Sunday morning alchemy

[igferatu]

The fact that our eyes are specialized organs which focus visible light into images doesn't mean that the rest of us can't 'see' also. Our skin is sensitive to temperature, to infrared light which we perceive as an entirely different dimension of sensation. When a piece of metal is heated until it glows red, nothing has changed in the metal except

Comments

[thebluestar98]

methinks this should be an unlocked post because of it's sheer awesomeness.

:)

[igferatu]

as it is written, so it shall be done ;)

[donttouchmyhat]

WOW.

Which is a terribly inadequate reply - expressively speaking - considering how much I liked this. But still: WOW.

[igferatu]

wull thank you!

how to sense more stuff

[lostcosmonaut]

mebbe if we had something like Cerebro to amp up th brain

...--mza.

Re: how to sense more stuff

[igferatu]

it's true. even if it didn't work I'd still sign up to sit in that sphere room and try really hard to make it do something.

[ulyart]

This is great stuff!

About the perception of gravitational fields: our senses are most attuned to changes. (For example, frog vision is best at perceiving small moving objects, which is no surprise given that flying insects is a staple of their diet.)

When a stimulus is unchanging, we become acclimated and no longer notice it. (the way people are unaware of their own body odors).

Our bodies are equipped to notice fluctuating gravitational fields; we feel g-forces in accelerating cars, elevators or roller-coasters. But as we spend most of our existence in the stable gravitational field of the earth, we come to take gravity for granted.

[igferatu]

Thanks! Yes I wasn't even thinking about kinesthetic and vestibular senses and how they are all feeding back on each other (upside-down rooms make us dizzy, etc). There are ideas that Leary wrote about relating directions of up/down, left/right, and forward/back to the 2nd, 3rd, and 1st neurocircuits that are interesting to me.

The fact of unchanging stimulus becoming unconscious takes me back to the idea that life is literally the fifth 'dimension' where time = Δ(3d space), 'life' = Δ(4d time). I was thinking earlier that perhaps 'time' is not as accurate a label for it as 'order', so that each life is a microcosmic bubble of 'order' on top of the macrocosmic 'order' and it's subjectivity is sort of the mathematical difference between the two changing orders. Order in this sense is sequence with the direction of before and after, which is something we don't experience directly but learn to infer through deduction and memory...perhaps because we are made of order so we can only have a second hand experience of it's causes and effects