Are the blind entitled to make observations? I would say so.
A fairly finite amount of immediately observable phenomena exists in the natural world at any instantaneous slice of time, but it is not all uniformly accessible. For this reason, it appears that potential knowledge is infinite - and it might well be, but that is not the concern here. The amount of information available to the individual (observer, thinker, what have you), is compartmentalized and scaffolded: first, there are directly observable objects that more or less exist in the same way for everyone. An agricultural chemist, a winemaker, and a hog certainly would not perceive of a vineyard of grapes in the same way, but a vineyard there is nonetheless. Then, there are phenomena that can only be observed with a proper mindset or the tools necessary to observe them. Much of scientific inquiry falls into this field. Beyond that, however, there exists the scaffolding of knowledge - much of which is incredibly difficult or completely impractical to observe. It is upon this information scaffolding that much of our society exists, and also accounts for the vast differences in perception given the same phenomena. Should that scaffold crumble, we would be limited once again to what we can access with our senses - and there are people today who function in that mode.

Now to take a step back - this is but a light philosophical treatment, yet there is still some continuity to be expected from the brief discussion above. In our academic development, we exist at different levels of the information scaffold. The subdivisions of different disciplines serve to present entire subsets of information in individual, more manageable, facets. Naturally, we are given an incomplete view of a particular subject, our greatest strengths lying within rather than among disciplines. In this sense, we are all blinded (some more than others) by our own perceptions, by the very machinery that gives us a way of understanding and processing the phenomena around us. The quest in life, for those like me, is not necessarily lofty and ambitious. It strives only for one simple thing, and that is to observe truly.

I like to describe life, living, as a zero-sum game. All things considered, it probably does not even perform that well, though a case can be made that because we can’t really stop people from make babby, humanity as a whole is pretty good at winning. On a broader level, one needs only look as far as extinction. It’s going to happen, sooner or later. We occupy such a small slice of the geographic time scale, and it’s only a matter of time - probably time on an order of magnitude larger than any of us are, and will ever be, concerned. On an individual level though, we are presented with what scientists call “a shitty situation.” That is, that we’re all going to die. In the game of life, there simply is not winning. The best we can do is to not lose - and in the interim, find ways to fill out the time by producing and reproducing. I will not address one of the two subjects.

One of the wonders of common communication is the ability to build information scaffolds. This is present in all levels of nature, in different formats. Ours, though, is especially powerful and not merely concerned with survival. Our information scaffold allows us to create physical scaffolds. It empowers us to conceive of abstract concepts, then express them in accessible manners. But the greatest capacity of the scaffold is the relative ease with which we can situate our offspring upon it. The tacit goal of humanity in general, therefore, is to ascend this scaffold, build upon it, preserve it, and reinforce it. A failure to do these tasks lead to ignorance, stagnation, a proliferation of wheel-reinvention, and perversion of information. Interference at one level strongly impedes the ability to ascend beyond that point - and that is the particular danger of death.

How high does this scaffold go before humans are unable to ascend fully in order to build upon it? When does our ability to create new, usable information plateau? With every generation, we are replacing those who have already spent a lifetime climbing the scaffold, with those who must again ascend from the bottom. These are nonequivalent exchanges.