Fight!! - Which sense is the best sense

[undercoverbrother]

Originally Posted by Sliver

Oh man, don't get me going on gravity. I fataing hate it. Always pulling me down. Sometimes I'll get stuck fixating on how the earth is trying to pull me down 24/7 and it drives me crazy.

Yeah, Gravity is focusing on little old Sliver

[troutman]

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/touch/

Touch is often classified as one of the traditional five senses, along with sight, hearing, smell, and taste. Touch is, in several ways, seemingly different from these other senses, however. For one thing, touch does not seem to have a single sense organ. The skin, of course, is the most plausible candidate sensory organ, but the skin itself is not sensory. Instead, the skin contains many different sensory systems. Many of them, like those that code for pain and itch, do not seem to be tied directly to the sense of touch. For instance, we don’t, at least in most contexts, seem to treat cutaneous pains as part of the sense of touch proper. The same seems true for itch, tingles, and twinges, though perhaps these seem more closely tied with touch. At any rate, they are not paradigm instances of tactual perception, and if they seem more closely tied to touch, then this is something in need of explanation.

Even if we focus only on those systems usually associated with touch, we find a number of distinct sensory channels. Some of these have proven incredibly difficult to isolate and study (see e.g., the historical discussion in Gallace and Spence 2014). Indeed, we are just now starting to understand the role and function of the most basic receptor types involved in touch. Another methodological challenge, to which we’ll return, concerns the deep connection between touch and exploratory action (nicely summarized in Jones and Lederman 2006). For touch, many of the historically important empirical investigations have focused on cutaneous touch, especially on mapping the two–point threshold over the extent of the body. This threshold is the minimal distance at which a subject can discriminate two distinct stimuli. Its study requires subjects to remain completely still, while very small probes (like horse hair) are used to generate stimuli. It is much more difficult to measure touch in ecologically salient contexts where there are unconstrained movements using the whole body.

This raises some interesting questions about what counts as the sense of touch. There have been various attempts to define touch. One attempt concludes that the typical means of unifying the systems involved in touch fail to give anything like a coherent account. The conclusion is that:

[T]his leaves us with something so heterogeneous that no criteria can unite its various characteristics and at the same time exclude characteristics of other senses. (Ratcliffe 2012: 3)

[Matata]

If no part of your bodied responded to touch, you'd be dead, which I assumed limits the discussion to external touch.

[GGG]

Originally Posted by #-3

Well the obvious answer is touch, it's the most fundamental of the senses. before you get to photos bumping into stuff and creating a reaction or VOCs triggering nerves, you have the simple process of reacting to something you bump into.

I'm liking the suggestion of proprioception a subtle combination of touch, hearing, and sight. Automatically understanding the size of any physical body under your control and reacting to sub-prescriptible changes in all of the sensory signals you normally receive, allowing one to virtually feel when a body is not providing direct sensory signals.

But my first thought was intuition. Probably the highest order sense, the ability to weigh all of the information available, compare it to experience and make relevant assumptions about the future. Given the unnoticeable delays in all of our other sense, pretty much every reaction we have is based on intuiting the near future. It is definitely the edge we have over gold fish, without that they would eat us alive.

Is intuition a sense?

I would define senses as a method your body takes information/stimuli and brings it to the brain for decision making.

Whereas as I see intuition as taking all the sensory inputs and making subconscious decisions.

[Huntingwhale]

Originally Posted by Reaper

Hearing. If I couldn't hear music I'd consider checking out.

Years ago I used to think that. Always said I'd rather be blind then lose my ability to hear music. Now? No way in hell. Having to learn to navigate the world without sight. Risking your life every time you walk among cars or other heavy objects. Not being able to freakin' see.

Sight is by far the most important sense, AINEC. Smell is the least important. Plenty of smokers and cocaine users barely have a sense of smell. I remember when I was into that stuff when I was younger that I could barely smell anything and it didn't really affect me.

[undercoverbrother]

Originally Posted by Huntingwhale

Years ago I used to think that. Always said I'd rather be blind then lose my ability to hear music. Now? No way in hell. Having to learn to navigate the world without sight. Risking your life every time you walk among cars or other heavy objects. Not being able to freakin' see.

Sight is by far the most important sense, AINEC. Smell is the least important. Plenty of smokers and cocaine users barely have a sense of smell. I remember when I was into that stuff when I was younger that I could barely smell anything and it didn't really affect me.

You avatar says different...........

[Reaper]

Originally Posted by Huntingwhale

Years ago I used to think that. Always said I'd rather be blind then lose my ability to hear music. Now? No way in hell. Having to learn to navigate the world without sight. Risking your life every time you walk among cars or other heavy objects. Not being able to freakin' see.

Sight is by far the most important sense, AINEC. Smell is the least important. Plenty of smokers and cocaine users barely have a sense of smell. I remember when I was into that stuff when I was younger that I could barely smell anything and it didn't really affect me.

That’s good. I still consider hearing to be the most important sense to me. If I was left with only sight I’d just use it to kill myself.