatland might feel when visiting the 3d world- a completely new dimension, almost.