<p>it’s an interesting question.</p>
<p>We can perhaps map EVERY sense to sight. Theoretically, we can decompose sound waves into frequencies, amplitudes, and distributions, all that can be mapped on paper. Smells are triggered by chemicals, which can also be theoretically mapped to a 3-D model of the world. The same could go for taste and touch. We can trace them all to a particular stimulus - a stimulus made of particle interactions that could theoretically be visible.</p>
<p>Not only that, but we know of a sixth sense, the sense of “balance” that fish tend to have. We also know that birds can sense magnetic fields - although this is probably related to sight, as birds can literally “see” magnetic field lines (this is due to their neural architecture).</p>
<p>So the question is, what makes a sense fundamentally different from another? we know that the chemical gradients of smell and of hearing quickly diffuse wrt time, which makes those unreliable for mapping. We also know that taste is exhaustible, as it involves the tongue dissolving chemicals (which inevitably reduces the concentration of such chemicals). And touch COULD be theoretically mapped to sight (black and white sight, one can use bumps as indicators of the intensity of a particular color), but it would take a massive amount of time. </p>
<p>but is it possible to map sight to smell? the problem is that sight is based on 3-D. But smell, if the nasal receptors were sensitive enough, might detect 3-dimensionality. it might be possible for hearing, too? (if we had extra ears, perhaps?) hmm. yet, sight allows for far more nuanced observations than any of the other senses. But is this a product of the construction of our own senses, not of the stimuli themselves? well, the thing with such stimuli is that such stimuli are not fundamentally different from each other - they’re all matter that occupy space and time dimensions. </p>
<p>Or is it the neural architecture of our own brains, that makes the senses fundamentally different from each other? (are different “feelings” fundamentally different? Are different perceptions fundamentally different?) in that you cannot morph the qualities of one (in either magnitude) or direction into another. Hm. maybe this does apply to sensations. Even if not to the precursors to such sensations (which can be all mapped to sight or touch).</p>
<p>==
here’s an interesting question: is a person like hellen keller necessarily missing anything? (other than the arbitrary qualitative factors of color and sound) If she isn’t missing anything, THEN she can learn everything about the world with just touch? Can she do it if she had no sense of touch? Theoretically? After all, dimensionality could perhaps be added to BOTH taste and smell? (although in that case, it would be contingent upon the existence of a world far more sophisticated than ours).</p>