We feel the world with these five senses but what does it all mean ? Vision and hearing seem to constitute our largest dedicated sensory highways with respect to combined processing in our brains but we are immediately faced with conundrums : when these senses are absent or impaired neural plasticity takes up some slack and extends the dynamic range of other senses to compensate. We like to think that the physics that we know defines the limits to which this kind of adaptation can take place but in many cases said adaptations seem to exceed our expectations and we’re left unsure of exactly what’s going on. Part of the problem is that in spite of all our sophistication we still don’t know what human consciousness actually is, in and of itself. None of the folks that think they’ve got it all figured out have been able to use their claimed knowledge to build , much less demonstrate, a simulacrum of the thing that possesses capabilities of life forms much simpler than your average dog or cat. Dogs and cats themselves seem to know this and so deliberately on occasion exceed the capacities of their owners with complete disregard for these humans that truly believe the universe revolves around them. Thereby , of course, hangs a furry tale. Our Universe has a built in sense of humor that is requisite for understanding the absurdities of mortal existence. Unfortunately by the time most of us recognize this we have suffered horribly and for mostly inane reasons…
More to come & regards,
TK