Are the senses useful?

[skakos]

According to the myth, Democritus pulled out his own eyes so as not to be decieved by his senses.
Could it be that our senses obscure our view of the world?
Could it be that what we see with our eyes makes it difficult to see with the eyes of our mind?

Surely our senses seem to be our only window of the world.

But many important discoveries, many important notions of philosophy and science were "discovered" not with the human eyes but with the eyes of the mind. For example the notion of "infinity" is something we "saw" with our mind. There is nothing "infinite" in the cosmos we see. In the same way the notion of "atoms" that Democritus "discovered" was not something "seen". He saw them with the eyes of his mind and his mind alone. The catalogue can go on and on.

In a world of consciousness, we seem to rely too much on our senses.

What is your opinion?

[Philosophy Explorer]

Some discoveries in our mind were later confirmed by empirical evidence and one discovery can lead to another and to another. For example, with general relativity, it was first thought out by Einstein later to be confirmed by empirical evidence (i.e. a solar eclipse and followed up by other evidence) and of course it can work in reverse too.

PhilX

[Hobbes' Choice]

According to the myth, Democritus pulled out his own eyes so as not to be decieved by his senses.
Could it be that our senses obscure our view of the world?
Could it be that what we see with our eyes makes it difficult to see with the eyes of our mind?

Surely our senses seem to be our only window of the world.

But many important discoveries, many important notions of philosophy and science were "discovered" not with the human eyes but with the eyes of the mind. For example the notion of "infinity" is something we "saw" with our mind. There is nothing "infinite" in the cosmos we see. In the same way the notion of "atoms" that Democritus "discovered" was not something "seen". He saw them with the eyes of his mind and his mind alone. The catalogue can go on and on.

In a world of consciousness, we seem to rely too much on our senses.

What is your opinion?

My opinion is that this is the most stupid question I've seen on a long time.

Without your senses there is no world to understand. No context. Nothing to be conscious of.

If Democritus was less stupid he might have realised that instead of plucking out his eyes, he could just have easily worn a blindfold.

[tbieter]

According to the myth, Democritus pulled out his own eyes so as not to be decieved by his senses.
Could it be that our senses obscure our view of the world? 306 below acknowleges a modification of the senses. Regarding sight, before my cataract surgeries my sight was foggy My sense of sight was impaired. As I drove, I had difficulty seeing the street sighns. Now both eyes are so clear that I can see the street signs clearly and on sunny days I must wear sunglasses.
Could it be that what we see with our eyes makes it difficult to see with the eyes of our mind?

Surely our senses seem to be our only window of the world.

But many important discoveries, many important notions of philosophy and science were "discovered" not with the human eyes but with the eyes of the mind. For example the notion of "infinity" is something we "saw" with our mind. There is nothing "infinite" in the cosmos we see. In the same way the notion of "atoms" that Democritus "discovered" was not something "seen". He saw them with the eyes of his mind and his mind alone. The catalogue can go on and on.

In a world of consciousness, we seem to rely too much on our senses.

What is your opinion?

My opinion is that this is the most stupid question I've seen on a long time.

Without your senses there is no world to understand. No context. Nothing to be conscious of.

If Democritus was less stupid he might have realised that instead of plucking out his eyes, he could just have easily worn a blindfold.

The scholastic philosophers had a different perspective on the role that sense plays in the aquisition of knowledge.
Consider these principles:
Knowledge
303 Nothing is in the human intellect which was not first in the sense.
306 Any particular fixed modification of a sense would impede knowledge of any things other than the same kind of particular determination.
Objects of knowledge (307-11)
310 Singulars and the accidents of material things are the only field of the senses.
To the question "are the senses useful," the scholastics reply that the senses are absolutly necessary to the human beings knowledge of reality.
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=14699

[Pluto]

Could it be that our senses obscure our view of the world?

Yes that is possible, we see the world not as it is, but as it appears through the apparatus of the eye, of sight. But what other way of 'knowing' the world are you talking about, other than what we know from our senses?

[Impenitent]

Helen Keller would disagree

-Imp

[hammock]

. . . Could it be that our senses obscure our view of the world? Could it be that what we see with our eyes makes it difficult to see with the eyes of our mind? . . .

A degree of misrepresentation or dupery is tooted to be the case when the immediate world of sensation is compared to the experimentally inferred one depicted by science or scientific realism.

Physics assures us that the occurrences which we call "perceiving" objects, are not likely to resemble the objects except, at best, in certain very abstract ways. We all start from "naive realism," i. e., the doctrine that things are what they seem. We think that grass is green, that stones are hard, and that snow is cold. But physics assures us that the greenness of grass, the hardness of stones, and the coldness of snow are not the greenness, hardness, and coldness that we know in our experience, but something very different. The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself. Thus science seems to be at war with itself: when it most means to be objective, it finds itself plunged into subjectivity against its will. Naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows that naive realism is false. Therefore naive realism, if true, is false; therefore it is false. [An Inquiry Into Meaning and Truth]

I have argued that things are abstractions. We create all things, we infer unity and mid-level individuation in the world. Seen in this light, consciousness has a much bigger job than just painting the apple red. It must create reality much more broadly, including the apple itself. Just as there are no red photons, there are no rocks, cars, dogs, or numbers. Nature presents us with a wash of particles, a continuous flux of quantum stuff, and we overlay this flux with stories about cars and rocks. [Realism: To what extent is the world out there the way it seems?]

Challenge-wise, the brain is after all deciphering the existence of a reality from status reports which originally concerned events happening to the body (stimulated, specialized tissues open to receiving these disturbances and converting / outputting them to transmissions in a nervous system). But both commonsense and scientific representations are still different takes on the same extrospective environment (i.e., both conform to the characteristics and rules of consciousness and intellect).

The dictum of all genuine idealists from the Eleatic school to Bishop Berkeley, is contained in this formula: "All cognition through the senses and experience is nothing but sheer illusion, and only, in the ideas of the pure understanding and reason there is truth." The principle that throughout dominates and determines my Idealism, is on the contrary: "All cognition of things merely from pure understanding or pure reason is nothing but sheer illusion, and only in experience is there truth." [PTAFM]
- - - - - - -
No doubt I, as represented by the internal sense in time, and objects in space outside me, are two specifically different [categories of] phenomena, but they are not therefore conceived as different things [substances]. The transcendental object, which forms the foundation of external phenomena [outer sense], and the other, which forms the foundation of our internal intuition [inner sense], is therefore neither matter, nor a thinking being by itself, but simply an unknown cause of phenomena which supply to us the empirical concept of both. [CPR]

As to the above transcendent version of an "outer world" which the ancient rationalists favored... Whether that references general forms or things in themselves, such might be more the cause of a phenomenal world and its concrete particulars than the latter literally trying to represent it. Thereby the amount of deception or the faithfulness of the simulation in respect to the provenance doesn't even become applicable. No more than a dream is trying to represent neural structure or operation (its creator).

In a materialist view of human death, absence of everything follows the eradication of sensation and reflective thought. Which seems analogous to transcendent affairs (by definition) stripped of our spatiotemporal and qualitative, quantitative, etc properties. Noumena and things in themselves might best be viewed as nomological potencies that regulate the sensible world rather than being a repeat of more "stuff existing in a place". Plus, Kant made the ancient Greeks' intelligible world somewhat redundant by placing much of those universal, regulating forms in the mind [or distributed to most minds like Windows OS to most computers].

[Hobbes' Choice]

Helen Keller would disagree

-Imp

No see would not. She knew very keenly that he birth had robbed her of one of the senses and this trapped her, in her early life, in a prison away from human discourse.
That being limited by the loss of hearing had a profound effect on her life.

The interesting question we might want to ask is, what might it be like to meet another species that had other senses, that we could never imagine what the experience of them would be like. For a person with no hearing, there is nothing in their experience that could hint to them what it felt like to hear a symphony, or the wind in the trees.

[Hobbes' Choice]

Senses are everything.WIthout them there is nothing. Nothing to be conscious of. No stimuli, no thoughts no sound, light, being.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprioception


Proprioception is one of the dozens of senses that Aristotle left out of the BIG FIVE. This along with a sense of hunger, a sense of thirst, a sense of balance, a sense of direction..... etc... Tells us that we are alive, a living feeling body.

We have no sense of the brain. Were we to have no senses at all there would be nothing to think about. We would be nothing. No language. No learning. Who is to say we would even be conscious, without something of perception to be conscious of?

[Philosophy Explorer]

If it exists, would ESP be regarded as a sense?

PhilX

[Hobbes' Choice]

If it exists, would ESP be regarded as a sense?

PhilX

Sounds like a contradiction in terms to me.

If you set aside the naive idea that we have only five senses, and consult the efforts of science to understand what the body is capable of through the panoply of senses that we actually have, then anything that does not fall inside the remit of the big five, that might suggest a sixth is, explicable within known parameters.

[hammock]

If it exists, would ESP be regarded as a sense?

By definition, no. Since it bypasses physical mechanisms of the body. Extra="beyond" sensory, with latter's meaning in the biological context rather than transcendent; or hand-waving at something that escapes the asymmetry of time (i.e., precognition), appeals to messages from spirits of dead people, etc. The later appending of the label "sixth sense" to ESP seems a deviation from what's taken to be the original internal structure of the concept.

As far as discovery of "extra senses" in a purely mundane vein...

Some animals might potentially have the addition of magnetoception. Unknown whether it would manifest itself in consciousness as some already familiar sensation, a new one, or just be confined to a hidden mechanical compulsion motivating the creature toward a particular direction. If the very controversial evidence that humans have magnetoception was sound [not to mention the problem of how we blatantly fail to utilize it], then such a circumstance would seem to indicate it only being carried-out in the insentient manner.

Blindsight is not so much an "additional sense perception" as an extra, alternative route for processing visual information. In which an organism can "know" about conditions in its environment minus images being shown or presented (and without help from the remaining, functional senses).

I first encountered Blindsight in the Lawrence Weiskrantz book, Blindsight, and his book, Consciousness Lost and Found, in 2001. Now I discover that Nicholas Humphrey was a PhD student at Cambridge University in 1967 with Weiskrantz as his supervisor. Humphrey suspected the existence of blindsight in a monkey and began experimenting on a monkey named Helen who had her primary visual cortex removed. Here's his story of a monkey [Seeing Red - A Study in Consciousness] that is proven blind, but is apparently able to see anyway:

[page 43, 44] The first hint I myself had that a condition like blindsight might exist came through research with a brain-lesioned monkey, begun when I was a PhD student at Cambridge University in 1967. A monkey in my supervisor Larry Weiskrantz's laboratory, named Helen, had undergone a surgical operation which removed the primary visual cortex at the back of her brain, with the purpose of discovering more about the role the cortex plays in normal vision. The operation had been done in 1965, and during the following two years the monkey had seemed to be almost completely blind. However, I had reasons for thinking this might not be the whole story. And so, one week when I had time on my hands and the monkey was not involved in Weiskrantz's research, I decided to find out more.

Humphrey's reason for thinking the monkey might not be completely blind is revealed in this footnote:

[page 138] In studying the visual-response of single cells in the sub-cortical visual system of monkeys, I had found evidence that this "primitive" system, which remains intact after removal of the visual cortex, might be capable of supporting finely-tuned visually guided behavior.

. . . Humphrey explains further how he experimented with the monkey's ability to use its sub-cortical visual system.

[page 44, 45] Over several days I sat by the monkey's cage and played with her. To my delight, it soon became clear that this blind monkey was sometimes watching what I did. For example, I would hold up a piece of apple and wave it in front of her, and she would clearly look, before reaching out to try to get it from me. As the game continued, she soon transformed herself from a monkey who sat around listlessly, gazing blankly into the distance, into one who was interested and involved in vision again. I persuaded Weiskrantz to let me go on working with Helen. Over the next seven years I took her with me to Oxford, and then back to Cambridge, to the Department of Animal Behaviour at Madingley. I became her tutor on a daily basis. I took her out on a leash in the fields and woods at Madingley. I encouraged her and coaxed her, trying in every way to help her realize what she might be capable of. And slowly but surely her sight got better. Eventually she could, for example, run around a room full of obstacles, picking up crumbs off the floor. Anyone who was unaware that she had no visual cortex could well have assumed she had completely normal vision.

. . . Humphrey goes on to explain the primitive nature of her vision and how he suspected that she was not conscious of what she was seeing.

[page 45] Yet I was pretty sure her vision was not normal. I knew her too well. We had spent so many hours together, while I continually wondered what it was like to be her. And, although I found it hard to put my finger on what was wrong, my sense was that she still did not really believe that she could see. There were telling hints in her behavior. For example, if she was upset or frightened, she would stumble about as if she was in the dark again. It was as if she could only see provided she did not try too hard. . . . In 1972 I wrote an article for the New Scientist, and on the front cover of the magazine they put the headline, under Helen's portrait, "a blind monkey that sees everything." But this headline surely was not right. Not everything. My own title for the paper inside the magazine was "Seeing and Nothingness," and I went on to argue that this was a kind of seeing of which we had never before had any inkling.
===== [From Matherne's book review of Seeing Red - A Study in Consciousness, by Nicholas Humphrey]

[thedoc]

As far as discovery of "extra senses" in a purely mundane vein...

Some animals might potentially have the addition of magnetoception. Unknown whether it would manifest itself in consciousness as some already familiar sensation, a new one, or just be confined to a hidden mechanical compulsion motivating the creature toward a particular direction. If the very controversial evidence that humans have magnetoception was sound [not to mention the problem of how we blatantly fail to utilize it], then such a circumstance would seem to indicate it only being carried-out in the insentient manner.

This topic was raised on another forum, with the example of Foxes that were more successful when they stalked their prey along the magnetic lines of force, than when they stalked their prey across these lines of force. the discussion didn't go far enough for me to determine if the researchers felt that the Foxes were aware of this or if it was just by chance that they sometimes stalked in alignment with the magnetic lines of force. I raised the idea that humans might have this ability with some able to use it, and was promptly Phoo Phooed out of the discussion. My example was the ability of some people (myself included) to wake up at a specific time in the morning without any external stimuli. There was a time when I was the only driver in the house and I had to drive everyone to where they had to be that day. I would wake up, get up, and try to get everyone else moving before any alarm went off. I will still sometimes, wake up in the morning, and lay there waiting for my wife's alarm to go off. I suggested a possible sense of the magnetic force of the Sun, but this was rejected on the other forum, what do you think?

One more detail that I should add, I know that some people get in the habit of waking up at the same time every morning, but with me it seemed that I could decide what time in the morning I needed to wake up, and I would, even at widely different times in different mornings. It seemed like if I decided the evening before on a time, that is the time I would wake up, almost without fail. More recently when there is an item on EBay that I want to bid on, (I'm a sniper, I bid in the last seconds) I will get a urge to get on EBay, usually just several minutes before the item closes, and I have not been watching a clock, usually I don't even consciously remember the time the item closes, I just get a feeling that something is about to happen.

[hammock]

. . . I suggested a possible sense of the magnetic force of the Sun, but this was rejected on the other forum, what do you think? . . .

Even though the paper (source) was published by a think-tank of the LaRouche movement, the passage below which includes solar effects upon the Earth's magnetic field can surely be backed-up to some extent by more respectable institutions. The central question thus remains of whether or not there is magnetoception of any kind in humans, of which I can only declare agnostic or suspended belief about until more extended research in the future. Initial or tentative efforts along this line which seem negative can't be taken yet to be a final determination.

In addition to these relatively fixed structures, there are regular and irregular variations induced from above. The effects (gravitational and electromagnetic) of the rotational relationship of the Earth with the Sun, along with the rotational effects of the Moon (gravitational) induce slight (sometimes unnoticeable), but regular variations in the GMF qualities measured at the surface of the Earth. Much of this is attributed to the effect on, and generation of, electrical currents in the atmosphere, ionosphere, magnetosphere, and related structures which generate magnetic fields which interact with the GMF. Even if, on a relatively weak level of intensity, the class of regular variations in the GMF (daily, lunar, annual, etc.) could provide a temporal landscape, a periodic indicator, for life. Along with these expected influences, much more rapid micro-pulsations add another dimension of variation. Also, irregular activity from the Sun (solar flares, coronal mass ejections, solar wind shutdowns, etc.) and other extraterrestrial interactions sporadically induce fluctuations in the magnetic field at the surface of the Earth. http://www.schillerinstitute.org/educ/s ... ption.html

[Impenitent]

Helen Keller would disagree

-Imp

No see would not. She knew very keenly that he birth had robbed her of one of the senses and this trapped her, in her early life, in a prison away from human discourse.
That being limited by the loss of hearing had a profound effect on her life.

The interesting question we might want to ask is, what might it be like to meet another species that had other senses, that we could never imagine what the experience of them would be like. For a person with no hearing, there is nothing in their experience that could hint to them what it felt like to hear a symphony, or the wind in the trees.

how did you know this? she told you via human discourse...

not through senses but language - terms defined sometimes through senses...

-Imp