You can’t prove that something doesn’t exist. You can only prove that something does exist — John Connolly
Senses are the only way I perceive the environment around me. The information they receive about the state of my surroundings is conveyed to the brain for interpretation, followed by a reaction (and choosing not to react is also a reaction). The sharpness, range, and quality (or however we want to define a scale for acuteness, something similar to IQ) of senses differ between individuals. For that matter, it changes within my lifetime with age.
As I grow older, the number of taste buds and sensory receptors in my mouth decreases, and the remaining ones become less sensitive. This decline in taste sensitivity makes broccoli taste less intense or bitter compared to when I was a child. Now, I find broccoli to be much more palatable than it used to.
Similar changes are occurring with my other senses. Now, I go around wearing glasses, trying to make the world look as sharp as it once did. Variations in the information content my senses can receive, and the way brain interprets them, imply that I see the world, the environment around me, differently and uniquely. The experience of wine for a sommelier is different from what I will get from the same bottle of wine.
Often in wine tasting classes, someone would praise the minerality of the wine. I, on the other hand, have no idea about what they are talking about. Even if I like some particular aspect of wine, I often find it hard to describe the flavor or aroma in words. Verbal communication is inadequate to convey or understand the notion of minerality in wine. I can hear wine having minerality, but that does not help convey the taste or smell of the wine.
The awe-inspiring vistas I saw standing at the summit of Cabo de Roca in Portugal, I will not be able to communicate that feeling to you. Years later, even seeing a picture I took there does not do justice to the feelings that were present in the moment. Missing a particular sense makes me miss a dimensionality of perception and experience that no words can substitute for. Think of a deaf person missing an entire dimension of experience that hearing could be.
The curious fact is that I can say that about a deaf person because I can experience that dimension and thereby comprehend what someone is missing. But the other way around is not so easy. If I do not have the necessary biology that is sensitive to a specific carrier of information that permeates the environment, I would not be able to describe what I am missing. I have no way of contextualizing what I cannot experience.
It is much easier to downshift. If I am no longer able to sense something that I can sense now, it would be easy for me to describe what I would miss. Upshifting and describing what I may be missing if I have never experienced the corresponding sensory perception, however, is a different story.
Living in three dimensions, I can imagine how a creature living in two dimensions might behave. I can try to teach them that they do not have to always move along the surface. Sometimes they can move faster from point A to B by leaping through the third dimension. But the creature living in two dimensions has no comprehension of the world of the third dimensions and would not understand what I am talking about. Similarly, if more space dimensions than three were to exist, it would be impossible for me to create a mental imagery of that world.
Who knows, limited by my senses, what I am missing that some other sentient beings might be privy to. Maybe there are sentient beings in the corners of the universe that can use small variations in magnetic or gravitational fields to sense their environment (after all, birds are capable of sensing variations in the magnetic field). Like we can sense photons to see the world, perhaps there are creatures out there who can sense neutrinos that are flying around us. And if they are anything like us, what beautiful art forms they might be creating from manipulating fields of neutrinos.
But I should not be (and I am not) nostalgic about what I am missing. How can I? It is just a notion that I may be missing experiences that carriers of information can bring but I have no sensory capacity for. There is no emotion associated with the notion. This kind of notion of missing out is different from FOMO. There, I know that people getting a variety of experiences is real, while for some reason, I am not a participant.
There is one exception, though, and that is my knowledge of mortality. Although I have no personal experience of what death would be like, I have seen it happening around me. Even without any experience, the consequence of mortality fills me with existential crises. So far, the same is not true for missing a capacity to sense fields of neutrinos.
Ciao, and thanks for reading.
