User talk:Paine Ellsworth/Sensory perception

Imagine
Imagine a wall in front of you about an arm's length away. A light is on so you can see the wall. You can tell just by eyesight its texture, its color. You can reach out and touch the wall and gain more information about its texture. From early infancy we have been taught that this is how we determine reality – when we use our five physical senses we are able to "know" what is real.

If it's a real wall in front of us rather than just an imaginary one, then you can actually see and reach out and touch the wall – and that's how you know it's real. If the lights are off, then your memory comes into play. You can't see the wall, but you can still reach out and touch it because you can remember that there's a wall right there in front of you. So you reach out to touch the wall and there it is. All five of our senses connect into our brain, and our mind interprets and determines everything we see, hear, touch, taste and smell, everything.

But is it real? ...really?

Yes, it is real
Yes, of course it is real. At our level of reality, it absolutely must be real. Our senses are there for a reason, a purpose. We are able to sense the "outside world", the world that is outside of our physical bodies. And they can sense things inside our bodies as well. We know when we are hungry, or when we have to discharge waste materials. We can sense it when we step on a nail, or when our finger gets caught in a car door. Our senses enable us to know if there is danger in our vicinity, and can help us to avoid the danger or meet it head on, depending on our mental faculties. We depend on our five physical senses to navigate the environment in which we live and move about. So yes, of course it's real.

No, it is not real
No, scientists have been able to show that everything, even us, everything is composed of tiny particles called atoms. And atoms are mostly composed of empty space. So really, how real can it be?

Our mind is capable of hallucinating. Another way the mind can "fool" us is, for example, if we are in a desert and we see an oasis. But when we get close, the oasis disappears. It was just a mirage. So our mind doesn't always show reality to our senses. There are times when what we sense isn't real at all.

An example
In 1974 I returned to Ethiopia, a country in East Africa. I'd visited there briefly the year before, and this time I would stay awhile. By the second night some of my co-trainees and I had been taken to a town called Dire Dawa (said like "deer-uh daw-wuh"), where we were invited to a welcoming party at the Ogaden Hotel. My smaller hotel was about a mile away, so I was picked up by a car loaded with new trainees. We were driven to the Ogaden, but because the little car was so full of people, I was unable to see the route we took.

Later at about 11:30 at night, I was partied out and decided to go back to my hotel. I walked out the front and stood on the street, realizing that I had no idea which direction to walk. I'd been drinking, but I wasn't "drunk". I looked up into the sky, and there, right overhead, there I saw my favorite constellation, "Orion the hunter". I call him "Orion the warrior-poet" because how many hunters back in "the day" carried a long sword? Anyway, full of confidence after seeing Orion, I started off. It was dark, of course, as I made my way, staying to the side of the road in case a gang of hyena were to pass by. They would attack a woman or a child, but a man was to be avoided. Hyena are pretty smart, and almost from birth they know to avoid men. Whatever passes for "men carry guns" in their minds is almost instinctive. I had no gun, but they didn't know that. Inexplicably, I walked directly to my hotel. Don't know how, but with several directions I could have gone, I had walked in the exactly correct one.

Orion is a winter constellation and it was the month of June. It was in the sky that time of year, but only during the daytime. I hadn't actually seen Orion – but my mind knew that if I thought I saw Orion, I would feel confident and walk in whatever direction it pointed me in. My mind knew which way to go even if I consciously had no idea. So I couldn't have actually seen Orion, I just thought I had. I trusted my mind and it came through for me.

This is a talk page, so feel free to add your own hallucinatory experiences.

It's usually real
However we define "real", what we sense with our eyes, ears, or whatever physical sense is usually right there in our environment, right there in front of us. Usually real. Not always, but yes, usually. Whenever we stop and smell a flower, its subtle scent will probably be right there, close to the flower... mmm. Anyway, we perk up and feel better, because what we hear, see, touch, taste or smell is usually a part of the environment that surrounds us.

Our sixth sense
Is there really such a thing? I sometimes wonder. It might be just our mind using its memory. Like my Orion experience above, my mind obviously remembered how to get back to my hotel. So "eerily", I was able to walk right to it. Not a sixth sense, just memory and trust.

A sixth sense, to me, is a way to sense our environment that does not necessarily include any of our other five senses. That is why it is probably just a figment of our imagination. We like to think maybe that we have a sixth sense like some kind of extrasensory perception, telepathy and such, but that is doubtful. More often, it is others who tell us that they are able to perceive things with a sixth sense. And still others measure our gullibility by how readily we accept such an ability in someone. We certainly don't want to appear "gullible", now do we? (We think emphatically as we open the newspaper to the horoscopes page.) I think our senses, added with our memory, can only take us so far.

Our seventh sense
I think there is yet another sense in us that rarely gets described, but is a very real thing. It is our personal sense of good and bad or, if you will, of right and wrong. As you might suspect, this usually gets quite complicated as you study more than one person. And the more people you study, the more complicated it can get. As individuals we humans are usually good to, and do the right things for, our families, friends and such. Two or more of us with a common belief might start swaying toward the bad side and still call it good, start doing things that we think are the right things, but then end up doing wrong things to others whom we don't even know. Careful with this, because it takes a good deal of self-study and reflection to realize things from another person's perspective. You have to do this if you ever really want to know the worldly differences between right and wrong. Have a careful mind and try to do the right thing whenever humanly possible.

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