• 0 Posts
  • 79 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 11th, 2023

help-circle

  • The classic “five senses” works well enough for the basic understanding of how we interact with the world, but doesn’t actually hold up under much scrutiny. You can apparently get up to 12 depending on how you want to define things.

    https://www.press.jhu.edu/newsroom/how-many-senses-do-we-have

    The idea of five classical senses dates back at least to Aristotle, himself a rather classy guy. In De Anima (Of the Soul) he argues that, for every sense, there is a sense organ.

    Let’s tweak Aristotle’s definition of what a sense is just a bit. Instead of a sense organ, each separate sense really only requires a different kind of sensory receptor. In the skin alone, there are at least four different kinds of sensory receptors: those for touch, temperature, pain, and proprioception (or body awareness).









  • I’ll admit, I only made it through part B. This is where you think that because you are the only one to have this thought, it must be a simulation. It doesn’t actually mean that, but that’s irrelevant anyway because you aren’t: The Anthropic Principle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle) is a well-known part of cosmology and philosophy.

    Living at only one point in time doesn’t have any greater meaning. Flip this the other way: imagine you have a minimal amount of hand-eye coordination, and you can hit a dart board, but not enough to hit a specific number. So you throw a dart and hit a 3. The chances of that are 1/20, and the chances you hit the very specific spot on that 3 is astronomically smaller. That doesn’t mean it’s special, it’s just where you hit.

    Your observations and experiences aren’t meaningful because they’re planned, they’re meaningful because they’re yours, and you couldn’t have them at any other time.




  • It’s weird that this has become such a controversial opinion. The internet is supposed to be open and available. “Information wants to be free.” It’s the big gatekeepers who want to keep all their precious data locked away in their own hoard behind paywalls and logins.

    If some clanker is going to read my words, it’s a very small price to pay for people being able to do the same.