Senses and environment: Connecting the threads

 

All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses — Friedrich Nietzsche

Arun Kumar

Arun Kumar + AI

Summary: There is a dualism between me and the external world. To survive and thrive, I need to be aware of my environment. This awareness comes from tapping into various carriers of information. What diverse kinds of carriers are there? Although biological organisms did not consciously know about them, natural selection developed senses that tap into these carriers to improve survival chances.

There is me and there is everything else (i.e., the rest).

The rest is the environment in which the me, a biological organism, is trying to survive and thrive. Me and the rest form the notion of duality, implication of which are so profound and so intriguing that countless philosophers, religions, developers of social norms and ethics, have grappled with since the beginning of time.

Me and the rest are separated by a boundary. In my case, the boundary is my skin. For trees, it is bark and the surface of leaves. For cells, it is the cell membrane.

At the microscopic level it may be hard to tell where me ends and the rest begins, but at the macroscopic level, the boundary is the demarcation between the outside and inside of biological organisms. All biological organisms live inside of a boundedness like a cocoon hanging on the branch of a tree outside of my window.

In this duality of outside and inside, the outside environment is the provider of energy, and I am the consumer. I need energy to glue my biology together and keep it safe inside of my cocoon. It is also my innate desire to survive and thrive (and doing that requires energy). If I do not then I might as well be a rock.

As all other biological organisms also want to survive and thrive, I am also competing with them for the limited resources that the environment has to offer. As part of this competition, I also need to avoid dangers and stay alive and not become a source of energy for some predator. To achieve these goals, a basic need I have is to be constantly aware of what is going on around me. This awareness is facilitated by having some biology that reacts to carriers of information about the state of the environment that surrounds me.

A carrier of information about the state of the environment is something that leaves point A and has the ability to travel to point B (where I stand ready to receive the information). When the carrier of information leaves the point A, it either carries the information about what generated it or is influenced by some characteristics associated with point A. The generator of the information could be a lion having a sudden urge to roar or it could be a drop of morning dew hanging on a leaf and reflecting sunlight.

The carriers of information require a medium to travel through and that medium could just be vacuum or could be air (or water or some other material). It is the presence of those carriers of information about the state of the environment that evolution and natural selection patiently developed corresponding sense organs for.

In the universe I live in, the carriers of information are several and include waves, fields, particles.

The world is permeated by electromagnetic (EM) waves. It is the light coming from stars that travels through empty space and reaches the receptors in my eyes. It is the microwave background radiation that originated the at time of the Big Bang and is still around me conveying a message that originated 13.8 billion years ago. It is the radio waves which we have learned to exploit to communicate. The EM waves can travel through empty space.

The physics behind electromagnetic (EM) waves is electrons circulating the nucleus of the atom and when they jump from a higher to a lower energy orbit, a pulse of EM radiation is released. The orbits, and the corresponding energy levels, are unique to the atom and that information is codified in the spectral characteristics of the emitted wave.

On its way from the source to my eyes, the electromagnetic radiation could be reflected, absorbed, or scattered and such actions impart their own signature. The light that falls on leaves, chlorophyll absorbs the red and blue parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. However, it reflects green light, which is why leaves appear green to our eyes.

Sound, as a carrier of information, is a form of wave that relies on the compression and rarefaction of the medium such as air they travel through. Sound is generated by the vibration associated with the source. Unlike EM waves, sound (or compressions) waves require a physical medium (like air, water, solids) to propagate from point A to B.

Another form of waves is gravitational waves, and they are generated by sudden disturbances in the fabric of space and time. They are like throwing stones in a pond that creates ripples on its surface propagating away from the point of impact. Similarly, massive objects like merging black holes or neutron stars create gravitational ripples in the spacetime fabric that propagates away at the speed of light.

Going beyond the waves, particles like molecules drifting away from their point of origin could also be carriers of information. The particles could drift through emptiness or could be carried away through a medium like air.

Various fields, such as electric, magnetic, and gravitational fields and their gradients in space or variations in time, can also serve as carriers of information. While fields can be static or dynamic, waves are inherently dynamic. Changes in the strength of the fields, either in space or time, can be a carrier of information. Fields can exist in vacuum.

Another carrier of information could be subatomic particles, like neutrinos or cosmic rays, and are capable of carrying information from the source of their origin (e.g., core of stars where thermonuclear reactions generate them) to another location through vacuum.

Lastly, some carriers of information require physical contact to deliver their content. A bit of food has to be placed over my tongue for me to know its profile. Walking on the beach, a sharp piece of seashell pressing against my soles lets me know of its presence.

There may be more esoteric carriers of information out there that are beyond my limits of knowledge but whose existence I can speculate. For example, quantum entanglement where particles become interconnected in such a way that the state of one particle instantly influences the state of another, regardless of the distance between them.

Or perhaps, the neural activity inside my brain generates a signature that like a blue tooth signal can be picked over a short distance and someone with correct and sensitive enough receptors can tune into. Mind reading and telepathy may not be total fiction.

And so, biological organisms need to have a physical boundary. For surviving and thriving, they need to gather information about the state of environment. There are carriers of information that are present in the environment. The miracle is that independent factual threads come together in the patient hands of natural selection and evolution. Natural selections, by developing senses that respond to the carriers of information has connected these threads together.

Ciao and thanks for reading.

Conservation of the Cone of Misery

Seeing Helene’s cone of uncertainty
veer away,
we prayed it to hold,
and not sway.

For our own relief,
we chose to ignore,
that someone’s loss
is our gain, and more.

In the physics behind life,
a principle holds -
The net sum of misery,
is conserved,

It never folds. 

When Mortality Meets Life

 

When the realization of mortality
embraces the need to live
the result is an awkward dance
and a cataclysmic kiss,
not dissimilar to
when matter and antimatter meet,
creating an expanding sphere
of gravitational waves
reaching out to
ever distant conclaves.

That kiss lets you know
that life is short
and although a day may seem long,
a year, not.

It also lets you know
that it is time to slow down
and a time to figure out
this life, this game
before limbs get tired
or just go, lame.

From Taste Buds to Dimensions: The Ever-Changing Landscape of Sensory Perception

 You can’t prove that something doesn’t exist. You can only prove that something does exist — John Connolly

Arun Kumar

Arun Kumar + AI

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.