Re: blindness and identity
I apologize if anyone thought I was trying to say that blind people have no sense of identity! I was actually trying to criticize the mirror test as a test of cognition and thinking about how psychology traditionally neglects the existence of blind people. So I was interested in seeing how identity develops in blind people since it must still be different despite being built on cultural information interactions.
Its worth pointing out too that many of these cultural interactions originate in sighted people too, which means that blind people's identities are shaped through processes they don't experience directly.
When experimenting with blindness myself, the biggest thing I notice is that visual processing is so fast that it automates much of the thinking for you so you know where everything is all at once. While blind processing is relative and focuses on relationships. Sighted people actually use the second type of processing for many thing but not as heavily as blind people, and that impacts cognition.
#8 and #9 - fantastic posts, don't worry I'm aware that the mirror test doesn't automatically imply anything about blind people. I've honestly always been critical of the test for this very reason... I was actually more interested in exploring the consequences of what that means for a lot of at least popular understanding of psychology, because psychology tends to neglect blind people. Back when I was dating that guy a few years ago he was treated like crap by his college psych program (they acted like he could never complete it) so most blind people aren't even able to engage in the study.
But you're absolutely 100% right and I totally agree. Identity is formed through contextual clues, which can be absorbed through other means.
I don't know if your example with the echoes actually works though because the mirror test is trying to capture a specific type of cognition relating to recognizing your own face as your own, and is socially derived. But there might be a better alternative.
I bring up gender too because I talked to some trans blind people and it was very interesting to see how they came out about their gender identity, and I feel that even in non-trans blind people there are interesting things to say here as well.
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