#92 Molyneux's Problem and Questioning the Perception/Cognition Border — with philosophers Janet Levin and Brian Glenney

Molyneux's Question with Janet Levin and Brian Glenney

Love & Philosophy — Beyond Dichotomy

In 1688, an Irish scientist named William Molyneux sent John Locke a letter with a question in it. Suppose a man born blind has learned by touch to tell a cube from a sphere. Suppose he is given sight, and the two objects are set on a table in front of him. Could he tell, by looking alone, which is which?

Locke said no, and put the question into the second edition of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Berkeley said no more emphatically. Leibniz said yes — with a hint, and a little time. And three centuries later the question is still open, only now it's being asked in operating theatres in New Delhi, in habituation studies with ten-hour-old infants, and in the way a skateboarder looks at a handrail.

Janet Levin and Brian Glenney have been in conversation about this problem since Brian's dissertation defense in 2007, where Janet was on his committee. They still disagree — productively — about whether you need to move your body in order to see. This episode is that disagreement, twenty years on.

Janet Levin is recently retired from the philosophy department at the University of Southern California. She works on the mind-body problem, phenomenal concepts, and what she calls the philosophy of philosophy: whether thought experiments are worth anything, and whether they can absorb empirical information and still count as philosophy. Her 2008 paper introduced the distinction between temporal and epistemic immediacy that has shaped how the Molyneux question is tested ever since.

Brian Glenney teaches at Norwich University in Vermont. He wrote his dissertation on Molyneux's problem at USC in 2007 under James Van Cleve and Janet Levin, wrote the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on the question, and has since argued for a pluralist answer — that the question has many correct answers depending on who is being asked about, and how. He also works on skateboarding, urban space, and the sensory expertise he calls the skater's eye.

Full show notes

• 00:00 — Why a navigational approach to mind keeps running into this question
• 02:20 — Introductions: phenomenal concepts, sensory expertise, and Bernie Sanders at the skate park
• 05:20 — Janet reads Locke's own statement of the question, and his answer
• 08:00 — Why this was supposed to be the crucial experiment for empiricism vs. rationalism
• 10:30 — The 1688 letter Locke never answered, and the 1693 one he did
• 12:00 — Molyneux, Dioptrica Nova, and the attempt to give empiricism experimental oomph
• 14:00 — Why Locke buried the question in a passage about perceptual learning
• 15:00 — Common sensibles: what touch and sight might share
• 17:00 — Locke's "at first sight" trick, and what it forecloses
• 19:30 — Passivity vs. activity: if you move your head, is it still perception?
• 20:40 — Leibniz's cheat code, and the birth of epistemic immediacy
• 22:20 — Janet's distinction: temporal immediacy vs. epistemic immediacy
• 24:15 — Held (2011) and the best evidence for a "no"
• 27:30 — Andrea's caricature: two languages, or one idea?
• 29:30 — Why restored vision isn't normal vision — and the paradox that follows
• 31:00 — Vision and touch as English and Russian; Leibniz as the bilingual child
• 33:30 — Janet on phenomenal concepts and why Molyneux caught her
• 35:40 — Did you know Adam Smith had a theory of perception? He wrote it at fifteen
• 37:50 — Brian finds his own ancestor in the archive: George Glennie, Aberdeen, 1796
• 40:15 — The moon illusion, and how Janet and Brian actually met
• 41:20 — The dissertation with six chapters, and the one revision that changed everything
• 42:30 — Maybe there isn't a single correct answer
• 47:15 — Project Prakash: five subjects, three days of play, and a fast yes
• 51:30 — Janet's counter-proposal: what if you only tweak vision?
• 55:20 — Bumpy pacifiers, baby chicks, and the ten-hour-old infants who disagree
• 58:50 — The six-month-old who recognizes its own hand
• 01:01:00 — Nobody frames it as empiricism vs. rationalism anymore
• 01:03:20 — The couch potato perceiver and the sentient statue
• 01:05:50 — Could virtual reality run the experiment we can't?
• 01:07:00 — Path dependency: every subject arrives with a history
• 01:11:20 — The blind Rubik's Cube puzzler, and whether expertise transfers
• 01:15:00 — "Give me something I care about": motivation as the missing variable
• 01:19:10 — Why does perception have to be passive at all?
• 01:22:20 — Andrea: what if it isn't yes or no?
• 01:26:50 — Ned Block and the border between seeing and thinking
• 01:29:20 — The skater's eye: knowledge in the heel rather than the head
• 01:33:00 — Enactivism, affordances, and the motivation Brian adds to them
• 01:36:30 — Janet puts a lock on the back gate
• 01:39:20 — Do you still care about this? Plato's cave, Reid, and the seduction of the external world

Some words that come up

Empiricism / rationalism — The organizing quarrel of the era. Empiricists (Locke, Berkeley, Hume) hold that knowledge is built up from sense experience. Rationalists (Leibniz) hold that some ideas are innate and amodal — not owned by any single sense. Molyneux's question was supposed to settle it experimentally.

Common sensibles — Properties like shape, figure, and distance that seem accessible to more than one sense. Colour isn't one; neither is roughness. The question is whether a common sensible is genuinely shared, or whether you have to learn to correlate two separate streams.

At first sight — Locke's three-word addition, and, as Brian argues, a trick: it more or less guarantees the answer is no, if perceptual learning is needed to make the correlations.

Temporal immediacy vs. epistemic immediacy — Janet's distinction. Temporal means the first instant after the bandages come off, which is probably what Locke meant. Epistemic means the identification is made by perception rather than by inference or association — so you wait until the person actually has the wherewithal to see, and only then test. It reframes what a fair experiment even looks like.

Perceptual learning — Changes in what you can perceive that come from experience rather than reasoning. Locke's newly sighted person sees a flat, variously coloured circle before they see a sphere.

Passivity vs. activity — Locke assumed perception is passive reception, and that anything active is cognition. So: is moving your head still perceiving? Is watching an object rotate? The whole episode circles this.

The perception/cognition border — The contemporary form of the same question, now central to philosophy of mind through Ned Block's work.

Phenomenal concepts — Concepts of what it's like to have an experience: to see red, to feel something smooth. Janet's long-standing interest, and her route into Molyneux.

Affordances / enactivism — Gibson's idea that we perceive the world in terms of what it lets us do, developed by Alva Noë and others. Brian adds a motivational layer: the skater doesn't just see that the handrail is skateable, they want to skate it.

• Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690; Molyneux's question added to the 1694 second edition), Book II, Ch. IX, §8. Full text at Project Gutenberg
• Molyneux's first letter to Locke, 7 July 1688 — the one Locke never answered. The second, in 1693, is the one that made it into the Essay. Molyneux had in the meantime dedicated his optics treatise Dioptrica Nova (1692) to Locke.
• Marjolein Degenaar & Gert-Jan Lokhorst, "Molyneux's Problem", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — the standard scholarly overview. plato.stanford.edu/entries/molyneux-problem
• Brian Glenney, "Molyneux's Question", Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Brian's own entry, and the best place to start. iep.utm.edu/molyneux
• Michael J. Morgan, Molyneux's Question: Vision, Touch and the Philosophy of Perception (Cambridge, 1977) — the classic history.
• Denis Diderot's Letter on the Blind (1749) is where the two-dimensional version of the question first appears — roughly fifty years after Locke

Transcript

 📍 Hello, everyone. Welcome to Love and Philosophy. This is Andrea. I'm so glad you're here. This episode is wonderful. I love it. It's about a question that's been kicking around philosophy since, uh, a long time, 1690s or so, and it's called Molyneux's question. Pretty much it's like, imagine someone who's born blind, and they learn just by touch. Like, you know, you can feel things, and you learn what a cube is or a sphere. And then they are given sight one day, or their 📍 sight comes back, or their sight comes for the first time, and there are two objects on a table in front of them. So it's a sphere and a cube. Would they know what they are if they haven't touched them? Would somehow the having touched them and known them that way transfer? That's kind of the question, although Janet's gonna explain it much better. So I'm gonna give the floor to her. Janet Levin and Brian Glenney, those are the two guests today. And actually, Brian was Janet's student, and they worked on this problem together back when he was doing his PhD, and now they're still working on it together. Twenty years later, they've been going back and forth a bit about these ideas. Although, as you'll hear, it's the first time they've really talked in person in a long time. So one reason I'm so interested in this question has to do with the navigational approach, and they asked me about that, so I left a bit of it in at the beginning. Sorry, it's been a long day. It's hard to still talk. My voice goes away by the end of the day. so I left some of that in, but not all of it, just a little bit, just because we reference it later. We also talk about how Brian and Janet know one another. But just, I, I wanna bring out just a little bit more of this rationist, rationalist, empiricist idea where, you know, there's this one side who thinks we get knowledge through experience, like through the senses, and then we sort of slowly build up the world, and then that's this empiricist picture. That's Locke and Berkeley and Hume. I always say Berkeley, by the way. It's just something wanna... It's, it's a glitch. I have glitches with people's names. Even when I know how to say it, I say it the wrong way. Don't know what that is, but you don't have to send me an email about it and tell me I say the name wrong. I know I do, and I probably will next time too. I don't know why. Anyway, that's the empiricist side, and then the rationalist side is more like Leibniz, or that's who we talk about here. And that's where you could just sit in your room and figure things out. Uh, you know, the rationalist idea of what mind is. Of course, I don't think these are opposites, and, we get into all that, and most people don't think they're opposites anymore. But there's still a whole lot of discussion about how to really understand how we come to know and how both of these can be possible, that we can have something like math and figure things out sitting in a desk chair, but that also experience seems absolutely necessary too. And so this problem has to do with a lot of that. One thing I wanna bring out too is we talk about at first sight, and it's a little phrase that Locke added in, which you'll hear Janet and Brian discuss. it's Janet, Janet made this distinction between r-reading that phrase temporally, like at first sight, like the first time you see it in time, or epistemic immediacy. Epista- epistemic im- epistemic immediacy. So that means, um, waiting until it's actually available to the person, until they have the wherewithal, let's say, to really see, and then asking. And that matters enormously, right? If, if you take that into consideration. So we, we talk about that a bit here. Also passivity and activity. This is so interesting to me, and this idea that Locke assumed perception is passive reception So that's a lot of what we're talking about here with the table moving and your head moving and things like this. But how much-- what is movement? How much movement on each side? Now, of course, I have my own views about that, But it is why we talk about this couch potato sentient statue stuff, which is super interesting. also we thought we'd talk about some different thought experiments, and also real experiments, because it's another very interesting thing about this problem is now we've gotten to a point where we can actually test these kinds of things in the lab. So cataract surgeries or the Project Prakash, which I talk about here, we talk about here, uh, newborns, people who've just gotten their sight. There's all kinds of ways now to actually test this and try to figure out the answer. And a lot of people think that answer has been solved, but I'll let you decide after you hear this conversation or look into it for yourself. Maybe there's not even a yes or no because there's so many different ideas of what it means to be blind and what kind of blindness. I think what I love most about this conversation, and I get a little excited about, of course, by the end, even though I'm trying to be quiet, but is not thinking of it in those terms and thinking of it actually as a way to learn in a multiple layered sense about the capacities that we have and how we come to know and how we come to know in different ways. And that's the sort of pluralism more that Brian's leaning towards, but that I think actually Janet's made contributions to, maybe in spite of what she meant to do. Even in inspiring Brian to do it. And I love their relationship. I love both of their work. Janet introduced me to Brian's work, and I'm just really thankful for that. Brian and I are going to have a conversation, uh, in a couple months about his work. So some of it we don't get into here in full as I wanted to, and we will together later, especially the skateboarding part, because he has this idea of the skater's eye. I love skateboarding. I've loved it since I was a kid, so I'm really excited to talk to him about that, but also just some of his work, other work that he's doing. He's doing some really interesting things. The more I look into it, the more I love it. So thanks to Janet for introducing me to him. Also, did you know Adam Smith had a theory of perception? And did you know he wrote it when he was 15 years old? That's something I learned in this conversation, but there's plenty more to thinking about the ways we see and the many kinds of bodies with histories that see differently and sense differently. that's what we're gonna talk about here. I'm really glad you're listening. This is a little more of a philosopher's, philosopher's conversation or something like that. We definitely can't stay out of the weeds, but I love it. It's wonderful. It's worth hanging out and just listening. It gets really good. and yeah, 📍 thanks for being here. Thanks for listening. Hope you're having a wonderful day, evening, night, whatever it may be, wherever you may be. Summer is definitely here. I know I've heard a lot of people are having a hard July, whether it's from the weather, the fires, the rain. Gosh, you know, there's all kinds of things going on. So be good to yourself. Do something c- caring for yourself or for others. Take the time. It's worth it. This is our one life, everybody. here we are, and I'm glad to be connected with you. All right. Bye. 

Brian Glenney: You've really picked this out. Why are you interested in it?

Andrea Hiott: Well, because I work on this whole navigational approach to mind. I'm coming out of hippocampus research, but I'm really a philosopher. I went back to get my neuroscience degrees because I wanted to better understand this part of the brain, the hippocampus. Mind in motion. And I mean, it's part of why I do this podcast. It's about thinking beyond these typical either/or categories. But I also just think it's a really interesting question that, you know, three hundred years later we still talk about it.

And I love what you did in the spatial paper, Janet, where you sort of flipped the script about what people were assuming. That's the kind of thing I think this problem is really good at. You did that. But I think Brian's doing that too — definitely instigating different ways of thinking.

Janet Levin: I think you and Brian will see eye to eye on this, on the navigation. I'm hoping.

[00:01:00]

Andrea Hiott: Well, either way. But Brian, I think we should talk another time too, because I also have a degree in urban planning, and I see that you are really interested in these things. I stopped reading some of it because I was getting a little bit excited and I didn't want that to take over this conversation. Just cities in general, because obviously that's a whole huge part of what a navigational approach to thinking about cognition is doing. If you're interested, we could go into that another time. Maybe this will lead towards that by the end, too. I don't know.

Brian Glenney: Oh, I think it will. I'm excited to — I think the last time that Janet and I really talked about Molyneux's question was in my dissertation committee hearing in 2007. She might not remember this, but she's the one [00:02:00] that led me into this kind of pluralism way of thinking, even though she won't ever take credit for it. I don't know. Should we just jump in?

Andrea Hiott: Oh, that is so interesting. I was wondering, because of the amodality. It naturally leads there if one is thinking of it in a certain way. But let's — do you want to introduce each other? Let's go with the one, two. Do you want to introduce yourselves? How would you like to start?

Janet Levin: Okay, I'll start. My name is Janet Levin, and I'm recently retired from the philosophy department at USC. I'm interested in mind-body problems, and I'm interested in what could be called the philosophy of philosophy — that is, are thought experiments in philosophy worth anything? Can they accommodate empirical information? If they accommodate a lot [00:03:00] of empirical information, can they still count as philosophical issues and philosophical questions? And I'm particularly interested in how we form and whether we can change our concepts of mental states and mental activity. I think that's one of the things that got me interested in Molyneux's problem.

Brian Glenney: And I'm Brian Glenney. I teach at Norwich University in Vermont. And I mean, I see Bernie Sanders, like, every month or so at the skate park. Of course, he's not skating — he's walking by. Very active, very active young man.

And I did my dissertation on Molyneux's problem and finished in 2007. [00:04:00] Janet was on my committee, and I'm just excited to talk with her again about it. I guess my interest has lately been how the senses can specialize and pick out really fine-grained attributes out in the world. There's a famous example of a sailor who can identify a ship that a landsman can't even see. I think we have all these kinds of sensory specializations, and most of us don't even know it, or where they came from, or how we could acquire more of them. So I think that's kind of where my interest in Molyneux's question has been leading me. But let's go back to the beginning here.

Andrea Hiott: I can't believe you see Bernie Sanders all the time at the skate park. That's already — what? He's just walking by?

Janet Levin: Was he wearing mittens?

Brian Glenney: In the winter, yes, Janet. He's very bundled. Can't even recognize him.

Andrea Hiott: I like thinking of him actually hanging out at the skate park, but he's just [00:05:00] walking by.

Brian Glenney: And he always gives a little wave. "Hello, skaters."

Andrea Hiott: That's awesome. Okay. So we've mentioned it — Molyneux's question. What is this, and why did both of you get interested in this, or how?

Janet Levin: Well, maybe we should start out by just reading what Locke says when he introduces Molyneux's question in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Do you want to read it, Brian, or shall I read it?

Brian Glenney: Yeah, go for it, Janet.

Janet Levin: Okay. Well, the official question is:

"Suppose a man born blind, and now adult, and taught by his touch to distinguish between a cube and a sphere of the same metal, and nighly of the same bigness, so as to tell, when he felt one and the other, which is the cube, which the sphere. [00:06:00] Suppose then the cube and sphere placed on a table, and the blind man to be made to see: quaere, whether by his sight, before he touched them, he could now distinguish and tell which is the globe, which the cube."

And then:

"Not. For though he has obtained the experience of how a globe, how a cube affects his touch, yet he has not yet attained the experience that what affects his touch so or so must affect his sight so or so; or that a protuberant angle in the cube, that pressed his hand unequally, shall appear to his eye as it does in the cube."

Okay. Now, that's how Locke presents Molyneux's question. [00:07:00] And Locke says:

"I agree with this thinking gentleman, whom I am proud to call my friend, in his answer to this his problem; and am of opinion that the blind man, at first sight, would not be able with certainty to say which was the globe, which the cube, whilst he only saw them; though he could unerringly name them by his touch, and certainly distinguish them by the difference of their figures felt. This I have set down, and leave with my reader, as an occasion for him to consider how much he may be beholden to experience, improvement, and acquired notions, where he thinks he had not the least use of, or help from them."

So — you wouldn't be able to recognize, as they say, at first sight, with [00:08:00] certainty, which is the cube, which is the globe, if you had only felt them, if you were to see them for the first time.

And Locke and Molyneux and Berkeley thought that this was a really big deal because it showed the truth of — I mean, if the blind man wouldn't be able to distinguish these things, it showed the truth of empiricism rather than rationalism. That is, that you can only get ideas of spatial figures, and time, and mind, and body, and all these things that might have seemed amodal and universal, by experience. And the experiences that you get of these things visually are very, very different from, and not connected at all to, the ones that you get [00:09:00] by touch.

Now, continental rationalists like Leibniz say that, well, we do have at least some innate ideas that are amodal. We have an amodal idea — that is, one not determined by experience in various sensory modes. We've got an idea of the cube and the idea of the sphere. And so we can get that very same idea both from touch and from sight.

So supposedly this was a crucial experiment to determine the truth of rationalism versus empiricism. Now, there are lots of questions that arise. What exactly does it mean to be able to know these things with certainty? What is it to be able to do it at first sight? [00:10:00] And what exactly are the conditions under which the man born blind and made to see can try to identify it? Can he move around a little bit? Can he move his head? Exactly what is it that's going on?

So that's the question. That was Locke's answer. Leibniz answers in a different way. He predicts that yes, under certain conditions, the man born blind would be able to distinguish the cube from the sphere. And so people have been talking about this three hundred years later.

Brian Glenney: And you might wonder —

Andrea Hiott: That's a long time. Was it first in a letter that Molyneux wrote to Locke? Is that how it started, and then he put it in the —

Brian Glenney: In the essay.

Andrea Hiott: In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding? So that was before 1700, right? Sixteen-ninety-something. That's a long [00:11:00] time ago.

Brian Glenney: 1693, yeah. And that 1693 letter was preceded by another letter that has a different Molyneux question —

Andrea Hiott: Oh, really?

Brian Glenney: — that Locke never responded to.

Andrea Hiott: Oh, what was that?

Brian Glenney: It basically asked a similar question, but it was a little bit more general. It was like, "Hey, would the newly sighted be able just to know by sight alone what the shapes were?" And there was a second question — would he be able to know how far away they were? Whether or not, for instance, the newly sighted man could reach out and touch the shape, whether it were, I think he says, a hundred feet or a thousand feet away, or something like this.

Andrea Hiott: So let's try to go back to that time period. What do — I mean, for people who are just kind of coming into this, there's this whole empiricist, [00:12:00] rationalist sort of separation. But how would one of you, both of you, explain what that is, and why this is such an amazing question to ask, and also why, if it's answered in the way that Locke answered it, that's so much part of the empiricist program?

Janet Levin: You want to go first, Brian?

Brian Glenney: Well, I'll give it a shot here. Molyneux was part of the new knowledge, which didn't really think Aristotle had figured out the way the world works — and that you can't just do it by reasoning from substances and causes, that you actually had to go out in the world and touch it and feel it and figure things out. And so I think what Molyneux was trying to do here was take empiricism, which was really still theoretical, and give it some experimental oomph. Like proto, proto-experimental. [00:13:00]

And he had previously written a book on optics called Dioptrica Nova. Molyneux's question never comes up in that, but what Molyneux did do was dedicate the book to Locke. And I think this was kind of — he dedicated this sophisticated optical book to Locke after not getting a response from Locke from the previous letter. Then he rewrote the letter, and then Locke was like, "You're a genius. I'm going to put your question into my essay, the second edition. Let's do it."

And even that's kind of weird. A lot of Locke scholars think Locke should have answered yes to Molyneux. After all, shape seems to be a common idea. We have an earlier section in the essay where shape seems to be something known [00:14:00] by both sight and touch. So why does Locke say no? Well, it's likely to agree with his friend, right? And he puts it in this weird section that's about perceptual learning rather than about common sensibles.

And in that section, just before he inserts Molyneux's question, there's this famous passage about what a newly sighted person sees when they see a sphere. They see a circle colored variously, and then over time and experience it looks like a sphere that's of a single color. And then he uses Molyneux's question as kind of a backdrop, or an extra context, to support that claim of perceptual learning. So — I actually think for a while, for about two decades, there were more papers on Locke's response to Molyneux than on Molyneux's question [00:15:00] itself.

Janet Levin: Yeah, but the Locke response is interesting because it really opens a way to think about the Molyneux question, and also to think about what perceptual learning is. And Locke does in many cases — I won't say most cases, but many cases — sort of waver between two views. Sometimes he'll say things that are not quite consistent with what he had said before.

But here it does seem that he thinks you need to be able to correlate your — I mean, you can think of a common sensible as something, some item in the world or some property that can be accessed by touch and sight, even though you might not be able to know, [00:16:00] if you can just access it by sight, what it would feel like. But you come to correlate the results of visual perception with the results of tactual perception.

And so you can do that for certain things like shape, figure, and in the case that you quoted earlier, distance, presumably. But you can't for color, and you can't for certain purely tactile things like whether something is rough or smooth, a kind of texture.

So common sensibles could be read as either something that is out there in the world that you just can determine the existence of in both ways immediately, or something that's out there in the world but that you can't [00:17:00] necessarily do by vision and by touch unless you correlate the two.

Brian Glenney: I mean, you'd find the correlation. So Janet, I make a big deal about Locke and his little trick when he answers the question — of adding at first sight. And that kind of ensures that it's a no answer, right? Particularly if perceptual learning is going to be required in order to make these correlations.

Do you think eventually, just by sight alone, Molyneux's man would have been able to work it out?

Janet Levin: I'm not sure, but I think it's possible. Well, it depends on what he's allowed to do and what "at first sight" means. And I know we've talked about that, because even though Brian and I haven't [00:18:00] talked specifically in person, we've communicated a lot through emails and reading each other's papers and things like that. So we are at least somewhat more familiar with each other's more recent views than circa 2007.

One of the questions is what the man born blind is allowed to do. That is, when he regains his sight, can he move his head around? Can he see the objects — you know, Locke says they're put on a table, in front of him. Well, what if it was a rotating platform? Would he be able eventually to identify — [00:19:00] Or also, there's the question of whether it's only a matter of distinguishing the two, or identifying the two as a cube versus a sphere. I do think he wants the identification.

But what exactly does "at first sight" involve? Is it only by sight, or is it at first sight — and "at first sight" might mean being able to see without touching? And then if you're allowed to move your head a little bit, or see the thing on a rotating platform, then maybe you could figure it out.

But then figuring it out [00:20:00] would mean that you're not doing it at first sight. That is, perception is supposed to be just passive reception without any intellectual activity. So one of the questions — and this is a question that Brian has been interested in with Reid and Adam Smith — is what exactly can you do here, and what counts as passivity versus activity?

And that's really a question that is really, really important now, when people like Ned Block are thinking about the distinction between perception and cognition. That's a really hot issue now.

Brian Glenney: I was going to add another cheat code that Leibniz produces. He says, well, what if the experimenter [00:21:00] also told the newly sighted person what shapes were before them? Gives them a hint. And then Leibniz is like, "Oh, yeah. For sure." That they could work it out.

And there's this additional thing which relates to what it means to be at first sight, which I think is where you get your epistemic immediacy. Because Leibniz adds that hint, and then he also says, "We shouldn't expect this newly sighted person to just immediately make this kind of recognition. We should give them time so that they can learn what it's like to know what it's like to see." And then once they've kind of got this epistemic visual ability, then we should test them.

Is that where you think you got the — you know, Janet has this famous distinction between what "at first sight" [00:22:00] means temporally, which is what Locke probably meant, and then this: once the newly sighted has the wherewithal to know what it's like to see, boom, we should test him. That's the epistemic immediacy that you kind of brought to the table with Molyneux's question.

Andrea Hiott: That was right around the time you were working together, then.

Janet Levin: Probably, yeah. But the idea is, what counts as epistemic immediacy? And I think you've gotten me to rethink that, Brian.

One thing that I think is important — and this is where the passivity versus activity comes in — is whether whatever you do can count as perception alone, rather than perception with the addition of some sort of intellectual putting things together. And [00:23:00] that is really an important question that has endured through these three hundred years. That is, what is perceptual learning? Does perception have to be passive? And if it does, can looking around and "learning" how things look from different directions — does that count as an intellectual activity, or just part of, sort of spread out in time, of perceiving?

And again, this is going to be more relevant when you're talking about three-dimensional objects rather than two-dimensional objects. Which is a reason why people often talk about the Molyneux question as a matter of distinguishing between a square and a circle rather than a [00:24:00] cube and a sphere. Anyway, I've talked too much.

Brian Glenney: No, no, no. It's so funny — it took fifty years for that 2D move to be made, by Diderot.

Janet Levin: Was it fifty years?

Brian Glenney: Yeah, around fifty years. But now that you've brought up epistemic immediacy, I'm going to keep going, because Held has this 2011 paper where he essentially presents the best evidence for a no answer to Molyneux's question. That's because he uses five different subjects — it's like real experimental data. Five different subjects, many trials. He uses standard statistical analysis to determine whether it's chance that they're making the recognition or not.

And there are these two controls. One control is that once they've gained their [00:25:00] sight, they're able to match shapes by touch alone. And then the second control is that they're able to match shapes by sight alone — vision to vision. It seems to me that that's sufficient for epistemic immediacy, right? Once you're able to match shapes by sight alone after being newly healed from these cataracts, you have the wherewithal to see. You know how to see.

Then, of course, they're not able to match the visual objects before them with their previous tactile knowledge of the shapes, suggesting a no answer. So does that vision-to-vision matching count as epistemic immediacy for you? Does it pass that threshold?

Janet Levin: Well, what I was worried about is whether [00:26:00] you can get epistemic immediacy from touch to sight — when you're looking at figures that you've touched. I think that the vision-to-vision was just to make sure that people could recognize shapes. Because in many of these cases — and one of the reasons I think that this question hasn't been empirically answered — is because it's very hard to get subjects who are legitimately, genuinely blind from birth but without any other problems with their visual systems, with their optic nerves or their receptors, that would prevent them from seeing at all, or seeing certain kinds of shape.

Also, removal of cataracts seems to be a very good way to do it, because there's no evidence that anything else in [00:27:00] the visual system has been afflicted. But this is just sort of running a check. Can these people see? That is, are there any other damages that would prevent the recognition and the identification of these figures? So that's, I think, why they do that.

But the immediacy that I'm interested in is whether you could distinguish these things that you'd felt before, by sight alone. And that's a really big question. What does that mean, really? Really hard questions about it.

Andrea Hiott: I really love that you're both just going into this, and I want you to actually keep doing that and go deeper. But just for some people who are maybe a little bit lost — so I'll try to make a really caricatured kind of thing, and then maybe you can improve and correct me.

If we're thinking about Locke and then Berkeley, we're almost thinking about [00:28:00] vision and touch as two different languages, something that just wouldn't connect. And then you have someone like Leibniz — who I think, Brian, you've given a different take on what he was really trying to do — but in the caricature version, that would just be sort of a rational — like, what we're calling rational, which for me none of this makes any sense anymore, but I'm going to bracket all that. But from this rational point of view, you could figure it out. So these things wouldn't be like different languages. They would be something you could figure out pretty quickly, intellectually — what we traditionally think of as cognitive, or intellect.

So that's the caricature: Locke saying, and then Berkeley even more radically saying, "These are completely different, so no is the answer." And then Leibniz saying, "Yes, you could figure it out intellectually, rationally." That's my caricature.

And then you brought up the Held and Sinha experiments — the Project Prakash thing. And that's interesting, because [00:29:00] that's when cognitive science gets brought in. And this is a really interesting thing that I just want to bring out for people, because very rarely do you have a thought experiment that then actually becomes part of empirical science that can be tested. So I just want to mark that, but I'll let you fill that in.

But just for people who are maybe a little lost, those are the two sides. And then, Brian, maybe you could say again how Janet — I really love what she did with this idea of the temporal and the epistemic, which basically, for people that don't know, that's just sort of this knowledge. Maybe you could unpack that just a little bit too, and I'll be quiet and let you talk. But before we get too far in, I wanted to make that clear to people.

Brian Glenney: Yeah, no, thanks. This problem is so seductive for me that going into the weeds is what I do right away.

So, I think Janet mentioned this about these cataract surgeries — that it seems like once [00:30:00] you've removed this blockage from sight, you should be able to just see. But we know that, one, if there's any kind of issue with your visual sense, it essentially brings about abnormal vision for the rest of your life. Why? Because the visual cortex gets recruited by these other senses, like touch and sound. And so in order for vision to come back online, it has to re-recruit these centers that seem reserved for it. All this work has to happen.

And so this is where the epistemic immediacy does so much good work, because it allows the newly sighted to gain the familiarity with vision in a way that allows them to have robust visual experiences again.

But the real question, [00:31:00] I think, is whether you need touch to help educate the visual organization of reality. And this is something that comes up with these two sensory languages that Berkeley uses as a metaphor.

Can we push this a little bit farther, since it seems really graspable? I know English. I know a little bit of Russian. Do I think in Russian? No. I need English to help me with my Russian. In that sense, I really have to translate things all through my English all the time. It would seem like if you're newly sighted, you need touch to translate all the visual information for you for a long time — until you get to a point maybe where you think in the visual [00:32:00] language, which happens eventually. Someone can speak Russian enough to where they just think in the Russian language. And so I think at that moment is when you can have this kind of epistemic wherewithal. But you need touch in order to make that happen.

But once you bring touch into the picture, you can't run Molyneux's experiment anymore, right? And so I think this is the paradox of Molyneux's question and the experimental approach — that when that visual ability comes back online, it's not normal vision, for one. And secondly, you've already —

Janet Levin: The vision is impure, because it's been educated by touch.

Brian Glenney: Right.

Janet Levin: Well, here's a question. Does it have to be educated by touch?

Brian Glenney: I think it does. This is the worry I have.

Janet Levin: Okay. Well, [00:33:00] this is then Molyneux's question, or the contemporary version of it. But I think you can think of Leibniz as saying — well, think about somebody who is bilingual almost from when they're learning language. Like, one parent speaks English, one parent speaks Russian, and they learn both at the same time, and so they can think in both languages, and they're thinking about the same thing. So I think you could think about Leibniz as saying something like that. I mean, this isn't quite right, but —

Brian Glenney: It's very close.

Janet Levin: Yeah. But maybe we should talk a little bit about why you and I differ in these ways, particularly in this question.

And my interest, as I think you pointed out, Andrea, a while ago, is that I'm [00:34:00] first and foremost interested in so-called phenomenal concepts. That is, concepts of what it's like to have various experiences, like visual experiences. What it's like to see red, or to feel something smooth, what it's like to feel pain, et cetera.

And these phenomenal concepts seem very, very different from physical concepts — like where you give a description of what's going on in the brain when all these things happen — and they just don't seem to be linked at all. But could our phenomenal concept of what it's like to see red really be picking out some brain state? Some stimulation of the cones, let's say? And even though it doesn't seem as though you can translate between them at all — that there's nothing more that you can learn about what it's like to see red that's going to give you [00:35:00] any insight into what's going on in the brain, or vice versa.

And so the Molyneux question started intriguing me, because here was another case in which, at least allegedly, you could see something and feel something, and what it's like to feel something is so different from what it's like to see something. Or maybe not. Are perceptual concepts different from phenomenal concepts — that is, phenomenal concepts of the brain and what's going on inside one's head?

And so that's how I got interested in it, and I'm also interested in how perceptual learning works. But Brian, you got interested in it for another reason.

Brian Glenney: For many other reasons. I was a very young thinker [00:36:00] when I came to it, and I wanted to be like a Scottish philosopher, you know, like Thomas Reid or Adam Smith. And they both have these theories of perception that are based on answers to Molyneux. They were really intrigued by responding to Berkeley and his no answer, and they were trying to respond with a yes, and figuring out different ways to do so.

Andrea Hiott: Sorry, did you say Adam Smith was too?

Brian Glenney: Yeah. Adam Smith.

Andrea Hiott: The economist? Oh, I didn't know that. I knew Reid. Sorry, that just kind of blew my mind.

Brian Glenney: It is mind-blowing. He has this whole other dimension. And Adam Smith writes this little paper when he's fifteen, and comes up with a theory of perception that's similar to Reid's, but it's before Reid. [00:37:00] So I work a lot on that Adam Smith theory of perception. I mean, we could say I'm the world's expert on this fifteen-year-old's essay.

Andrea Hiott: We have to talk about that another time, then, because I don't know anything about that. You have to send me that so I can read it, because that is — also Reid, I think that's a whole unopened world for so many people. Everyone's talking about Gibson, and me too, but with the immediacy. So that could be a whole other very interesting conversation. But anyway, I interrupted you. That's how you got into it.

Brian Glenney: I kind of got into it that way, and now I'm thinking about sensory expertise. And it does seem like, even though we take it for granted, the way that we see the world is its own kind of sensory expertise. And it suggests that we all see the world in very different ways. Objects have different meaning for individuals [00:38:00] and for different cultures, and I think that relates to your interest in perceptual learning, Janet. How is it that we come to learn these different meanings and different interpretations of these objects?

Also, I can't help but mention this. I was working on my last book on Molyneux and I came across some research by one of my ancestors, George Glennie of all things. He was doing research on this boy who was born blind, with cataracts in his eye. And then in his right eye, his cataract was couched — moved out of the way — and he was able to see for a little bit. And then it floated back up and blocked his ability to see. And so George was instrumental in trying to understand what happens when you go back to blindness after having sight. [00:39:00] What does it change about your world? And he sent all of his research to James Beattie, who then presented it to the Royal Society. And so I'm like — this was in 1796.

Andrea Hiott: And you found this back when you were a student, or you found it even more recently?

Brian Glenney: No, like two years ago.

Andrea Hiott: What?

Brian Glenney: Like two years ago.

Janet Levin: Brian just told me about this a few days ago, and I said, "We've got to talk about this. This is really cool."

Andrea Hiott: That is wild. That is wild on so many levels — that you've been doing this and didn't even know that, and yet it's sort of part of the path. But sorry, I keep interrupting. You keep saying things that are sort of blowing my mind.

Brian Glenney: I didn't even know I had an ancestor that taught philosophy. He taught philosophy for forty years in Aberdeen. [00:40:00] I feel so ignorant and foolish to not have known this seemingly cool thing.

Andrea Hiott: It seems confirming in a way, though, too, somehow.

Brian Glenney: It's confirming. There's a genetic basis for my interest in Molyneux, maybe.

Andrea Hiott: Some kind of flow that's going on beyond what you thought.

But Janet, how did you find Brian, or how did Brian find you? What's that moment? How did you two connect on this? Or did you connect on this? I'm thinking this is what you connected on, but maybe it was something else too.

Janet Levin: Well, just being in the same place, taking classes. I mean, Brian was interested in other issues in perception too, like the moon illusion, right? You really were interested in that.

Brian Glenney: I really thought I could solve that one. And the moon illusion is just that the moon on the horizon looks huge, and then as it creeps up, it goes smaller and smaller. But of course, the moon doesn't change in size or distance. It's a purely cognitive illusion. And so I had all these [00:41:00] experiments and was trying to figure it out. And then I'm like, "Man, maybe Molyneux will be an easier problem to solve." So Janet was working on it. James Van Cleve was working on it as well. I'm like, this is perfect. And so Janet really helped me think through these issues at a deeper level, of course, and was on my dissertation committee.

And that was a blast. I wrote — it was six chapters. Five of the chapters were these different ways of answering Molyneux, and the sixth chapter was my way, which was the right way. And then I presented my oral exam, and — well, I don't know who it was that said it, but I had one revision to make, and that was that my answer wasn't [00:42:00] the right answer, and that I should be much more open to the possibility that there are many ways of answering it. And I was like, "Yes, this was you, I think." And I was like, "Hmm, actually, that might be right."

Andrea Hiott: Well, that sounds really familiar, having just read some of your newer work.

Brian Glenney: Yeah. And that kind of started me on this idea that maybe there isn't a single correct answer to Molyneux's question, because it's such a general question. And as we learn more and more about vision, we know there are so many different ways to see, so many different processes that are required to see, and we all see the world in a different way. So it could be that we need many different answers to Molyneux's question, in accordance with the interests that we have, [00:43:00] the subjects that we're studying, in terms of the particular individual that we're studying.

And so the more I think of this pluralist kind of context for answering Molyneux, the more interesting Molyneux becomes — because, boy, it really expands your horizon of all the different ways to see. And lately I've been really getting into animal experiments that basically perfectly map Molyneux's problem and try to solve it through — I mean, we've got bees and bats, dolphins, electric fish. So once you start —

Andrea Hiott: Before we get into all those animal experiments — I know, there are so many exciting experiments. But Janet, that's very, very interesting. If Janet's the one who sort of turned you on to this, maybe we have to leave that as a mystery if it's part of your dissertation. But somehow she seems to have opened you into this very interesting different world of thinking [00:44:00] about this problem — which, frankly, I think is very important and sort of of the moment. Like, we could actually handle this now, maybe even with technology, but also just, we can maybe handle holding that kind of weird tension of letting there be multiple possibilities.

But that's interesting, Janet, because — I mean, maybe I'm wrong about this, but I feel like in your work, you're trying to find the answer, not opening to multiplicity. Is that wrong?

Janet Levin: No, I am trying to find the answer. But part of — well, I'm interested in whether we can have different unconnected concepts that pick out the same thing, whether this is true for sight and touch with [00:45:00] respect to spatial figures. So that's one thing that I'm interested in.

The other thing I'm interested in is, as we said before, perceptual learning. Can we do certain things to vary the angle of vision, or touch for that matter, and get a fuller picture of what the perceptual experience is, or the perceived object is, without that counting as adding some kind of intellectual activity? So those are the things that I'm interested in.

Now, whether or not there can be a crucial experiment to determine these things is really, really hard, and I think a lot of Brian's work shows [00:46:00] why it's hard. Number one, there are all sorts of things that have to be intact in the visual system in order for a person to be able to see in this sort of ideal way that Locke and Berkeley and Leibniz were thinking about when they posed or tried to answer the question. And so, as Brian points out, there are various parts of the visual system that can be out, and then you're going to have a different question to answer. There are, as he puts it, different kinds of blindness — different ways that the visual system can be impaired so that you're not seeing, and so you have to make sure all those things are fixed.

Whereas my view is more the theoretical view, the theoretical question. Could somebody do this, [00:47:00] rather than would somebody do this, if they were presented with the objects of sight when first allowed to see, if they were familiar with the objects by touch. So my question is more — is it possible for them to do it?

Andrea Hiott: I think it's really interesting how these are coming together in a strange way that's still very messy for me to try to articulate. So I'm thinking about maybe going to that experiment — I think it's called Project Prakash, the Held one, Held and Sinha — which, Janet, I think you were in your paper answering to, in a way, because that came down on the side of no, and you were saying, "Well, maybe," in the way that you were just explaining. If we look at it a different [00:48:00] way, amodally, there's another way to look at it — which sounds familiar to some of Brian's work from a completely different perspective, to me right now. And I'm not sure how to connect those.

But maybe we could talk about that experiment for a minute, because there are a lot of interesting experiments, and it leads into the bees and the birds and how that's open. But also maybe just to understand a little more about how you both responded to this.

So maybe you can help me, but that experiment was with, I think, some neuroscientists at MIT, but the project was in India, with children in India who had congenital blindness. I don't know if it was ocular or cortical. I mean, as you both brought up, there are lots of different kinds of blindness — already we're in very multiplicity territory there. But to try to stay general, they were born with this, so that was unusual, I think, right? And they were maybe seven to sixteen or something. [00:49:00]

And they did a test on it. Maybe you could just — I don't know if you remember better how to summarize why that ended up on a Lockean sort of view, and then how Janet actually opened that up and made people — I think what you did was show people there's a whole other way to think about it, which to me leads towards what Brian is doing. But I don't know what you both would say about that.

Janet Levin: No, that sounds right. So do you want to talk about the experiment, Brian? Because you're probably closer to it.

Brian Glenney: Yeah, I can give my take, but your take is different and interesting.

I make a lot of hay about the fact that, yes, all five of the subjects failed to identify shapes that they had never seen before but they knew by touch. And that was a very big deal. But then [00:50:00] they allowed these boys to go and play. They had real-world experience for about three days, and then three of them were retested, and they had very good ability to visually recognize objects they had never seen but they knew by touch — three days later.

And the cool thing about the authors of that paper is they say, "Wow, this is shockingly quick." It seems like there was probably some kind of innate connection between sight and touch that the real-world experience essentially unlocked and allowed them to quickly achieve visual ability.

And so that's why the authors even end the paper: at first sight, no, but eventually, yes. [00:51:00] And that "eventually" requires, or includes, tactile experience at the same time as visual experience — which in some sense undermines what Molyneux is trying to do, but at the same time seems required if we're going to have what might be called pseudo-normal vision. So I make a lot of hay about this idea that perceptual learning, particularly for vision, seems to require having a translating language, like touch, in order to educate vision.

Janet Levin: But you do something really different with that. To go back to what you were saying — so if you have the touch-to-sight correlation for a few basic things, then you've learned the language, and you can then recognize new objects by sight alone, [00:52:00] not having touched them. So that's the big deal there. Does that mean — is that a yes or is that a no? It seems like it's probably a yes.

But one of the things that I was interested in is whether you could get the same result just by tweaking vision. You don't let them out in the world touching things — I mean, if that's possible at all. But you allow them to see these objects from different angles. Would that kind of experience in the world that is sight — I mean, I don't know how you tie them down — [00:53:00] but you let them move their heads, or at least move their eyes, or look straight at the table but have the objects on a rotating platform. Would you be able to recognize the cube as a cube and the sphere as a sphere, if you had that, without the touch?

So they didn't do that, but I'm wondering if that's possible. And a lot of people say it's not — that you need touch. And I think that's Brian's view, and that's Alva Noë's view. And I think it's Gareth — well, it's hard to say what Gareth Evans's view is, but a lot of people say that. And that leads to the idea of embodied perception, which I'm a bit [00:54:00] skeptical about, but it's something that Brian has really done a lot of work on.

Andrea Hiott: Well, yeah — Brian, when you were saying, is there some innate connection between sight and touch, I was thinking: the body. It is both, which we tend to just kind of skip over. There's sight and touch as if they're not part of the same thing. But it is much more complicated than just saying that.

But also, Janet, when you were explaining what you were just explaining, I was thinking about how it's also a very plausible, obvious kind of thing in a way. Even just thinking of amodality in a more caricatured way — like, if someone shows me a picture, if I've never been in an airplane, and someone shows me a picture from above of something, I wouldn't recognize it. But if that same object you could move around in front of me, I would probably get it. I mean, that's a little bit too simple, but [00:55:00] there's some way in which those things are connected too, because we're already putting sight in a category and touch in a category.

But actually, in that situation, if you're moving what's in front of you, the whole body and your sensory body and everything you've touched up to that point is going to be playing a role in what is happening with just looking at the thing moving. Does that make sense at all? I have trouble now even seeing how that could ever be separated — except perhaps in animals that were just born, because they haven't learned all that stuff yet, and we do have very clear examples there. So I'm getting a little bit messy, but what does that bring up?

Janet Levin: Yeah, that's right. There's Meltzoff, about the Molyneux babies that are given these bumpy pacifiers. You know those experiments? They're so good. Do you know those experiments?

Andrea Hiott: I thought you were talking about the bumpy — like the ducks or the birds that have bumpy touch [00:56:00] or smooth touch. I didn't know about the bumpy pacifiers. Is that another version of that?

Brian Glenney: You're talking about the Versace baby chicks experiment. Janet's talking about Meltzoff's old experiment, where he used a pacifier that was bumpy and habituated the bumpiness — the bumpy mouth-feel — in a newborn, and then dangled bumpy and smooth figures, and the newborn looked at the bumpy figure the most. And that's supposed to suggest a yes answer for the infants.

Andrea Hiott: We're supposed to be philosophers and not talk about this, but I've had experiences that make me feel like that could happen — but it doesn't depend on these clean cuts between what sight is and what touch is. It depends on everything I've experienced up to that moment. And as a baby, when you have that in your mouth, that is not just [00:57:00] like touching. That's a lot going on there. And it's from the time that you've just kind of started to create your habits, and with the regularity. So you're not separating things. It's not like suddenly at age nine I can then see this thing, which of course will be dissonant with everything up to that point that I've known. Does this make sense? I think, Brian, you're getting into some of that with your work too, but I also feel it in what Janet's saying.

Brian Glenney: Well, there's a contrasting experiment with the infants —

Andrea Hiott: Okay, good. I wasn't hearing people for a few minutes, but now —

Brian Glenney: Oh, okay. Sorry, it's probably my computer that's the problem.

Andrea Hiott: Glitched out a little?

Brian Glenney: It was glitching. But there's this contrasting experiment where they actually did use the hand. They tactually habituated [00:58:00] ten-hour-old infants to a cube shape with the hand, and then dangled the cube and the sphere before their eyes, and in that case, the infants looked at the novel object more frequently — the circle. Whereas with Meltzoff's experiments with the mouth-feel, it was the familiar object that they looked at the most.

Janet Levin: So we don't know what looking at things the most means, in short.

Brian Glenney: It really confounds what exactly we're supposed to be identifying with these Molyneux experiments. Does familiarity matter? Does novelty matter? Does the fact that it's a hand educating the brain mean that now the brain wants novel visual objects, whereas with the mouth, it wants familiar ones? Maybe because the pacifier is supposed to emulate food. So anyway, I think these infant experiments, when you start looking at them, [00:59:00] raise more questions than they answer.

And actually, the most recent Molyneux experiment was with a six-month-old baby that was blind from birth, and they filmed this baby essentially learning sight. It's like a half-hour-long video, and the first thing that the baby seems to recognize is its own hand — which I think Moore would love.

Janet Levin: Now, I don't know these experiments. So they were able — at six months — to get the baby to see?

Brian Glenney: Yeah, it was just another cataract operation. And around the four-minute mark, you just see this baby spacing out on its own hand, moving it around, and it's this thrilling moment where — wow, it seems like it does identify something that it knows by this kind of touch, [01:00:00] the movement of its own hand.

Andrea Hiott: What did they say? So that was on the side of yes or no?

Brian Glenney: Of a yes.

Andrea Hiott: Okay. Because it's very — I mean, if you think about when you're born and you're just learning what we've already categorized now, but it's not categorized in the way that we've now categorized it. So I think it's really interesting. This is why this question is so interesting, because it can make you think of all of these things, and why it's even interesting that there's not one answer.

But I wonder what you both think about that, or if you disagree on this idea of even — I mean, do you still really see those categories of empiricist and rationalist as really clearly separate? Especially if you've both mentioned the body too. I just wonder if this question has raised anything [01:01:00] interesting about that, especially in the kind of — I don't want to say the communication between the two kinds of work that you're doing, because they actually are much more different than we've really shown, and yet I think they've both created, co-created, some new things. So I'm trying to bring that out a bit.

Janet Levin: Yeah, well, I think the issue of empiricism versus rationalism that so motivated Locke and Molyneux and Berkeley and Leibniz — I don't think people think about the question in that way anymore. They think about it in terms of what perceptual learning is, and what the connection between visually produced concepts of shape and tactually produced concepts of shape are. Whether there are connections that we can just get a priori or not. [01:02:00] A priori meaning without any other sort of knowledge — that we can just kind of examine these concepts and determine whether or not they're concepts of the same thing. But that's independent of the old questions about rationalism versus empiricism, I think.

But so one thing that I think separates me maybe from Brian — I mean, I don't really have that many fixed ideas about this — is whether you need some sort of action, or capacity for action, capacity for movement, to be able to see three-dimensional shapes. And many people say you do, a lot of people that [01:03:00] Brian just quoted. Some people say you don't, or you may not, and I'm not quite sure where to go. I'm interested in exploring whether you can learn to identify these things by sight alone, by just moving your head around, or looking at the object on a rotating platform.

Now, the idea though that you need touch, I think leads into some really interesting questions that Brian has a lot to say about. About embodiment.

Andrea Hiott: This gets you to the skate stuff. Which I think is very interesting.

Brian Glenney: Yeah. Well, I think, Janet, your interest — you have, like, maybe a couch potato version of perception, where it seems like you could just sit there, [01:04:00] and perception can do the work that it needs to do to get the ideas acquired. But I think I've gone to more of these action theories, where your body has to somehow be involved, be part of the process of seeing or touching. And without that movement, you're not going to get that. It's the facilitator of these two different languages.

Janet Levin: Which I really like — thank you. Yeah, it's definitely the couch potato view, but I'm interested in whether it's possible for a couch potato to recognize three-dimensional shapes.

Andrea Hiott: Sorry — the couch potato view. That's just wonderful.

Brian Glenney: Yes, that's really good.

Andrea Hiott: But you did say even the couch potato was moving its head, so... [01:05:00]

Janet Levin: Yeah, but could — now, Susanna Schellenberg has this idea of what she calls a sentient statue. That is, an individual who just doesn't move, or can't move, but still can have experiences. Visual experiences, let's say. Now, can the sentient statue recognize three-dimensional objects? And so that's the question. And she thinks that you need at least the capacity to move. But I wonder, in one of the papers that I wrote, whether the sentient statue could do a little bit better, at least, if the world were moving [01:06:00] around — even though the sentient being was statuesque, in that she couldn't move at all. So that's one of the things that I was trying to think about, but I really don't have firm conclusions.

Brian Glenney: Well, there's a way to combine our two ways of thinking, maybe, with virtual environments. What if our actual analog body doesn't move, or our analog world doesn't move, but we're placed into a digital world that does move? And we have a digital simulacrum that becomes our world. That's all we know. Shapes are presented to us, three-dimensional — would we be able to identify them?

Janet Levin: Yeah. The way that this dovetails with questions about virtual reality [01:07:00] is really, really interesting. And that's something that I think everybody's going to be wanting to talk about, as you can get these much, much more realistic three-dimensional worlds. Or three-dimensional simulacra.

Andrea Hiott: But even there, I feel like — what do you both think about the sort of path dependency of all of this? That would be a way I would say it in a navigational approach. That even if we go into a virtual world, we're coming with a history as a body, of a lot of stuff. We don't just leave that outside the virtual world. And I feel like that's the case in all of these, even — I can't remember what you just said about the statue. I haven't read those papers. What was it called?

Brian Glenney: A sentient.

Andrea Hiott: Oh, a sentient statue. Okay. Well, I guess that's always been [01:08:00] a sentient statue, but it's a little bit like a zombie or something, because do you have movement inside if you're a sentient statue? Have you always been a sentient statue? I also think, just coming out of neuroscience, or even a lot of phenomenological studies about locked-in syndrome or something like that, where you can't move anymore — but of course you would recognize a three-dimensional object.

So, all to say, it's already a little bit what we've talked about. It depends on a million different things, in a sense. But I wonder about that path, that historical, if I dare say, kind of aspect to it. Do either of you think about that much?

Janet Levin: By historical, do you mean what happens if you live your life normally and then can't move?

Andrea Hiott: We can have a lot of thought experiments, but if we're really looking at this as we do now in the lab — a lot of these experiments don't consider [01:09:00] when the changes come, according to when they're done in the subject's life, which means they've had a whole very different experience up to that point. If they're just born — whether it's an animal or a human — there's a very different result than if they're ten or twenty or thirty or whatever. And all those results aren't necessarily the same, but there are some very similar things to them. But we don't talk about it like that at all — that temporal kind of thing, that you're a developing body from the moment you come, and that that is actually the more defining and the more coherent way of looking at the data. But we don't do that. Or I don't see that coming into the discussion. Which is fine when you're just doing the thought experiments, but we're really doing empirical studies now too.

Janet Levin: Well, I think that's really important, to get clear about what the person has experienced up to the relevant [01:10:00] point. Because if you have a lot of touch-to-sight correlations or whatever, then it's easy to see how they could be extended, that they could be extrapolated. And so you get a yes, I think, even for individuals who haven't seen those particular shapes. I mean, that was what your question was, Brian, I think, about the Held experiments.

Brian Glenney: Yeah. No, that's right. If they're running around the world, then they're getting a lot of that experience.

Andrea Hiott: I want to hear about that. And also, I just want to say, I also think that's where your work, Janet, could be reinterpreted in a really interesting way. Because the kind of idea that you're presenting there, if you try to think of it through that lens I just presented, it opens up a different way of doing the experiment. It's just that there's going to have [01:11:00] to be a different shift in what kind of data we're actually looking at — if we're looking at it through a kind of developmental lens rather than almost like slices of experiments, not taking that development into account.

But maybe — does that relate at all to what Janet just brought up about your work there, Brian?

Brian Glenney: Well, it relates to most theories of perception in philosophy today. Bence Nanay has a nice paper where he talks about how some people with blindness have some degree of visual imagination. If they have that capacity, their ability to answer Molyneux's question with a yes seems more apt, seems more possible. And so this just adds to the pluralist take on Molyneux's [01:12:00] question — that you really have to be open to looking at the subject. What kind of blindness do they have? Is it ocular? Is it cognitive? Is it based on some kind of lesion in their visual cortex? If so, you have to take those two subjects differently. What kind of specialized abilities do they have?

So maybe one example — I just wonder how Janet would actually answer this. Imagine you have a blind puzzler who knows how to do a Rubik's Cube using braille, and they can solve the puzzle in a minute. They're given sight, the braille is removed, and all there are are colors. Of course, they're maybe not seeing the colors, but they're able to match which colors fit, which have similarity. So are they able to solve a visual Rubik's Cube at first sight? Does the puzzling specialization transfer across the senses? Doesn't that [01:13:00] seem to pick up on something you're interested in regarding conceptual capacity?

Janet Levin: Yes, but I've got to confess, I've never really tried a Rubik's Cube. I know that it's a challenging, interesting thing. But I take it that you use colors, that you memorize what colors are on one side, and then you maneuver it a little bit, and you're picking up on color changes. Is that right?

Brian Glenney: Yeah, but you wouldn't have to identify the colors necessarily. You just have to match — same color — while you're trying to solve the puzzle.

Janet Levin: So for you, that's the interesting, or the problematic feature — the color bit?

Brian Glenney: I guess for [01:14:00] me, does the puzzler's capacity to solve a Rubik's Cube transfer? That's what I'm interested in. I don't see the color matching as problematic.

Janet Levin: You do?

Brian Glenney: Well, not necessarily. I'm interested in what it's being used for.

Janet Levin: So you're suggesting that somebody who had done a Rubik's Cube in braille could, if they had their vision restored, be able to do it — [01:15:00] or at least tell when it was done, just by looking at the colors?

Brian Glenney: Yeah. And I think, as you think about it, there's this additional feature: when I read lots of people with blindness and their thinking about Molyneux's problem, they essentially say, "I don't care about shapes. I have no motivation to think about shapes. Leave me alone." I think that's a really standard response from people with blindness. Like, you're just using me as a guinea pig — give me something I care about.

And I think that motivational component to see — think of that baby who sees its own hand for the first time. It's very interested in its own hand, and all the other objects that the scientists — I mean, you haven't seen the video, I know, but they pass all these other objects around the baby. The baby doesn't care about those objects at all. I just think that this motivational feature of the [01:16:00] puzzler — it cares about the Rubik's Cube. It cares about solving it. It's motivated to solve it. And I think that additional feature gets lost in Molyneux's problem. But it can be brought out with this new kind of Rubik's Cube, or any of these other kinds of specialized abilities that the newly sighted might be able to transfer from their previous blind status.

Janet Levin: Well, I think the motivational issue is very interesting, but I think that's a separate issue. Suppose somebody really is motivated to solve a Rubik's Cube and were just shown the different — again, I'm really speaking from ignorance, because I don't really know how it works, but presumably they see the colors and [01:17:00] they can tell...

I'm hesitating because I'm not exactly sure what the experiment would be, since I really don't know that much about Rubik's Cube. How are you thinking about it? They see one colored surface and then they see another one?

Brian Glenney: Yeah, they see all these multiple colored surfaces and they're like, "Oh, that's just like the various dots that I previously touched."

Andrea Hiott: If the colored surfaces were somehow regularized to — whatever the patterns of the dots are, if the colors are somehow regularized to that, they wouldn't need to be the dots, but you would pick up on the same patterns, right?

Brian Glenney: Yeah.

Andrea Hiott: That's the idea.

Janet Levin: And when you pick up on the patterns, it's that you see one surface that has colors that correlate to [01:18:00] the braille dots that you've been feeling — and then is it that you see the next panel after somebody manipulates the cube?

Brian Glenney: As they start to solve the puzzle, which they know the algorithm for, right — they'll just turn the Rubik's Cube in certain ways. That behavior helps them make this transfer of specialized knowledge on how to solve the Rubik's Cube. And I think that's a kind of conceptual achievement that moves from touch to sight in an interesting way, because it's translated through this bodily movement. And that actually seems, given what we know of sensory perception today, like the right kind of Molyneux problem to be asking, as opposed to this [01:19:00] sentient passive statue.

So I guess maybe the question is: what is that passiveness controlling for? Why is it important to be a couch potato perceiver for the conceptual transfer?

Janet Levin: Well, that's a really good question. A lot of early modern philosophers like Locke want to distinguish between perception as being something like passive reception, versus cognition — where you can use either information about the relation between sight and touch, or other information that's just visual, or perhaps even more information about the way the world is, or the way people now think that the world is, to influence [01:20:00] what you say that you perceive, your recognition of objects.

And so there are two questions. One is the one that Brian raised, and I agree completely: why does perception need to be passive? Why should that be the distinction between perception and cognition? Couldn't it be something else? Couldn't perception be a matter of where it is and how it is that you get the information about the world — that is, through sensory modalities of various kinds? And then cognition is a matter of how, in later stages, that information is processed, even if the information comes in not just passively, but with either some sort of innate way of categorizing these things, or something that is very rudimentary [01:21:00] learning. So why should that distinction matter? That's a question. And that would be a question that you could raise to the early modern philosophers like Locke, who think that it has to be passive.

But then the other question — and this is the one that I believe comes out at the end of that article that you were talking about, Andrea, that I wrote about Molyneux — is whether... I mean, let's accept the passive-active distinction, even though it seems really stupid to do it. But let's accept it for now and ask whether seeing something from different angles when you're not moving, et cetera, but you are getting more visual information about it — does that count? And suppose you are able to learn more in that way. [01:22:00] Does that count as passive, or does it count as involving some kind of intellectual activity? So that was the question I was interested in, and that's why I brought up the sentient statue. But of course, you have to say something about how long the sentient being has been a statue.

Andrea Hiott: I think it's really interesting if you try to hold both of these together without deciding, without the yes/no, which has kind of guided this whole problem and question. But what if it's not about yes/no anymore? What if it's about being more specific and robust about each way in which we're asking the question? And when we do that, then we get more information, which all together gives us something — which I think is what your paper actually does there.

But even if I try to be more specific about — a lot of those experiments, even ones I remember recently, which I can't remember what it was exactly, but [01:23:00] humans had their vision surgically restored. And then this cross-modal matching was really hard, but then they learned it really quickly. Kind of like what you were talking about, Brian, with the kids. It's as if at first it's very dissonant, but then you have some kind of more experience, which is actually empiricist there. And then it makes sense. It all kind of fills in or something.

I think this was even with newborns — from the very beginning, they had that cross-modality. But when you go through life, you become patterned, right? And so then you lose the kind of ability for the amodality. It's the same way we prune in the brain and things like this. This seems very much demonstrated in science, that this happens, and that then, of course, if you've been going through life in that way, when you suddenly have a change, you're going to be almost frozen for a bit, and [01:24:00] you have to relearn it.

That to me seems like — we have to stop thinking about cognition and perception as opposites. And if we do that, then we look back at something like what you present in that experiment, Janet, and I think that's opening us up into some way in which we can intellectually move while passive, if that makes sense at all. And that to me feels very exciting. But I don't know if that made any sense to either of you.

Janet Levin: It did, yeah. Whether seeing things from different perspectives, but without you moving, is — first of all, is it enough to give you the ability to perceive three-dimensional objects? Question one. Question two: is it perfectly passive? [01:25:00] If the ability to identify these three-dimensional objects from just looking at it from different perspectives — you know, watching it rotate on a platform, let's say — if you can get an idea of a 3D object from that, does that count as introducing some sort of intellectual activity to it?

Andrea Hiott: I think it introduces a new experience, a new form of learning. I can see a way in which that kind of setup could show us that we can learn in a new way — which, I mean, I don't believe in this cognitive-perceptual divide that a lot of us assume. But even if we stick with that, I just think that [01:26:00] kind of experiment shows what you're trying to get it to show, just maybe in a different context. Because you would have to still have moved up to that point, I guess, is the point, if you're going to think of it in the same context in which you present it. But it's still actually a novel way to show how that same kind of process can be done in these spaces that are three-dimensional, or that we don't think of as empirical. So I'm almost flipping what you say. Does that make any sense, Brian, from an embodied point of view, or even Janet?

Janet Levin: I mean, it's empirical because this thing is rotating in front of you and is presenting itself to you via your visual system. But can you — if the thing turns around, can you still regard that as the object having presented [01:27:00] you with an experience? Or is it that you're doing something? So I think that's a good way to put it.

And does this matter? I'm not sure. But it does matter, I think, if you are thinking that there is an important distinction between perception and cognition — and that has now come to the forefront, given Ned Block's new book about the border between thinking and feeling, where he says that there is one, and there's been a lot of commentary about it and a lot of attempts to show that he's wrong. So that sort of Molyneux question, I think, is relevant to that debate.

Andrea Hiott: And I guess what I'm trying to say is: why do we have to say it's either/or? Of course, there's a difference between thinking and feeling, or these different ways that we've presented how we come into new knowledge. But if we [01:28:00] take this whole picture into view of how we've gotten there, we're actually getting different kinds — more like a pluralistic, or a multiplicity. We're getting different knowledge in each of those cases, and to pit them against one another is seeming to me a little less — like, why would we do that? Does that make any sense to you? Or is it too kind of —

Brian Glenney: No, no. It makes a lot of sense.

Andrea Hiott: I just feel like there's something there about the way that we can — I almost feel like it's showing that cognition is a continuance of experience, that you're experiencing in a different way. Because I do think what you show in that experiment is possible. But it doesn't fit into the ruts of trying to make it yes or no, either/or, in that old model.

Janet Levin: I think that's right. But then you have to [01:29:00] get clearer what the new questions are, and that's something that I'm not quite sure I've got, but it's something that I've tried to convey. So suppose you get to a yes, or a possibly yes — how do you do it? So it's not so much that there's a yes or no answer, but what would it take to get what these days you could count as a yes answer?

And I'm toying with the idea that you don't need movement, although I'm not sure. Brian is vehemently of the mind that you do, and has a fascinating paper called "The Skater's Eye," which talks about this. I don't know if you've seen this, Andrea, but it's really pretty interesting.

Andrea Hiott: I'm very interested in Brian's skateboarding stuff. We're going to have to talk about that in [01:30:00] another episode. I want to hear about it, though, Brian — she's brought up a few different of your papers. I don't know how much time you all have, though, because we said till 8:00 and now it's 8:05.

Brian Glenney: 8:05?

Andrea Hiott: Maybe. We've been going. Well — I mean, not 8:05. Whatever time it is for wherever you are in the world.

Janet Levin: But maybe Brian could just present, for like five minutes, and then you two could set up a time for him to continue. Just to present that.

Andrea Hiott: We could do something like that. I'm fine, so you just tell me. But yeah, go ahead.

Brian Glenney: Yeah. So this paper, "The Skater's Eye" — it's this strange ability that skateboarders have to identify objects out in the urban landscape that are particularly suited for an individual's skateboarding maneuvers, skateboarding tricks. So, like, a handrail, ledges, a set of stairs. [01:31:00] And then skateboarders who see a handrail that affords a certain trick have this crazy motivation to then skate it. And that feature adds to this — like, what is the skater's eye, such that it makes them want to go and risk bodily injury in order to perform this trick?

So we're on our third paper, and it's in Cognitive Science. This third paper — we're finishing the reviews for it. So it has this upshot where we're —

Janet Levin: In the Journal of Cognitive Science.

Brian Glenney: Yeah, in the journal. Where we're trying to understand what might be the brain processes involved. Is the hippocampus involved? Premotor cortex? What are the [01:32:00] operating conditions for the skater's eye?

But it actually comes back to Molyneux's problem in a way that is different from this perception-versus-cognition distinction, where I don't see perception, so to speak, in the eye, or in the head — but rather, I guess, for the Rubik's Cube puzzler, it would be in the hand, right? Their hand would just know how to do the work, rather than the head. And then for the skateboarder, their knowledge that produces this ability to instantiate the skater's eye, that's in the heel rather than the head. And so our body is able to produce, or is itself a repository of, this knowledge. And [01:33:00] that's kind of a third move away from this perception-versus-cognition distinction — that maybe the body itself does a lot of this work. And I think this is enactivism, right? It's kind of a well-trodden way of thinking about reality for the last twenty years.

Janet Levin: Yeah, but enactivism is one thing — that is, that you see the world in terms of what it allows you to do, how it allows you to move, et cetera. And that's a view that's controversial. It comes from Gibson, as you said, Andrea, and it was taken over by Alva Noë, and I guess Bence Nanay. I haven't seen the latest of Bence Nanay's stuff.

But then Brian adds this motivational aspect to it — that what you see is not just affordances, not just ways that [01:34:00] the environment allows you or prompts you to skate, but that you get this motivation to do it. And I'm wondering about that too. I mean, what if you've had a horrible accident and you really, really don't want to do it, but you see these things. You go, "Oh, God, that's where I did whatever it is that I did, and I fell, and oh, God, keep me away from that." So maybe you want to say that there's some sort of underived but tamped-down desire to do it.

But is this hippocampus? Where would a motivational component come from?

Andrea Hiott: Oh, gosh. Well, there are so many different theories. The motivational part is different than the spatial part of it. In a bigger way, you could think of it coming from [01:35:00] the hippocampus, because it's kind of how you're navigating. And it's also connected to your memory. And so for me, I would start in a very different place than any of this, but actually all of this would inform it in a really interesting way. So if you just think of it navigationally instead of cognitively or experientially, then you already have all that cognitive-experiential stuff in there.

And I think what Janet just brought up about the care and the urge — I'm saying care, but you have this urge. Brian, you said the skater — you said something about, they just want to do this trick. They see this. And I love skating, by the way. I love it, and I've watched, like, every video about it, and I did it when I was a kid. But more, I just love it. I love the interaction of the environment with the body, and also the edge work of it is interesting too, which is what Janet's bringing up a bit.

And it's interesting you brought up enactivism, [01:36:00] because there are so many different kinds of that too. But that ecological sense, and that participatory sense-making with the world, which can seem like an abstract idea, but I think it fits here. So then, to go back to the living — if you're just thinking of it as the way that you are experiencing the space, you know, you and Janet and I have had very different experiences with what we think when we hear "skateboarding," or when we see a certain staircase relative to what we're going to do with a skateboard. It's going to be really different for all three of us, right?

Brian Glenney: Good example.

Janet Levin: There's a bit of concrete block that comes down in our backyard to the back gate, and I once saw a skater on this, and I just freaked out, [01:37:00] because I was thinking, "Oh my God, they're going to fall." And so we put a lock on the gate. I mean, they could get up if they wanted to. But so every time I pass that, I think, "Oh, God, this affords the opportunity to shred. Never let it happen."

Andrea Hiott: I love that. I mean, of course this is about reading the environment in a sense — but Reed. Edward Reed. I haven't read that much. I would be very interested in how putting that with Gibsonian affordances and all the rest of the stuff that we've been talking about might illuminate something very interesting in all of this. Because there's a connection I can't quite make, but I see something very fascinating in trying to hold both of these things together a little bit.

In terms of — I mean, what we've been thinking about is, can you gain knowledge from two different modalities without those modalities being connected? But [01:38:00] then we kind of got to a place where we're understanding that the body is already the connection. And yet at the same time, I think we're realizing that you can create new connections without moving your body. Which I think a skateboarder does too — you're imagining what could happen there.

So in a way, maybe the body doesn't need to move, Janet, but there's movement in the environment, which is actually what you're saying when you're talking about the table moving. So I guess the question is, how could we not think of this through an either/or framework? What would that look like for both of you? Is it possible?

Janet Levin: Yeah. And then, if it's not either/or, then you have to be very clear about where the movement is. The question is, can it be just environmental movement, or does your own body have to move? And so that's a different question.

Andrea Hiott: But doesn't that [01:39:00] feel very exciting? If you start thinking of that question, and looking at your papers and Brian's papers, then something very interesting opens up.

Brian Glenney: Yes. So that's definitely something for further discussion. But this has been a lot of fun for me.

Andrea Hiott: And just before we go, I do want to bring it to — you know, care, or whatever. Do you still care about these issues after all this time? What is it about this question, or even doing philosophy in a way, that you can still keep having these conversations about it after, what, twenty years or something that you've both been talking about it? Does anything come up about that before we go, just to kind of end? Or anything else you might want to say about your connection, but also this problem, this idea?

Janet Levin: Yeah. Well, I think I've gotten more interested in questions about perceptual learning, [01:40:00] and whether perception can be distinguished in any way that's reasonably sharp from cognition. And I'm not sure it can, but it's really now come to the front of philosophical discussion about perception and cognition. And so that is an avenue I'd like to explore more.

Still interested in phenomenal concepts, which is kind of interesting, because Leibniz could say — and John Campbell does say this, who thinks that there are amodal concepts — that the phenomenological distinctions between what it's like to see a cube versus feel a cube are so strong that it blocks out what could be a perception of something that's [01:41:00] amodal. You know, the phenomenology rules, but it shouldn't. It's like Plato's paintings on the cave. That's not what's important. What's important are the forms. But you get distracted by all these paintings in the cave. So you just have to step outside, and then you can see what's real.

But I'm not sure how you step outside of these phenomenal concepts to see what's real, though some people say that that's true. Anyway, that's a digression. Brian, you've got different issues.

Brian Glenney: It's not a digression. That's where it's at. In some sense Janet's right. Everything kind of does come back to this question of what real knowledge is, right? It can't be the cave knowledge of these images on the back of the cave wall — or at least, please, I hope it's not that. I hope we're [01:42:00] not in a simulation.

And this is something that — you were mentioning Reid. Reid thinks that we have direct access to the world, like to this cup, rather than through some kind of intermediary, like an idea. And I think this is probably what drives both Janet and me with respect to Molyneux's question. Is our contact with shapes out in the world mediated by something, like experience, or like concepts? Or do we have some kind of immediate contact with the external world?

And I think that's what drives my interest in Molyneux's question. It's still so seductive in the sense that you can change it in slightly different ways, and its meaning completely changes. Like Janet was [01:43:00] saying — just, what if we move the shapes just a little bit? What does that do to our appreciation of what the newly sighted see, and what their capabilities are? There we have it: the seduction of getting to the external world, I think, is the draw into Molyneux's problem.

Andrea Hiott: Well, I find it wonderful and inspiring, and I feel like we just barely even got into it, actually — all the really interesting threads. And I'm thankful to you, Janet, for introducing me to Brian, because I had not been aware of all this work, and I'm very excited about it. So thanks for that.

Janet Levin: Yeah, but Brian's the man. He's doing the SEP entry. He's written many books about it.

Andrea Hiott: Well, yeah, now I've got a lot to explore. Hopefully, Brian, we can talk about that some time. We can make a time to talk about it, because there's so much interesting work.

Brian Glenney: Thank you so much for thinking of [01:44:00] me.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. Thanks, Janet. It's so good to see you.

Janet Levin: Good to see you. Have a great next two weeks in Hawaii. So I'm sure now, since you're such a great skateboarder, you're a great surfer too.

Brian Glenney: Well, I don't have the surfer's eye. Let's put it that way. I'm terrified. I'm right by Pipeline right now.

Andrea Hiott: Oh, wow. But did you grow up surfing, just to continue the theme?

Brian Glenney: I did, but then I had an injury.

Andrea Hiott: Ah — to Janet's point.

Brian Glenney: Yes, it is to Janet's point. But I'm trying to recover, and so we'll see. I have two weeks to do so. This has been a joy. Thank you so much.

Andrea Hiott: Yes, thank you both. I'll be in touch about when we go live, and you can both see if you need to edit anything, or send me all the links. But Brian and Janet, both of [01:45:00] you, thank you for your work. It's been really fun to talk to you both and see you both interact. That's kind of wonderful too — just to see you, over all these years, that you're still in conversation about this work. That means something, I think.

Brian Glenney: Yeah. It really is. And you know, when you're thinking about philosophy and love — we both love this subject, and you can see it.

Andrea Hiott: To me, that's inspiring, to see that that continues. And I feel that too, and I know a lot of people who are interested in these subjects do. So thanks for being here with us.

Brian Glenney: Thank you, Andrea, for this wonderful session.

Andrea Hiott: All right. And have a good morning and good day, and good Hawaii vacation.

Brian Glenney: Thank you. Bye.

Andrea Hiott: Bye.

Molyneux's Question, with Janet Levin and Brian Glenney. Love & Philosophy — Beyond Dichotomy, hosted by Andrea Hiott.