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Old 10-30-2007, 03:15 PM
madnak madnak is offline
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Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Brooklyn (Red Hook)
Posts: 5,271
Default Re: Quick Dumb Question

As vhawk stated, we have many different senses, but that aside...

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If we didn't have smell for instance, would we know about odor? If we didn't have taste, would we know that it's possible to savor food? Without sight, I'm sure we WOULD know that things exist beyond beyond our sight, but would we know that they are visible?

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Well, we wouldn't describe these things the way we do now, we would probably describe them as they are physically instead. Vision is the ability to recognize certain wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation. Hearing is the ability to sense vibrations. Smell is the ability to detect compounds in the air. Touch is the ability to sense pressure on the body. Taste is the ability to detect certain molecules when they come into contact with the tongue.

Without these senses, we wouldn't have a concept of "what something tastes like" or "how something looks," but we would recognize the reality of the physical properties that determine these things, and we would create instruments to measure them. Anything we can measure could hypothetically be a "sense," but most of what we measure actually does work on the basis of the same kinds of physical effects. For example, a seismograph is similar to the human ear, an X-ray machine is similar to the human eye (as is an infrared scanner), reagent kits are similar to the nose... A lot of information comes from chemical compounds, vibration, pressure, and electromagnetic radiation.

Some other possibilities include heat, beta radiation, magnetic resonance, and gravity. We already have the ability to sense some of those in some ways.
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