"the five senses"—hold up wtf are you talking about? who cucked your own awareness of experience? you obviously also have a sense of balance, and of temperature and if you pay attention, you also have a sense of where your limbs are in space, and nausea, and love
The five senses are a fake abstraction
19 tweets · May 2023 · 275 likes · 9 retweets · read on Twitter
a "sense" might mean several different things: 1. an individual receptor cell (eg rod & cone cells in eyes) 2. a sense "organ" (a system made of many of these cells, eg an eyeball) 3. a sense "field", eg "vision" these are all fake! all made-up abstractions useful—but fake!
you can break down most of the classic 5 senses into subsenses. eg touch: > Pressure, temperature, light touch, vibration, pain and other sensations are all part of the touch sense and are all attributed to different receptors in the skin.
taste is ofc made of: - salty bitter sweet sour - plus "smells" - plus tongue-textures - plus mouth-temperatures - (plus associations?) - (plus other stuff??) you could call those all separate senses! there's no right answer!
meanwhile, we like to think of our vision as looking "at reality" in some direct sense, but it's all an interface depth perception is constructed not by the individual eye, but by the brain (although it uses more tricks than just the binocular thing)
even perception of COLOR is something our brain does! it's not in the individual receptor cells and it's only maybe-kinda in the eyes (this is even before we get to how names for colors cause certain cultures to be more able to distinguish them)
it seems to me that we as humans in particular, with our absurd levels of neuroplasticity (adult humans have more neuroplasticity than newborns of most other species) can develop new senses to suit our situations & tools you probably have this one:
I was walking with @Morphenius yesterday and when we went from a side street to the main one, I felt a sense of being closer to the heart of the city, not as-the-crow-flies but in an artery sense an irreducible gestalt: combo of the street's size, sound, speed, busses
@RomeoStevens76 said to me at one point that one phase of buddhist practice is "unification of the sense fields" & I'm sure boring meditation is one path but I always like to explore things directly have you noticed the sense fields aren't separate? that you're inventing edges?
there's just EXPERIENCE there's no sound separate from sight there's no touch separate from taste there's no balance separate from space there's no nausea separate from love there's no outside separate from inside: youtube.com/watch?v=Tc0j2K…
it's all happening, all at once, all in one place (consciousness I guess?) there's a dualistic tendency to name that place as being "in your head" but this is wrong in two ways: 1. it's all out there! it really is! 2. is the touch of fingertips in your head? ofc not
#1 is a whole trip, which I'm not gonna go into. check out A Cartoon Epistemology which does conclude "it's all in your head", but is simultaneously pretty nondual slehar.com/wwwRel//cartoo…
but #2 is why I find myself on here ranting about how "the 5 senses" is fucked I think we've been played for absolute fools by Big Dualism. 4/5 canonical senses are based in the head: 👁️👂👄👃 and the other is surface-exterior, existing at the supposed self-other boundary 🫳
other senses are less localizable balance, proprioception, interroception... ...the mind as a sense organ, which senses thoughts, whatever those are ...our sense of others, constructed from our sense of how they see & interpret & attend to the world: youtube.com/watch?v=ALftXf…
the mere division of cells into "sense cells / receptors" and "other cells" is completely fake. sure, that's the MAIN job of some cells and not others but they're all perceiving and all communicating or this whole organism thing WOULD NOT WORK
the point of this thread is to shake loose what we think is going on with our senses, from our actual experience of sensing things and to remind ourselves (this is for me, too!) to not let any model of our senses overshadow our actual experience of those senses
ah! this thread would be VERY remiss without mentioning Don Hoffman's mindbending model of the Interface Theory of Perception which makes a remarkably sound case for the idea that what we're perceiving is an interface with reality, not "reality" as such sites.socsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/interf…
the IToP gets really trippy in contact with the idea that meaning is a sense because it highlights that without shared context, we look at the meaning dimension of reality and "see" different stuff or as some would put it, "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra"
here's @eigenrobot's version of the same "who cucked you into thinking you had exactly 5 senses?" thread twitter.com/eigenrobot/sta…