PWIP XXXIII

The senses align well with the model of reality. Dogma typically begins with knowledge, but philosophy starts with ignorance. One can imagine the search for knowledge as one being in a room. One’s experience of the room would depend on which sense one uses to search it. Ontology seems related to the sense of smell. This is founded on the animal’s ability to sense objects that are not in sight. The smell of an object is perhaps more telling of the object’s composition than its image. The olfactory system, however, only ever gets the hint of the object, not the object itself, unless the object is a smell. Sight is more related to epistemology. It maybe the second most concrete sense, second to touch, and can obtain a pinpoint perception of what is in the immediate vicinity. Such is dependent on light, similar to how the olfactory sense is based on particles in the air. An image of an object seems to allow for quicker discovery of what the room would hold, assuming there is a source of light. Of course, the experience of pleasure and pain, which is a tactile sense, brings one to ethics. Though pure touch seems binary, e.g. hot or cold, hard or soft, it appears to be the most significant sense. The conscious mind is aware of the animal’s condition through emotions, which appear tactile in nature. Taste seems more closely related to one’s aesthetic self, as it merely communicates what one finds most appealing, not what is most efficient. It is also more closely connected with one’s intimate self, as animals are more willing to touch an object, than to taste it; or rather they touch more objects than they may put on their tongues. Thus ethics would be more closely related with the sense of touch and psychology with the sense of taste. Sight and smell appear to be extended senses, as they can perceive objects a distance away from the body. The last extended sense is the sense of hearing. The audio sense is more spherical than vision, which is rather linear. Hearing is rather communal, as it relates to sociology, since at least half of human communication is audio. Like smell, sound is rather abstract, but unlike smell, it is also rather brief. Ultimately all perceptions seem to be hints from which to reason about the world, rather than explicit expressions of the overall process. It is quite difficult to believe truth is somehow outside of experience, and not buried somewhere within.