Beyond the human's mind to concieve- the limits of us as a people
 

The human mind can only interpret the data picked up by the 5 senses. What if there are creatures that our senses can't detect? What if, there was a group of beings that were made of materials and things that our minds can't concieve? How would we know? We could live right next to them, we could walk right through them and never know it. It's cool to think about. Now ponder this my friends, what if there are entire worlds that our senses can't detect? What if we share a solar system with multiple different highly inteligent races and never know it. Take for example the ant. A group of insects capable of instant communication within their colony. Look at the sixth sense exhibited by dogs in the face of a natural disaster. I can't help feeling we have sacrificed some valuable part of ourselves for our intelligence. And now im all wierded out.

We haven't sacrificed anything to be like this.

And given a choice between reason and instinct, I'd choose reason every time.

Why not keep both? If you could change the human race would you?

Okay, I can't refute the dog's sixth sense because I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.

I mean, are you talking about another sense? Because I can hear, see, and smell something all at once. It's not like there's anything that cannot be heard, or cannot be tasted. So something we 'cannot detect' sounds more like another dimension, rather than another sense.

Maybe I'm not understanding where you're coming from?

Humans are pretty pathetic on their own. Our only particularily acute senses are sight and hearing. However, for anything we can't percieve, we can always build something that can. Because of this, we're capable of percieving everything animals do, and far more. Your dog might go a little nuts the night before a storm, but we know it's coming a week beforehand.

So yeah, humans can't do much with what they have; you might say that, but you'd be totally ignoring our greatest asset, our brains.

If there were other senses how would we know about them? This is the route of my thread. How can our minds comprehend another sense that we don't have. Maybe we don't need it, or maybe we can't handle that much data at once.
Plz try and be a lil more open-minded.

We can't percieve them. If we needed the sixth sense we would have it. Otherwise it's just another sci-fi book/movie in the making. And although the idea interests me, if we could find this new sense, we would need a machine which would cost large amounts of money. In the long run, it's a great idea, but another sense is not needed by the human race. We've survived without it for thousands of years. Even before modern technology humans were using their brains to figure things out. For example if a human watched a dog or bison or any number of other animals they would see the animal act differently before a storm. So you could say our brain is our sixth sense.

What if our minds couldn't handle that much input? WHat if our brains can't process that much information at once? Look at it this way, the human mind has a huge amount of tasks it has to do every minute of every day and even as is we have people who snap under the strain. What if this "sixth sense" as u call it, would push us all over the edge of insanity? Our brains are just an organ that tells the rest of our body what to do. It has no individual reception capabilities. What about antennae? Why don't we have antennae? True, it could be because we don't need them, or it could be because we aren't able to handle them.

In any case, we already have seven senses (balance and kinesthetic), and animals don't have any more. They just have more acute versions of a couple that we're born with, and less vivid versions of other ones. The arctic fox, for instance, can pinpoint a rodent's exact position through several inches of snow by virtue of its hearing alone. There's no way it could judge things like distance as accurately as we can by sight though.

If there is something we're completely incapable of percieving, then it doesn't appear to be affecting us at the moment, so we'll either discover it by accident, or just live on and not care.

Edit:


You would just divert focus from something else to whatever you were trying to percieve. Sensory overload doesn't drive people insane.

Edit deus: Just noticed the antennae thing. The question you should be asking is, "why would we have antennae?" As far as senses and communication go, we pretty much have ants beat in every category. It has nothing to do with an inability to handle antennae. If we suddenly developed antennae over night, then we just simply wouldn't be able to use them. You need more than the physical protrusions. Parts of the brain would have to change for them to be of any use, but that has nothing to do with whether or not we could handle the extra sensory input. Take your ears for instance, if you screw up your temporal lobes, yeah you'll still have working ears, but you won't be able to hear. If we had antennae, we would have to have the necessary brain matter to use them, otherwise they'd just be vestigal.

The "sixth sense" that the original poster referred to in animals is nothing more than paying attention to the more familiar senses. Animals can percieve shifts in weather due to shifting air pressures because they can feel the pressure in their heads shifting. We can do the same thing. Some people have learned to pay attention to it and what it means, and others don't.

A "sixth sense" is nothing more than an ability to piece together information gathered from the other senses. Animals have demonstrated nothing other than that. Granted, you can percieve a lot of amazing things that way, but we haven't "sacrificed" anything. Most people just filter out a lot of sensory data, that's all. Animals get mystified by people who think humans are somehow less, because of our intelligence. But really, the research indicates that we're just like them, only we can build stuff. There would be no evolutionary benefit to ditching a sense, and we've seen no biological evidence of an extra sense in animals (which we would, having biological evidence of seven of our own right now), so I'm inclined to call this mystical perception "attention to detail".

The person who suggested we "couldn't handle" antennae is right, sort of. We're not biologically capable of supporting them. We don't have the hardware. Even if we did, what good would a pair of giant, fragile, elongated noses be? There's no benefit to it. Antennae belong on lesser creatures because they're a lower-level biological construct. Standard noses are better.

Oh, and there's really no line between the senses of taste and smell. They're the same thing done in a different location, and tied together very, very tight. So I'm of the opinion we should somehow merge the two concepts anyway.