Without Difference, Meaning Does Not Exist
Without difference, there is no meaning. If no human being could see, there would be no concept of color, no words for dark or bright. These ideas exist only because of contrast—because some experiences differ from others.
Meaning is not inherent. It is constructed through comparison.
The Myth of “Seeing at Last”
Popular stories often tell us that when a person blind from birth finally gains sight, joy naturally follows. Vision is portrayed as a missing piece that, once restored, completes the human experience.
Reality tells a different story.
Real medical cases—most famously those of Virgil and MM—show that regaining sight after lifelong blindness can be deeply unsettling. Instead of happiness, confusion and emotional distress often take its place.
They Could See — But They Couldn’t Understand
After surgery, Virgil’s eyes worked. Light entered. Colors appeared. Motion was detectable. Yet the world made no sense.
He could see shapes and fragments but could not assemble them into meaningful objects. A dog was not a dog—only patches of color and movement. A face was not a face—just an arrangement of lines and shadows.
MM experienced something similar decades later. After partial restoration of vision, he could detect brightness, simple forms, and color contrasts. But recognizing objects, understanding depth, or identifying faces remained extraordinarily difficult.
They were not blind in the optical sense. They were mentally blind.
Seeing Is Not a Switch — It Is a Skill
Vision is often mistaken as a passive process: open your eyes and the world appears. Neuroscience shows the opposite.
Seeing is an active skill learned over years. The brain must learn to:
- group edges into shapes
- separate objects from background
- understand depth and distance
- attach meaning to visual patterns
For someone who has never seen, these neural pathways were never trained. In fact, their visual cortex may have been repurposed to process sound or touch—a powerful example of brain plasticity.
When vision suddenly arrives, the brain is overwhelmed with raw data but lacks the internal structure to interpret it.
The eyes deliver information. The brain does not know what to do with it.
Why Vision Can Become a Burden
For Virgil and MM, sight was not a gift that seamlessly integrated into their lives. It was noisy, chaotic, and exhausting. A world once understood through touch and sound—stable and meaningful—was replaced by an unpredictable flood of visual fragments.
Some patients even preferred closing their eyes.
Not because sight failed, but because meaning did.
These cases are discussed in depth in An Anthropologist on Mars, which highlights a crucial truth: perception depends on history, not just biology.
Meaning Requires Contrast
This returns us to the core idea:
Without difference, meaning collapses.
- Without darkness, light has no definition.
- Without blindness, sight feels effortless and invisible.
- Without limitation, function goes unnoticed.
Even happiness depends on contrast. A state of joy is only recognizable because its absence exists.
What These Stories Teach Us
Virgil and MM reveal something deeply human:
- Having a functioning sense does not guarantee understanding.
- Technology can restore input, but not experience.
- Meaning is learned, layered, and shaped over time.
Vision is not just something we have. It is something we grow into.
And perhaps what we call “miracles” are not sudden transformations—but long histories quietly shaping the mind, long before we ever realize they were there.