It's not clear that this tool proves or even suggests anything at all about the relationship of mind and body. At best it indicates something about how our "sensorium" operates, but many philosophers would be seriously hesitant to equate our sensory awareness of our spatial surroundings with the mind. After all, animals have such a sensorium, but it's debatable whether they have mind in the sense(s) that philosophers, mystics, zen masters, or poets mean it.
You might want to try it first. This language is pretty close to what the people who can echo locate by clicking their tongues say.
As for whether there's a philosophical link between the senses and the mind, I think it would be really weird for any philosopher to not link them. All the mind has is what the senses give it, they completely intertwined.
This is a cool project, it'd be fun to make, and I'd bet enlightening to walk around with your eyes closed for a while.
There are a few things I'm sure I'd have done differently, and I'm not criticizing, I'm saying mine might have come out worse the first time. But I'm curious if anyone who's tried it can speak to the choices.
The case seems huge, the components could definitely fit into a tube half the diameter. Maybe it'd just take more time to pack, but maybe a large tube is actually beneficial for feeling the vibrations?
I'm sure I'd have tried audio over vibration, seems like you can get a much better range with less battery power. But vibration is perhaps less annoying to use for longer periods of time, or just more tactile?
And the PING sensor in my experience is extremely, surprisingly narrow. It feels like real life ray tracing. I've been curious about, but too busy to buy & play with, the infrared proximity sensors - I'm wondering if they have a somewhat wider spread but could still work here? Anyone know?
After vision, audition is your main way to perceive the world around you; you probably don't want to interfere with that sense. My guess is, if you consider proposing such a device to blind people, sound feedback would be an instant deal-breaker.
> the PING sensor in my experience is extremely, surprisingly narrow.
It would be very interesting to try and encode a wider sensing in finer ways: more buzzers, different "tones" of vibration... giving simultaneously information about what's exactly in front of the stick, and what the wider surroundings are like. I wonder what kinds of encodings are easiest to learn.
> My guess is, if you consider proposing such a device to blind people, sound feedback would be an instant deal-breaker.
I think you're right if the audio takes over the environment. Beeping and buzzing would be especially irritating. But OTOH, echo location is audible, and it's the main way that some blind people "see", so there's already evidence that audio is not a deal-breaker, or doesn't have to be.
> It would be very interesting to try and encode a wider sensing in finer ways: more buzzers, different "tones" of vibration... giving simultaneously information about what's exactly in front of the stick, and what the wider surroundings are like. I wonder what kinds of encodings are easiest to learn.
I agree completely. If you think about echo location, the source sound, a tongue click or whatever, has a wide spread. The sound that goes out echoes off everything nearby, it's not just a point-sample of distance. Furthermore, the echo that comes back has all kinds of texture to it, and blind people often talk about how they can hear the shape and material of things. They're getting multi-dimensional information from the echoes, not just a guess of how far away something is. They get amplitude and reverb/decay and stereo to work with, just for a start. It would indeed be very interesting to explore how a sensor device could achieve this same subtlety and multi-dimensionality!
This would be even more interesting if you had a hat with a ring of 4 of these sensors and vibrators. This way you could even "see" whats behind and next to you.
That product already exists, a blind friend of mine has one and freaks out his neighbours with it.
I was visiting him one day and he'd used it for a walk around around the block and his neighbour asked him how he "knew where all the cars where" and he responded "well, I ring Mary down the road and she describes the entire block to me and then I memorize it."
This guy nodded his head as if that made sense and left and then my friend promptly burst into laughter and showed me his secret.
How should that work? Three color-filtered light sensors and A/D converters on the Ardunino? With optics to get some sense of where the sensors are "looking"? Or a full-blown video camera? But that's not very Arduino-friendly, and synthesizing three numbers from a whole image seems hard.
In general, I think the appeal of this solution is its simplicity, it could be implemented on something even smaller than the Arduino. Adding video processing would be a move in the opposite direction, I think.
To me, the appeal of this device (and potential variants) is all in the new perceptive capabilities it grants the user – independent of any implementation details.
So to send color, I'd say sure, add a cheap video camera and whatever optics/CPU/software that's necessary to read the color, out along the same line for which the distance is being measured.
I accidentally clicked on the up arrow for this article. Then I decided to check the article to see if it was worth an up vote anyway.
>This page uses a plugin that is not supported
I guess my Chrome doesn't do .mov files in embed tags.
Well anyway, as far as embodied cognition goes, I believe that, in a certain sense, a star is part of my body while I'm looking at it. Post-it notes are part of our memory.
Seems interesting. Reminds me of the glasses that flip your vision upside down until your brain flips it back right side up and then when you take the glasses off you see upside down with no glasses. And also of blind people echolocating.
