I'm assuming that the data manages to be transmitted. If there's damage, then there's interference with the transmission of the information. Imagine if some jerk rerouted the optical nerves into, say, the sectors of the brain responsible for the senses of taste and smell. That would be a very, very confused individual.

How do you know? Has it been proven? Can you prove that to me? Show me what you're basing your oppinion on. How do you know that if our brains can't handle the data it will be interpreted as white noise? Has this been proven? I'm not saying that the brain doesn't have the part, I'm saying that it can't handle this much information. Your nervus system is constantly sending information to your brain. That's alot of information, so it seems reasonable to speculate that if you added a new sense then the increased amount of information might overflow the part (or parts) of your brain that process all that stuff? And my whole idea is based on the thought that this sense hasn't been discovered yet. Maybe when it is we will embrace it but as of now we don't even know it's there. So how can you tell me how the huan brain will react to this new sense? You, like the rest of us, are only speculating so please stop acting like we have to be wrong because a bunch of scientists haven't discovered it yet.

Black holes was used just to illustrate a point. If your not going to address the whole post then plz don't take pieces out of context.

And no one has even bothered to respond to my thought that maybe we can detect these things by their interaction in the surrounding world but we don't recognize their interactions as them interacting because we don't know it's there.

First off get your mind out of the world of Newton. Wave functions exists and collaspe everyday. Many greater minds then me and you have postulated and accepted their existence. Oh and all science ever concieved of was thrown out quite awhile ago with Einstien. Relativity told us that Newton had a good aproximation and that was it. Then came quantum mechanics that said what we see is at best an apporximation caused be mass interaction of sub atomic particles. Further, blackholes were predicted before any measurment ever suggested there might be something like that out in the universe. (Oh yeah your talking to a Physics major that has devoted the last 10 years or so of his life reading every respected source on physics he could lay hands on, and then some. Don't presume that because I have views that don't fit with Newtonian logic and thinking I must be drawing from Scifi and know absolutely nothing.)

Then we come to the real point of this discussion. Which is not that there is absolutely no way in hell of detecting these things, but that we don't have the senses to detect them or their effects. (after all they could simply displace a single atom or two and we could never tell with our senses or current technology.) We would first need to know where and what we must look for to detect these things. Your assuming a lack of proof means that it must not be possible. I have yet to see your proof that says these things can't possibly ever be there except your common sense which frankly doesn't fit with reality as the physicsts of today know it. This ignores a fundmental tenant of science, and logical debate, which says no evidence for something doesn't prove or disprove anything at all.

Edit: Oh and take a look at the logical Fallaices thread up toward the top. You have fallen into one or two of them.

I love you Sith. You are the first person who has whole heartedly argued sorta on my side on this issue and I love and rever you for it.
But is anyone ever gonna talk about the whole "it's there and interacting and we don't see it for what it is thing..."... plz?

Also look at Newton and gravity. No one noticed gravity for what it was until an apple hit the guy on the head. This illustrates my point to a tee. There could be stuff out there we can't detect and we don't recognize it's interactions for what they are so maybe there is a sense that we don't have that would allow us to do so.

I know because it's common knowledge. Even a tiny backwater community college has the resources available to teach about that. The brain can process a lot more information than you're giving it credit for. There's just no input method for what you wish the brain could do. The wonderful thing about senses is that they don't have to be discovered. They're always active and feeding information. I've discovered lots of new and novel ways to use the senses I've got, but humanity isn't going to "discover" a latent one, because by the definition of senses, there's no such thing. The brain is very, very adaptable when it comes to senses, because there's already a set method for dealing with them, but introducing something new would just be random electrical current that your brain would have to deal with somehow.

An example was given. I responded to it. That's not "out of context". Don't lecture me for violating concepts you don't understand, please.

If they interacted with something, there would be some sort of shift. Some sort of change. The things you're talking about would interact in a very noticeable way, and there's just no shifts of that scale occurring.

Find a new line of work. You're misunderstanding a lot of stuff, obviously. Wave functions don't "collapse" in a physical sense. They're just percieved one way, then when looked at differently, they're percieved another way. And why were black holes predicted? Because they affected their surroundings in an observeable manner. That's my point. They create an observeable effect.


If it affects those atoms, then I'm willing to concede that it exists, whether or not we've discovered it yet. But something on the scale of a race of invisible people or an extra sense would involve more than just a couple atoms. You've missed the point of this conversation entirely. I don't really give a damn if something's been proven, or even observed. If it affects and is affected by matter and energy on any scale at all, it's real. But Fuzzy's entire basis for initiating this conversation was about things that did not, in fact, interact with matter or forces, and then about a sense that we didn't know about, which defies everything we know about biology in any sense. So for God's sake, read a little before you jump in and start flailing away.

EDIT: For what it's worth, things falling down wasn't a new or novel thing that Newton discovered. He codified it. Legend has it that he was inspired after being struck by an apple. But the apple wasn't the first thing that ever fell down. Believe it or not, even before Newton, people could jump straight up with a reasonable certainty that they weren't going to hit their head on the moon.

The assumption before Newton was simply that things with the property of 'heaviness,' were all attracted to their natural resting place, the Earth, of course. I think it was Aristotle that set that up, but it might have been someone before him. He was forced to work it into his cosmology though.

First I read the entire thread. Second, I'm using the terminology used by the poeple that came up with this stuff not my own. I've had discssions with people from these fields and not one of them has ever told me I misintrupteted anything at all. Also, we can't see the wave function of a particle. We can calculate a family of possible wave functions and as soon as we make a measurement it collaspes to one. Your hinting at a hidden variable solution which many great minds have worked on and all failed. In fact there are one or two proves about the impossiblity of the hidden variably notion. Unless you have a degree in Quantum Mechanics and can read minds don't tell me what I'm thinking please and what I have or haven't done.

Now the earth is bombareded with countless, and I mean countless numbers of nuetrinos and we can barely detect them with immense complex detectors. For years they were perdicted by atomic theory and many thought they didn't exist. Then low and behold we found a few. Then there are virtual paritcles, a theory which gained the support of Stephen Hawking and lead to a brilliant theory and a rewriting of what we know about the very nature of blackholes. There are ways in which civilization could exist along side of us and the only evidence be a randomly shifted atom here or there. Blackholes were a mathmetical consquence of general relativity. They were a possible solution to an equation and nothing more till someone theorized about them and went looking. General relativity was written because of the failings of special relativity to handle acceleration and gravity well, not to explain the effects of a blackhole as observed from earth.

There may not be a physical sense that is waiting to be discovered but there may be ways to develop one through mental conditioning but thats a discussion for the other thread.

Once again your not supporting anything. You say I'm misunderstanding something you don't seem to have a lot of infromation on yourself. I am quite happy with me choice of careers and more than a few people would have steered me away if I had misunderstood as badly as you claim. (or are you claiming that all scientists in those fields misunderstood?)

Ah yes, we are also hung up on the definition of observable. Your taking it to mean anything detecable in anyway at all. Fuzzy is, and was from the start, talking about what we can pick up with the unaided senses. Also. there are structures in the brain we don't know a lot about. Structures which produce large scale quantum cohearence around nuerons. The nuerons themselves actually grow these structures. No one knows if they have a function but the possiblities given Quantum mechanics are huge.

Edit: The comment on Newton was in refrence to his approach to thinking through a problem and his laws of motion. They are refered too as Newtonian mechanics and the type of thinking is called Newtonian. (At least among physicst.) He wasn't the first one with the idea but he perfected it as much as he could and put his name on it thus why it's named after him. Again, not my choice of words someone elses I learned to use to communicate with my fellows in my major.

I've said it before and i'll do so again. Maybe these things are affecting the earth in a large way but we don't recognize it for what it is. Something we think we have an explanation for could have a totally different one we haven't even thought of because we don't realize that the factors affecting it exists. Like black holes. We think we have a rational explanation for the creation of black holes, but what if we're totally wrong because we lack the knowledge of alternate forces that could affect what happens to things we already know exist.

You have come to the bottom line. Biology. What you fail to take into account is that we only have information based on creatures that have developed on Earth. If there are other inhabited planets out there then they would have developed differently according to the conditions on their planet. So in the field of biology all we can rely on is the very basics. Living organisms need energy to function. Everything else is based on the physiology of creatures on Earth. So there very well could be another sense that hasn't been developed on Earth due to lack of necessity, but that's not the thread. The thread is "what if there are things we can't detect with the senses we have?" Truth be told, there very well may be, then we got into the discussion about alternate senses. Now a creature that has developed under diffeent circumstances than those found on Earth would have different senses, it makes sense to me. You may not believe in life on other planets. But if you truly believe that in all of unknown space their isn't life you're a fucking moron. Yes this is a blatant flame. And if the admins feel they need to ban me then they should. I understand how it works, rules are rules . But I feel this needs to be said so fire the fuck away.

And I never said this sense had to be evident in humans. I merely asked how "would we know?". I'm just asking would we be able to handle the addition of another sense to the ones we already have?

How do you know that we couldn't delevope another sense if the need arose? You said yourself that select breeding is always an option. What we would have to find first is what exactly it is that we're trying to breed towards.

Ah, yes. That. It's been a while, so I know more of the actual ideas than the terminology. You're talking about the Uncertainty Principle, which exists because we can't measure something without exerting any force on it. Don't see how that relates to... Well, anything at all, really. What were you getting at with that, exactly?

The thing about neutrinos and black holes is that yes, they were very, very hard to detect. But as you just said, there was some effect there, something that didn't quite add up without their presence. Thus, they had an observeable effect. You say that as if you're arguing with me, but all you're doing is backing me up. What is it, exactly, you're intending here?

The discussion hinges, on this point, on what is real and what is not. From the start, I've been willing to concede that if whatever it is that Fuzzy was talking about created observeable phenomena, via unaided senses or something else, then it was something.

Yes, there may be structures on the brain that we can't quite determine what they do. But we can make some pretty good guesses at what they don't do. Biology is has some fairly consistant logic to it. If it was a sense, there would be a place in the brain to work out the information, and we would get input. Only, there is no indication that this is the case. It's possible that these are something resembling what you say they might be. It's equally possible that trees are giant interplanetary radio antennae. I'm not putting money on it, though.

Fuzzy, it's entirely possible that people have been missing what should be very obvious. You've been making a very clear-cut argument to this effect through this whole thread, but not in the way you think you have. I repeat - if there was some massive force that we didn't understand, at the very least we'd have to recognize that there was some force that we didn't understand. We've come to understand things like black holes, so I think something on the scale you're talking about would, at the very least, have caused some confusion by now.

Fuzzy, the problem with your logic is that you fail to take into account the underlying physics. There are things we can't detect with our senses, but they're not the things you want us to consider. We have senses to detect all forms of energy, if not all wavelengths or amplitudes, and trace amounts of matter. We have all the senses that would be practical. In different environments, there might very well be differences in wavelengths and amplitudes, but in terms of the sheer number of senses, we've pretty well got everything covered. The only things that we may not be able to percieve cross into the boundaries of philosophy and religion, and if that's the sort of discussion you want, then for God's sake, say so.

I suppose that there's always the option of <i>developing</i> something new. What it might be, I have no idea, but there is that option. However, it wouldn't be something we've already had, then grown away from, as you've suggested until now. It just wouldn't happen.

Yes I am relying slightly on the uncertainty principle but it more than that as well. I'm also working off of quantum entanglement and ideas of locality. Which also leads to quantum teleportation.

Your relying on an argument thats been used for years by millions of people. Basically it's the, if humans were ment to fly they would have wings, argument. Which isn't entirely false but a slightly different evolutionary path could have lead to bird like creature with human intelligence.

Fuzzy may not have a great grasp on how the things he says could be possible but there are states in which entire ulternate universes could exists next to each other and never know of the others existance. For example, the uncertainty princlple leads many prominate researches to postulate multipul realities. We may never be able to expirmentaly prove they are there or go to them but that doesn't mean they aren't there. It also doesn't mean their existance doesn't have implications to our universe.

Also, your argument states that there is observable effects that we see then we go and prodce a theory about it. Relativity was pretty much exclusively math and thought expirement. The prediction, and yes they were predicted, happened well before we ever noticed any effects from them. Einstien notice that one solution to his field equations was indeed an object so massive it pretty much tore a hole in spacetime. He and many others figured it was an artifact of the math only. Others postulated about the problem and figured out possible ways we might detect their presence. Then and only then did we find any. This is contrary to your argument which asserts we see something then we develope something to explain it.

Then there are stings and quarks. It's become clear that something is there but there is no direct evidence of it being only that. There are many ways of interperting the effects that have been atributed to these things. That doesn't mean they aren't there or that we could never proven beyond a reasonable doubt that they exist. We are moving into areas of physics were we may have to prove things without actually having direct data to point to and say this caused that thus it exists.