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The seven senses, which are needed the most?

ricksfolly

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Of the human seven senses, the ones most necessary for survival are sight, hearing, feeling, touch, and equilibrium. Taste and smell are just icing on the cake.

With a little help you can survive without sight and hearing, as Helen Keller and others have shown, but they still needed touch, feeling, and equilibrium to walk and move about without falling down.

With none of the seven senses functioning, could you survive with the right kind of help?

ricksfolly
 
I can't help but notice your inclusion of seven senses. We actually have many more than THAT.
The traditional five senses are sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste, a classification attributed to Aristotle.[2] Humans are considered to have at least five additional senses that include: nociception (pain); equilibrioception (balance); proprioception and kinaesthesia (joint motion and acceleration); sense of time; thermoception (temperature differences); and possibly an additional weak magnetoception (direction)[3], and six more if interoceptive senses (see other internal senses below) are also considered.

So, at the very least, I'd agree with the five. In my mind, sight is the most important. If I have sight, I can learn sign language. With sign language, I can begin to understand hearing, touch, smell and taste.

Could I live without sight? Yes, in our society, of course. Hearing, touch, smell and taste? Absolutely. In any civilized world, no problem. Could I live without the other ones listed in the quote above? Sure. Civiization is a wonderful thing. Aren't we lucky?
 
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Why is intuition not part of those senses?
 
Sight is greatly needed as the most efficient means of percieving the environment, and identifying threats and opportunities.

The sense of touch is important (clustering pain and heat in with it) to enable us to manipulate objects skillfully and avoid damage.

Taste/smell: without some facility with this, it could be difficult to avoid eating spoiled or tainted foods, absent other signs of such spoilage.

Hearing is useful but you could more easily survive without it than without a sense of sight or touch. Taste/smell vs hearing is arguable to some degree.

You could argue that in the modern civilized high-tech world, hearing is more important than taste or smell. The ability to hear an oncoming train or car, or the crackle of an electrical short-circuit, etc...
 
To me, sight is the most important, followed by touch. Sight, for obvious reasons, and absence of sensory tactile ability puts one at risk for injuries and infections that can be fatal if left untreated.
 
What's the other half?

I think there is definitely a metaphysical interaction that can happen with intuition, and that it's not always cut and dry cognitive-process. Sometimes it is though, for sure, and I don't disagree that cognition plays a role. But I do believe that a sort of spontaneous ESP is possible which relays information that you in turn act upon, even if you aren't sure where it came from.
 
I think there is definitely a metaphysical interaction that can happen with intuition, and that it's not always cut and dry cognitive-process. Sometimes it is though, for sure, and I don't disagree that cognition plays a role. But I do believe that a sort of spontaneous ESP is possible which relays information that you in turn act upon, even if you aren't sure where it came from.
Why do you think this?
 
My experiences.
Fair enough. I haven't been convinced that things like ESP exist. From what I've experienced, and what I know about things like confirmation bias, subconscious thought etc. there isn't enough evidence for me to think It's true.
 
My experiences.

To me, intuition is sharp observing. Example: If I'm going to get on an elevator, and there's a man on there that my intuition tells me could be some kind of problem or danger to me, I'll take another elevator. Yeppers, one might call that intuition.

But what is more likely going on is that I subconsciously noticed little things that all added up to T-R-O-U-B-L-E. It might have been the way he was standing....or how he looked at me when I went to board the elevator...or how he didn't look at me...the tilt of his head...the light in his eyes.

Body language is an excellent people-reader. Most of us do that alllll day long as we interpret others in our environment. Some people have an uncanny ability to put these signals together -- even in a heartbeat, as with my example. It's in our genes, an important skill for survival.

Cognitive? Maybe partly. But I think intuition is mostly a subconscious process.
 
To me, intuition is sharp observing. Example: If I'm going to get on an elevator, and there's a man on there that my intuition tells me could be some kind of problem or danger to me, I'll take another elevator. Yeppers, one might call that intuition.

But what is more likely going on is that I subconsciously noticed little things that all added up to T-R-O-U-B-L-E. It might have been the way he was standing....or how he looked at me when I went to board the elevator...or how he didn't look at me...the tilt of his head...the light in his eyes.

Body language is an excellent people-reader. Most of us do that alllll day long as we interpret others in our environment. Some people have an uncanny ability to put these signals together -- even in a heartbeat, as with my example. It's in our genes, an important skill for survival.

Cognitive? Maybe partly. But I think intuition is mostly a subconscious process.

That is something I would call direct intuition. You have something observable in front of your face and your cognitive mind calculates various factors that you aren't even consciously aware of, and it ends up influencing your conscious mind. I do agree that this happens and it's not mysterious.

But think of something like... knowing the phone is about to ring before a person calls, and not only that, you know exactly who it is that's going to call you because just a moment ago you were thinking about them. Was your thought about them prompted by their decision to call you, and you somehow picked up on their action in a pre-cognitive way?

Here's another real world example. There was a guy I met in China last year who is also from Canada, in Edmonton. He was the first Canadian I met there that year and he was visiting Nanjing on vacation to see family. We hung out for maybe 2 weeks and then he went back to Canada. About 10 months later I was back in Canada and walking down the street in Vancouver on a festival day. When I got up that morning, for some reason he was on my mind a lot, and I was thinking about the good times we had in Nanjing. Then at the festival I bumped into him. Coincidence? He doesn't even live in Vancouver. He took a bus here to visit a friend!

I am telling you... the human mind has special abilities.
 
I think experts would ask you, "How many times did you think of someone, and they didn't call?" Your Edmunton experience is not all that different from my observation that when I'm traveling far and wide, I'll usually meet someone from my own home town.

However, I do tend to agree that there are times when coincidence (and certainly cognitive intuition) cannot explain these types of things away very easily. There does seem to be something "at work" sometimes. Re the phone call thingie again, this has happened to me as well. I've often wondered if my cell phone creates an invisible energy of sorts that causes this to happen...(after it's received the signal and before it rings)
 
can't help but notice your inclusion of seven senses. We actually have many more than THAT.

The traditional five senses are sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste, a classification attributed to Aristotle.[2] Humans are considered to have at least five additional senses that include: nociception (pain); equilibrioception (balance); proprioception and kinaesthesia (joint motion and acceleration); sense of time; thermoception (temperature differences); and possibly an additional weak magnetoception (direction)[3], and six more if interoceptive senses (see other internal senses below) are also considered. >>

Sorry, what I should have said the traditional senses that respond to external situations, which of course there are only five, not equilibrium or feelings. The others you mentioned are more ore less automatic or instinct.

ricksfolly
 
Of the human seven senses, the ones most necessary for survival are sight, hearing, feeling, touch, and equilibrium. Taste and smell are just icing on the cake.

With a little help you can survive without sight and hearing, as Helen Keller and others have shown, but they still needed touch, feeling, and equilibrium to walk and move about without falling down.

With none of the seven senses functioning, could you survive with the right kind of help?

ricksfolly

The least important, to me, is hearing. If I personally had to lose one of my senses that's what I'd pick. Life in general is too noisy, and people talk way too much. Would miss listening to music, though.
 
I think there is definitely a metaphysical interaction that can happen with intuition, and that it's not always cut and dry cognitive-process. Sometimes it is though, for sure, and I don't disagree that cognition plays a role. But I do believe that a sort of spontaneous ESP is possible which relays information that you in turn act upon, even if you aren't sure where it came from.

I've always thought intuition that caused you to react was something you saw out of the corner of your eye (peripheral), or a barely audible sound, or something you touched, or smelled, all below the level of our usual awareness.

ricksfolly
 
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