801.01 Alternate Faculties of Sensation

801.02 Information is experience. Experience is information. We have all experienced the information given to us directly through our own sensing faculties or relayed to us by others through our sensing faculties, but as originally sensed directly by others and not by ourselves. The only way that we know that we “are,” that we are alive in Universe, is through information apprehended by our own sensorial faculties. We can hear, see, taste, smell, and touch-feel. We have all experienced the information-relaying relationships between the old life and the new life. The old life is excited to see how early the new life develops, coordinates, and responds both consciously to external information and subconsciously to internally programmed instructions of the brain or of the genes. The old life tries to speed the development of the new life’s communicated comprehending by pointing to first the child’s and then the “old life” speaker’s eye and saying, “eye, eye, eye,” “mouth, mouth, mouth,” and “ear, ear, ear,” while pointing to those instruments until the child responds by making a similar sound. However, it is seldom that we observe parents thus engaged with their children refer to their internal organs, such as the endocrine glands. In fact, parents may not even know of these glands, let alone where they are situated. Such word-coaching by oldsters of youngsters relies almost exclusively upon identification of superficial characteristics and comprehends only in superficial degree those organs to which they refer.

801.03 Let us imagine a scientifically conducted experiment designed to disclose the unique behavioral characteristics of each of those four prime sensing faculties without which we could not apprehend Universe and could not have sense of being.

801.04 Let us suppose that you are blindfolded and that your mouth, nostrils, and ears are also simultaneously bound closed. Only your tactile sensing is operative. To find out about yourself and local Universe, you would begin by reaching out around you with your arms-extended hands. You could learn environmental conditions through your hands. You could lean forward, and the sense of balance would tell you how far you can reach without shifting your base position. You discover that you are prospecting with your sensitive skin terminals, as does an insect with all its radially and circumferentially orientable feelers. Your most extreme and mobile skin feelers are your toes and your fingers. You are trying to get terminal reach information before you move on from your safe base. You will not risk shifting your weight until you are certain that you will be supported. You will not move into a place so small you cannot tum around and escape. Without changing your base, and standing with all your weight on your left foot, you learn that you can stretch out and sweep out with your arms while at the same time sweeping space and testing the ground’s firmness with your right leg. Thus you learn that there is a maximum range of information gathering, which is the distance between the right foot’s big toe and your left hand’s middle fingertip. Most of us have a toe-to-fingertip reach of about six or eight feet. In these sense-limited conditions, our only way of finding out about Universe is tactile, through touch alone. Very quickly, we become super-sensitive with our feet and hands, particularly with our feet and legs in gravitational balancing. Every child learns this in summer while at camp. At home, his parents won’t let him stay up after dark, but maybe at night he is very fond of a path that goes down to the water. He starts going on that path and finds himself running along in the dark. Even though you can’t see, you remember well the pattern of turns, depressions, hills, and dales. Your feet feel familiar with the path; the rhythm of steps and heartbeats subconsciously monitors your memory-bank control of your running along that familiar path barefootedly in the dark. We find experimentally that we can remember patterns tactilely and feel very safe following them. We are even able to run back and forth over a local complex of familiar ground and we can run at about 10 miles per hour. Wherefore our static tactile information-gathering, which commands a maximum spherical range of 10 feet in diameter, is augmented by the 10-miles-per-hour dynamic range-minding capability.

801.05 Ecology is the science of cataloguing, ordering, and inspecting patterns of life. Different kinds of life demonstrate different kinds of patterns. There is a difference of radius of sweepout of wolves, seagulls, and man. If we humans had only the tactile sense to go by in our ecological patterning, we could only sweep out a fairly small territory, but we could get so used to it that we would probably run around in the known territory.

801.06 But now suppose that you cover up all your skin and uncover your nostrils and your mouth. Your eyes and ears are still covered and your feet and hands are now tied down so you cannot move. You have only olfactory information. Under these conditions, men’s measurements are governed by three factors: (1) the radius of the permeation of gases within gases; (2) the concentration and viscosity of such gases, such as orange groves, pine woods, and so forth; and (3) the wind. Men coming in from months at sea have smelled orange groves and pine trees at somewhere around a mile offshore in still air. Such gases remain sufficiently concentrated to be detectable at a mile. (Of course, dogs can smell at greater distances than our human standing-still olfactory range of about a mile.) If the wind is blowing, the velocity is enhanced so we get smoke from forest fires at great distances. In great, 400-miles-per-hour, high altitude, jet stream winds, the smellable concentration can persist to a range of even 100 miles. Whereas our tactile sense’s static range is 10 feet, which equals about 1/Vth of a mile; and its dynamic velocity range augmentation is 10 miles per hour, we find our olfactoral static range of information-gathering is 100 miles and its dynamic range is 400 miles per hour.

801.07 If we now shut off the mouth and nostrilswith eyes and skin also blanked outand we then open up only the ears, we cannot see, smell, or feel; we have only sounds to reckon by. Men have heard sounds at very great distances. Sounds will bounce on the water, into the atmosphere, and back on the water again. Sound is a wave phenomenon that men have heard at ranges up to 100 miles, as in the case of the atomic bomb. The speed of sound in the air is about 700 miles per hour; the static hearing range is about 100 miles, while the dynamic hearing range is 1,100 miles per hour (700 m.p.h. + 400 m.p.h. jet-stream wind = 1,100 m.p.h.).

801.08 We next shut off the tactile, olfactory, and oral sensing, then uncover and open our eyes. Men see stars that are billions of miles away. We know the velocity of light is 186,000 miles per second, or about 700 million miles per hour. We find that the visual sensing is in an entirely different order of magnitude. The tactile, olfactory, and oral faculties as a group are so minuscule as compared to the range of the visual that they cannot even be considered together.