[benkahuna]

Interestingly, you're pretty much on the ball here. It's even worse than you think. When someone goes blind, they gradually lose the ability to conceptualize sight as the neurons involved in conscious appreciation of site die. If you're intially blind, you have no concept of sight. You can imagine something, but not necessarily what it's like. The seeing and the concept of sight are pretty much a package, so far as cognitive studies have shown.

In order to see, you need fully functioning pathways in the brain, from the photoreceptor cells, to bipolar cells, to retinoganglion cells, to the primary visual cortex, to secondary visual processing areas specialized in either color and form or motion and orientation, etc.