What Do I Know? Blindsight, Echolocation, and the Unconscious Mind

Seeing Without Knowing: Blindsight’s Terror

“Que sais-je?” I asked myself this decades ago, and it grows more apt with each example of how little the self knows itself. Consider those WWI soldiers with destroyed visual cortex—primary region V1 obliterated by shrapnel, eyes intact—who insisted they were utterly blind. “I see nothing,” they said, and believed it absolutely. Yet place them in a hallway scattered with obstacles and watch them navigate perfectly, eyes tracking movement, bodies flinching from approaching objects. “How did you manage that?” the researchers asked. “Lucky guess,” came the reply. “I told you, I cannot see.”

This is not modesty or confusion. It is literal truth and literal falsehood spoken simultaneously. They see without seeing—what neurologists now call blindsight. The mechanism terrifies me more than the phenomenon: a pathway from thalamus straight to amygdala bypasses the cortex entirely, delivering visual information to motor and emotional systems without ever lighting the lamp of awareness. The soldiers identified angry faces at seventy percent accuracy when chance predicts sixteen percent. They pointed to objects they swore were invisible. Vision divided: one part conscious (cortex-dependent, aware, what we call “sight”), another unconscious (subcortical, functional but utterly dark to the self that acts upon it).

If I can see without knowing I see, what else do I do without knowing? Free will presumes I am author of my actions, that the “I” who decides and the “I” who acts are one. Blindsight suggests I am passenger in a vehicle driven by processes inaccessible to consciousness. The narrator is not the author. I am stranger to myself.

Blind Echolocation and the Fluidity of Sense

The brain’s hundred billion neurons permit permutations exceeding atoms in the universe—essentially infinite possibilities. After vision loss, this plasticity reveals itself in ways that dissolve categories I thought fixed. Blind individuals who click with their mouths, using echoes to navigate, do not merely compensate for lost sight. They mountain bike. They hike mountains. They explore cities with precision thought impossible for the sightless.

MRI scans reveal the mechanism’s strangeness: when blind echolocators process clicks bouncing from objects, their primary visual cortex V1 activates—the same regions sighted people use when looking at surroundings. Not the auditory cortex, mind you, but the visual cortex. The brain repurposed “vision machinery” to process spatial information from sound. What is seeing, then? If a blind person uses visual cortex to interpret echoes, are they seeing? The question exposes language’s inadequacy. Their experience is neither sight nor hearing but some third thing I cannot imagine, having never inhabited their phenomenology.

I wrote once that words half belong to the speaker, half to the listener. Now I see that internal experience—what philosophers call qualia—is incommunicable entirely. I know only my consciousness. I cannot access yours. I cannot verify your experience matches mine. The blind echolocator’s “spatial awareness” might resemble my vision or might be utterly alien. Empathy, it turns out, is elaborate guesswork.

Que Sais-Je? The Unreliable Narrator Within

Consciousness, I suspect, is confabulation—a story the brain tells about information it processed unconsciously. Blindsight proves we act without awareness. Echolocation proves our categories (vision, hearing) are fluid constructs, not natural kinds. And if the brain fills gaps where data is absent, inventing plausible details to complete a seamless picture, how much of what I “know” is fabrication?

I know that I exist—cogito ergo sum—but who exists? The conscious narrator observing thoughts, or the unconscious processes generating them? I am double within myself, more than I suspected. The self I experience is unreliable narrator of the self that acts. What do I know? Less than I thought.