Is there nothing without the senses?

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I enjoy thinking of the senses in whimsical ways. Our noses act as time machines transporting us back to our fondest memories. Magic happens inside of our eyes and brains popping images of anything we’d like to see into our minds. Our eardrums get tickled by invisible waves, causing us to dance. Butterflies flutter in our tummies at the touch of someone special’s lips to ours. Life is granted to us through tasting the flavors of the world. 


I’ve contemplated the absurdity of our ability for sight specifically for a few years now. As I became older I naturally began having many revelations regarding how the world really works. One being the fact that the reason we see things is simply because our eyeballs capture the light reflected off of.. well literally everything. I learned about this process during my junior year of high school in AP Pysch, how our retinas capture the light reflected off of objects to create images in our brains, but never realized the actual hecking craziness of the fact that that’s fact. Everything you see… is just…light. “


When light hits the retina (a light-sensitive layer of tissue at the back of the eye), special cells called photoreceptors turn the light into electrical signals. These electrical signals travel from the retina through the optic nerve to the brain. Then the brain turns the signals into the images you see,” (www.nei.nih.gov). That is amazing to me. And now, ever since the beginning of this course, I have been having many similar extraordinary revelations, now regarding the rest of the senses. It is one of the beauties of life uncovering the extraordinariness of things typically overlooked- or possibly right at the tips of our tongues, under our noses, behind our ears like a magician's quarter, or right beneath our fingertips. Our senses are extraordinary! In these revelations and new-found appreciations I began to wonder, does anything even exist without our senses? To us, surely not! Right? 


Or how about this one- in an alternate universe or reality for instance, how might one navigate the universe, if not through the senses? If we were’t humans, say we were more like entities or spirits, what new, ‘senses' I'll call them, would we have? Outside of the box thinking required for sure. All ideas or explanations, anything whatsoever, are welcome. Do we already possess some of these ‘senses’? I feel these are relatively religious thoughts and questions in some type of a way. I honestly wish I had a more definitive thought on what I believed religion to be, but I have so many indefinitive ones instead.

Comments

  1. Jonathan Brumberg-KrausFebruary 8, 2022 at 7:52 AM

    I like your questions about alternative senses and "new senses"! We'll start talking about that with the Kripal reading for Th 2/10. But it's very clear, if we compare ourselves with other species, that our range of sensory capacities are quite different, or even meager in contrast let's say to sharks. And also, some humans seem to be able to sense things (ESP?) that others can't.

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