How many senses do we have that help us make sense of the world around us?

We can sense ejaculation, urination, defecation. We can sense our heartbeat. We can tell when we are getting too hot – from over working. There are a multitude of body function senses. However, they tell us little about the world outside of us.

Whilst our senses inform us of so much, they deceive us too at times. The world is not quite as it seems. Reality is real enough but maybe not the reality we assume it to be.

We can look at that further in a moment.

Our senses are not discrete. They are not standalone sensory devices. Taste is linked to smell. Hold your nose and eat something. Taste depends on the aromas released whilst chewing. The texture of food is processed by touch, the mouthfeel and crunch. The crunch makes a sound. Your hearing comes into play too in the business of eating. The louder the sound the more crunchy a foodstuff appears to be. The sound is as important as the resistance to food breaking down.

We assume so much about taste from what we see. The colour and physical texture guide us. In Cuba I was shocked to eat a ‘potato’ that turned out to be very sweet. I presumed it was a potato until I bit into it. Not unpleasant once the surprise dissipated. I braced myself for a potato that was not a potato.

We can detect acceleration. We can balance and stand upright with the aid of an item in our ear system. That is a separate sense to the five we all know about. Let’s call it a motion sense. It enables us to detect being moved as well as the movements we make ourselves.

When the sun shines on your face or you get your hand close to a furnace, are you touching the heat? You are sensing the temperature, the radiation. We can sense static charge to some degree. Maybe these are an extension to skin interaction that we call touch.

I do hope nobody is disappointed that I didn’t recount some juvenile tale relating to a sixth sense, namely extra sensory perception. That is usually explained by intuition, knowledge, experience and hustling.

We also have what I will call it a mass sense.

If you swing your wife’s handbag around, touch is not relevant. You may have a feel of the handbag to guess whether it is leather or faux. However, swinging it about gives you a sense of its mass. Its weight as you lift it up and down and its mass when you throw it.

Mass has an attraction to all other masses in the vicinity. By vicinity I mean within a few million/billion miles or so. More so when closer of course. So your mass sense can compare, contrast and appreciate gravity. You feel the strain when lifting things. When holding things.

Mass has another property too. It has multiple properties that I won’t go into here as there is no need right now. (Read the book if you care to know more.)

Mass resists being moved. The heavier something is the harder it is to push. You can tell how heavy something is when you throw it. Your muscles provide the mass sense. Weight of course is mass x gravity, which is heaviness. I use the word heavy to help all understand what I mean.

We sense mass, mass which has no true substance. Particles emulate, bring about, create the effect of mass.

For the hardcore philosophers out there, a debate exists between idealism and physicalism. There were groups of people who could demonstrate that light acted as a wave. They had experimental proofs. There were others that had equally compelling proofs that light and electrons behaved as particles – they could show them bouncing off targets.

Who was right?

Both were right. Light has a wave-particle duality. It behaves as a wave in some scenarios and as a particle in other scenarios. As a parallel to this story there is a duality between physicalism and the various branches of idealism. The universe manifests itself through the physical behaviour of non-substance forms. The physical needs no ‘stuff’ to behave as it does.

The illusion our senses create aligns rather well with truth. We are fooled to some extent, but we are not being completely and utterly misled. The mind and body creates an individual personal reality, a personal consciousness that stems from an ether of non-substance forms.