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Comment by davnicwil | Hacker News Reader

It seems a bit of a stretch to separate this from the ordinary sense of touch.

I mean, feeling sand compress in subtle ways and being able to map that mentally to an object that might be hidden in the sand seems like literally touch plus normal world modelling / reasoning.

Couldn't you describe that effect where you can reliably guess the size and other features of things by sound without seeing them as a seperate sense? Well, it's not, again it's just a combo of a sense plus mental modelling / pattern recognition.

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> I mean, feeling sand compress in subtle ways and being able to map that mentally to an object that might be hidden in the sand seems like literally touch plus normal world modelling / reasoning

That seems like a very strong claim against the paper’s results. What makes you think that the study participants located the cube with reasoning, rather than unthinking sense?

I think we can be too quick to write things off as somehow coming from conscious thought when they bypass that part of our minds entirely. I don’t form sentences with a rational use of grammar. I don’t determine how heavy something is by reasoning about its weight before I pick it up. There is something much more interesting happening cognitively in these cases that we shouldn’t dismiss.

what is "unthinking sense?" we model the world subconsciously

'normal world modelling' doesn't imply conscious thought to me. Humans do a ton of stuff unconsciously e.g. 'gut instinct'.

exactly. Gp, I meant reasoning in the automatic sense, like how you reason about where a ball will land from afar as you go to catch it.

This is like wondering if we calculate parabolas consciously before catching a tossed ball. We had to learn its behavior without knowing the physics, but it becomes unconscious soon. If tossed balls behaved like they do in cartoons, we'd learn to predict them even if they violated the laws of physics.

I still wonder how we practiced finding things by distinguishing the fluidity of a medium around them. Maybe playing in water?

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