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

[Illuminatus]

Originally Posted by Genkotsu Ikaru

Of course not, Illuminatus. I've already pointed out that there's a great deal of thought already given to that subject. They're called "philosophy" and "religion". Look 'em up.

I find that kind of condescension highly insulting. Please don't do it again.

The realms of religon and science are not so distant as you might think. Perhaps "God" is a being that lives in some manner of other dimension, or exists as "dark matter". I don't know. I'm not terribly interested in arguing any further. I just think that you're all being very close mind ed about the subject.

[Genkotsu Ikaru]

I didn't suggest that "religion" or "philosophy" were invalid, Illuminatus. I just said that if you want to know what people have thought about this topic, that's where you look. You don't look up railroads when you want to know about photography. If you want answers, look into the appropriate subjects.

All I suggested was that you didn't read my previous answers to your question, or you wouldn't have asked it again.

Originally Posted by Total_Calamity

That's way to sci fi. We have to admit our senses are correct because it's all we know. And I'm not sure if this has any immediate relation to the conversation now, but I would like to point out that there are people with only 4 senses that survive just as well as people with all 5. For example, a blind person can survive by "seeing" with their ears, not seeing colors like most people do but hearing what is going on around them and putting the sounds together to make a mental image of what's where around them. So I guess where I'm going with this is that even if we do have a "sixth sense" we don't need it because we've survived this long without it(and yes, I know I've said this numerous times throughout the thread).

Actually, this is sort of a myth. Disability of the senses gets sort of mysticized. It's true that a blind person has more practice interpreting sound data, but that doesn't mean they've got some sort of sonar. This is the reason why Daredevil is alleged to have a "super power". And a deaf person is just plain out of luck, and outside the modern world, they'd be more or less totally unable to survive.

[Fuzzydoom]

Originally Posted by BitVyper

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.

How would you know? You don't. That is just a guess, educated or otherwise. How do we know how our brains would react to another sense feeding more data into our brains? I'm not saying our heads are gonna explode, I'm saying that wit too much data our synapses could overload and fry our brains, this might be the reason we only have the senses we do.

[Sithdarth]

First your nuerons can't fry themselves. Unless you have some sort of chemical emblance, drugs for example, physical truama, electrocution, your brain is safe. The worst that would happen if all your nuerons fired is a seizure. The action of a nueron is designed such that a normal one can't destroy itself the amount of power just isn't there. (It'd be pretty stupid if it were.)

Next I'd like Ikaru to point out a nuetrino, a gluon, or any subatomic particle for that matter. We can "detect" most of these through equipment that has nothing to do with our senses. At best they usually translate something we can't percieve into something we can, which usually only alows us to know that something was there and not what it was. Take for example gluons, we are fairly certain that they exist. However, we can only detect the reminates of one and say it was probably a gluon. The same thing can be said for quarks and the Higgs Boson.

Then there is the Zero Point energy field. No one is quite sure if it is really there or not but there is evidence, through theory and some effects, that could be misinturperted, which require some pretty significantly complex senors to detect.

It is true that eventually we would detect some thing outside our senses by how it effects the world around it. But thats not what Fuzzy said, he said what if there are things outside or normal senses, which there are plenty. (I could point to a blackhole, we can't see it but with a little equipment we can sorta find one, but I didn't use me senses to find it.)

Now there are things like neutrinos, mentioned above, that basically don't interact with the universe at all. (Only in very special conditions.) There are also theories on this stuff called Mirror Matter. Now this is theory theory so no taking anything as fact, but basically it's matter that we can't see hear or effect in any manner. There exists a very complex method in which small amounts could turn into normal matter and vice versa, even if this wasn't true it doesn't mean the stuff isn't real. It's not "real" to us but it's quite real to anything made of it. I could further point to the wave functions of a electron of some other quantum particle. When observed the family of functions collaspes into one. Does this mean that all the other ones never existed and weren't real? Well not really, chances are that in another universe the wave function collapsed differently. The existance of other universes we can't interact with my seem trival but it does effect us even if we can never interact. It tells us something fundmental about the reality that we didn't know before.

Finally, science can be applied to a lot of things that are called paranormal and there are ways in which telepathy and all those other neat superhuman power can be explained with Quantum mechanics. Just because we can't explain it with science now doesn't mean it will stay that way. We couldn't explain the inner workings of the atom for the longest time and before quantum mechanics the inner workings were practically paranormal. (and a good deal of quantum mechanics still is.) You can't point to science and say everything there is to know is known and anything else is hogawsh. (That was done in the last portion of the 1800s and look what happened.)

[Fuzzydoom]

Which way are u arguing for? Or are you just stating stuff without taking a side? Which would be fine to but i'm having some trouble understanding what you're saying exactly. Would you mind simplifying that a bit?

[BitVyper]

How would you know? You don't. That is just a guess, educated or otherwise. How do we know how our brains would react to another sense feeding more data into our brains? I'm not saying our heads are gonna explode, I'm saying that wit too much data our synapses could overload and fry our brains, this might be the reason we only have the senses we do.

Sithdarth pretty much explained this, but I'll reiterate:

If we had the extra organs, we would either have the proper brain matter to use and interpret them, or they wouldn't work. If we had them without the extra brains, we wouldn't be recieving the signal period.

Edit: That is, unless you were to just attach them to our heads, and jam the wiring into our brains. Then we'd be brain damaged at the very least.

Edit deus: The head exploding thing was hyperbole.

[Sithdarth]

Which way are u arguing for? Or are you just stating stuff without taking a side? Which would be fine to but i'm having some trouble understanding what you're saying exactly. Would you mind simplifying that a bit?

I'm some where in the middle. I acknowledge the fact that there is stuff we aren't equiped to really handle or understand. However, phyisology prohibts our brains from damaging ourselfs from a natural flow of infromation. If you direct downloaded like in the Matrix and cranked up the electricity to high then you could have a problem but your brain won't do it by itself. Oh and thats about as simple as I can get, you don't want to know what that was like inside my head before I filtered it.

[Fuzzydoom]

I can guess, thanks for dumbing it down for my big lumpy self.

[Genkotsu Ikaru]

Sithdarth has the best arguments made so far. But yes, I still have answers. Atomic theory was developed because there was a need for it, because without it, certain things couldn't be explained scientifically. They were interacting with outside forces in subtle, but detectable, ways. And all those other particles, forces, etc. that "almost never" interact with things outside, or that are "very, very hard to detect", still interact with outside matter and forces sometimes, because we've been able to observe these things. We didn't do it with our unaided senses, but we observed things that couldn't be explained without their existance, and then went out to find the cause. There's a reason why all your examples are really, really tiny, or really, really far away - the end result is hard, but not impossible, to detect. The same would not be true of a race of sentient beings walking around beside us that does not interact with light or kinetic energy at all. If you know anything at all about physics, you'd know that this is entirely impossible without all of science ever concieved being proven to be nothing but a bunch of ill-concieved nonsense.

Let's see, what else... Black holes. You're right, we can't see black holes directly. It's pretty easy to see their effect on surrounding space, though, given just a little bit of equipment. It's about like the idea of detecting something through sound, which I addressed earlier in the thread.

The more I read, the more it sounds like you picked this stuff up out of a book, and interpreted it badly. There's no actual "collapse" of anything involved in wave functions. And this "Mirror Matter" stuff... If it interacts with regular matter, then fine, I'll accept it, but honestly, it sounds like a bunch of crap. What would cause such a thing to occur? I don't know of any forces that could cause such a "switch". I'm not denying they're there, but I'm really not seeing a reason why natural forces would be exerted in such a manner. It's an unnecessary complication, and unnecessary complications don't happen. The forces of nature are striving to make things simpler, to come to rest. This would be a form of motion that accomplishes nothing but complication.

And finally, the prospect of quantum mechanics explaining telepathy. That's a negative. The particles involved would have to be sentient and actively cooperating to accomplish it, and that's just to get it from one location to the other. Fortunately, there's no biological "send" or "recieve" functions on the brain as it is, so we don't have to worry about it. Such a biological device would have to be constructed in a very odd, distinct way, and it would be very, very noticeable. What's more, it would be so handy that humanity would, upon discovering it, have embraced it as a wonderful tool. It wouldn't have just gone away. Have you never heard of selective breeding?

Oh, and Fuzzy. About your response to BitVyper and his "guess" - it's simple. If your brain doesn't have the mechanism to interpret input, then it's nothing but white noise that would be filtered out. The brain has parts devoted to interpreting data from the senses. If there was no such part dedicated to a new sense, then there would be no sense, just interference that makes a person stupid.

[BitVyper]

There wouldn't even be interference. Think of someone who damages his occipital lobe; he's essentially blind. Technically, the image is getting there, but he doesn't see anything.