In The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, there’s a description of a man who lost the ability to visually recognize ordinary objects, though he could still see. The one description suggest that he just saw geometry.
Googling it looks like maybe he just had visual agnosia? Which doesn’t really entail what you’re saying. That would mean that he could see normally but just couldn’t recognize figures as objects with names and functions. Or are you saying the details of objects disappeared and all that was left were the basic geometric forms?
On problem with this as evidence of the possibility that geometric forms could exist only in the human mind is that it presumably only applies to a rather narrow class of geometric forms. It would be weird if the geometric forms we have innate access to had a different ontological status from forms that can’t be instantiated in the human mind: like a 1000-sided polygon or something in 4+ dimensions.
Googling it looks like maybe he just had visual agnosia? Which doesn’t really entail what you’re saying. That would mean that he could see normally but just couldn’t recognize figures as objects with names and functions. Or are you saying the details of objects disappeared and all that was left were the basic geometric forms?
On problem with this as evidence of the possibility that geometric forms could exist only in the human mind is that it presumably only applies to a rather narrow class of geometric forms. It would be weird if the geometric forms we have innate access to had a different ontological status from forms that can’t be instantiated in the human mind: like a 1000-sided polygon or something in 4+ dimensions.