Re: The Thoughts and curiosities of a totally blind person on sight
You're probably not going to be able to get answers that will satisfy you. I had enough to know what I'm missing, if you will, and I've seen discussions like this, and it's just incredibly hard to cross that gulf of understanding. I can probably find some of the references where they've actually gone so far as to find differences in the brains of blind people, if I looked again, but I don't have them and you can presumably Google for that as easily as I can.
There isn't anything to equate visual experiences to. If you've never had them to a degree where you've had these questions, the gap seems to be as wide as those eldrich abominations from Lovecraft--it doesn't matter what we say, or how we do it, the experience will remain incomprehensible to you. Color, for instance, is varying frequencies in photons hitting your eye, resulting in different electrical signals to a part of your brain that may not even function in your case (science is still out on whether it does or not, but it certainly isn't getting input). You will be able to get answers like "red means blood" and "the sky is blue", but color and things like it only exist in so much as your brain has a way to process them, and yours doesn't. Words are labels that people put on things in order to manipulate the things, and that breaks down when there is literally no common ground.
If you want poetic, emotional answers, that's probably what most of the rest of this thread will be though. That, and "have you tried sensory substitution thing", which can be useful and fun to play with, but isn't actually equivalent to sight in a way that will let you get a handle on sight as a thing.
For a concrete example as to the complexity here, people don't see the screen when they watch TV, not because they can't see it, but because a whole bunch of things engage that are similar to suspension of disbelief when reading a novel, and because new TVs are sort of window-ish. "Do you see the screen" is one of those questions where it doesn't even quite make sense: can you see the edge of the TV? Do you experience the fact that there is a screen when watching it? Do you see the individual pixels because it's broken? And that's before we get into the qualitative thing where a screen actually mostly sends out parallel rays of light as opposed to entirely diffuse light as you'd see with a window or even just looking at a real room, which is an entire other dimension of quality (yes, windows and screens are very different).
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