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Roald Dahl wrote a short story, 'The Sound Machine' that's on very similar lines. Looks like it can be found in its entirety here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1949/09/17/the-sound-mach...
This may sound like a dumb question but can anyone explain to me why our senses are not all just considered touch? Molecules touch your tongue and you taste things. Molecules touch your nose and you smell things. Air vibrates your inner ear hairs and you hear things. Photons hit your eyes and you see things (not sure if this counts but it seems like it could).
All of our senses involve some form of matter/energy touching us.
- Photons touching our retina cells...
- Molecules touching our taste buds...
- Air molecules touching our ear hairs...
- Some amount of matter or electromagnetic energy touching our skin...
- Molecules touching our olfactory sensory neurons...
IMO we do not describe them as all just being touch as:
1) Saying they all are touch doesn't help differentiate the different senses and how they work.
2) It's a bit too low level.
This is similar to saying there is no need for the separate disciplines of biology & chemistry because it's all just physics after all. So we might as well dump those subjects completely.
Imagine being introduced to science at school but there is only one subject, physics, so you only "eventually" learn chemistry & biology through the lens of their physical atomic interactions.
Imagine trying to describe a cell through the frame of atomic interactions and no higher level abstractions allowed.
All science being physics is far less useful than being able to step over the base level going's on and make higher level abstractions so that you work at the appropriate "topology/focus/subdivision" level for the scientific discipline in question.
Anyways that's what I thought of when considering all senses are touch, it's just a bit too low level and ambiguous to be useful.
Just read “The Day of the Triffids” by John Wyndham (1951)[1]. It’s a great, classic horror sci-fi novel where plants can hear and talk to each other. Big influence for “Annihilation” and “28 Days Later.” Gotta love it when some crazy fictional idea turns out to have some factual (?) basis. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_of_the_Triffids
I think Annihilation is more a shameless remake of Stalker, as far as going into a "Zone" where an alien influence has changed the nature of reality.
The concept of a special zone where things are not the same as in normal reality is merely a shared motif.
I won't be surprised if single cell organisms, even prokaryotes can detect and react to sound - just a matter of more research to find out how.
> I won't be surprised if single cell organisms, even prokaryotes can detect and react to sound It would have to be pretty insanely high in the ultrasound. A 30 kHz (above the top of usual audible sound range) wave is around 10 mm (10000 µm) in wavelength; a typical prokaryote is of order 1 µm. While there are some uses for MHz-scale ultrasound, the attenuation starts getting pretty insane -- there's just not much en…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Touch is measuring motion or sustained pressure. Taste doesn't care about how hard the molecules hit your taste receptors, only if they bind to the taste receptors or not. Our eyes don't measure the photon pressure[1], the photons react with the atoms in our photoreceptor cells[2] triggering an electrochemical process. Our sense of hearing is the closest to touch. We have hairs on our body which is part of our sense…
If you're going to categorise senses into the usual five, which is what seems to be going on here, then hot, cold and pain are going to count as "touch" too. Those aren't about measuring motion so this explanation doesn't seem to work.
Pain should probably be considered a separate sense indeed, though it can also be argued it is something different from the senses themselves, since it is fully internal, it doesn't reveal some fact about the outside world.
This may sound like a dumb question but can anyone explain to me why our senses are not all just considered touch? Molecules touch your tongue and you taste things. Molecules touch your nose and you smell things. Air vibrates your inner ear hairs and you hear things. Photons hit your eyes and you see things (not sure if this counts but it seems like it could).
This may sound like a dumb question but can anyone explain to me why our senses are not all just considered touch? Molecules touch your tongue and you taste things. Molecules touch your nose and you smell things. Air vibrates your inner ear hairs and you hear things. Photons hit your eyes and you see things (not sure if this counts but it seems like it could).
Similar to a question I had in physics class at school, which was quickly brushed aside by the teacher, who wanted to continue with the content: Why is temperature one of the base units? Isn't temperature just movement as well? Nowadays I know I was more or less right. Just that 1 molecule moving hardly makes temperature and one probably needs a large number.
- Movement has an implied direction even if we ignore it sometimes. Temperature does not.
- A gas molecule can move a lot but have low temperature because it has little to collide with.
It's more accurate to talk about vibration/collisions rather than movement.