Our sense of hearing is the closest to touch. We have hairs on our body which is part of our sense of touch, which react to motion and pressure, both from physical objects and the air around us.
Similarly the hairs in our ears react to the pressure waves of the air around us. However a big difference is that they're shielded by the ear drum and don't react to sustained pressure, only relatively high-frequency air pressure changes.
Why we call them different things is mostly because they're used for different tasks. An electrical generator and an electrical motor can be the same thing, it's just what it's used for.
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.
Yes pain seems more like the interpretation of sense data, like if something sounds nice or tastes good?
When I had an operation under local anesthetic I still felt the knife cutting into me, but was able to interpret it as not painful? This is how opiates (for pain relief) have been described to me -- still allowing you to feel the sensations but allowing you to not 'feel' the pain.
Perhaps seeing with human biology knowledge can tell me why this is wrong!?
In the case of senses, it's about perception. We perceive the signals from our retinas differently than the ones from our fingertips, so we give them different names (sight vs. touch).
There are also differences in the "hardware" -- sight and touch signals start with different kinds of receptors, travel down different nerves, and are processed in different parts of the brain -- but the hardware differences don't map 1:1 to the way that we categorize senses. For example, pain and pressure are processed by entirely different types of receptors, but we still call them both touch. On the flip side, balance and hearing share a lot of the same hardware, but we consider them to be different senses.
Merkel's disks (close to surface, sense edges and slight pressure) Meissner corpuscles (close to surface, sense fine vibrations) Pacinian corpuscles (Deep, sense low frequency vibrations and heavy pressure) Ruffini endings (Sense skin stretching)
Not to mention other touch-like senses like pain, heat/cold, and burns. There are also separate dedicated mechanisms for erogenous zones (Krause end-bulbs) Your brain does a fine job interpreting all of these together but they are totally different biological mechanisms
s/considered/named/ , if everything were called "touch" then we'd need new language to differentiate between stuff interacting with visible light, air pressure waves, etc. \
The other question is can the sense of "touch" be broken down further? And the answer is yes, there are distinct "sense of touch" systems that measure different kinds of movement (stretching, low frequency vibration, high frequency vibration, ...) and these are used in ways that may be surprising (e.g. feeling details of a surface is mediated more through vibrations than by "displacement/distance" type senses)
also for building practical intuition, they can be temporarily turned off via adaptation - i.e. hold on to something vibrating at 20Hz for a few minutes, now you've blown out the Meissner's Corpuscle / low freq system while retaining the others
Some intro material below
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatosensory_system
- https://pressbooks.umn.edu/sensationandperception/chapter/mechanoreceptors-draft/
- https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/mechanoreceptor
- chapters are on scihub: https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-1-4377-2411-0.00024-1All 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.
- Alfred Korzybski
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation
It's technically correct and does highlight that calling something artificial doesn't make it inherently inferior to something natural, but if we extended the meaning of natural like that, the term artificial would become meaningless while the need to distinguish between the "naturalness" of a CPU vs a plant would remain.
You can see things in the dark with your eyes closed, you can hear things in a vacuum sealed isolation chamber, you can smell things without any there being anything smelly and you can feel things without touching anything.
Rather than every sense being touch, every sense seems mental.
- 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.
Imagine a pendulum, moving back and forth. The average movement is zero! Even for different pendulums moving at different speeds. Vibration is a similar case.
Obviously movement is not the most useful way to examine these systems, we want to look at other things too. Temperature is a measure of the kinetic energy involved.
>maybe collision is what actually makes the temperature
Kinetic energy is involved in both collisions and vibrations.
>but for some insignificantly small chance, they do have no collisions for a few seconds
We can compare to atomic fission, where the fission is also probabilistic - but the result is very predictable.
You don't smell and see through your hand, do you...
It is a dumb question. How would categorizing all our senses as "sense of touch" be in anyway useful? Why would we categorize obviously different things that work entirely differently as the same because, "at the end of the day, everything is atoms"
"Did you lose both your sense of touch and your sense of touch when you got COVID?"
"No, I thankfully, I only lost my sense of touch."