So often we think we've just got five senses but that's completely wrong.
We ask neuroscientists how many senses do we have,
they say anywhere between 22 and 33.
Just think of your sense of balance,
if you didn't have that it would be very difficult to get around, you'd be in big trouble.
Proprioception - if you close your eyes now,
you know where your limbs are without looking or feeling, you just know.
Kinesthesia - sense of movement.
So immediately we start to ask ourselves, why five?
Well Aristotle told us we've five senses and we believed that he was wrong about
there being five elements that governed all of reality
but somehow we still cling on to this idea of five
So I think it's interesting that people often think of philosophers as doing something which is
esoteric and irrelevant,
but you realize the power that philosophy has had on our ordinary view of ourselves
and our conception of our experience.
We still are in the grip of an Aristotelian view of our senses.
The question is, are we getting the data right when we start to philosophize on that basis?
Well if we think there are five senses and we
think that they're working independently of one another as we've done for about
two and a half thousand years, we may be starting with the wrong premises.
The other thing is that Descartes taught us that when we're interested in the
relationship between appearance and reality we might be wrong about the way
the world is around us, our senses might mislead us.
But somehow we couldn't be wrong about our experience
And I think one of the things that we might be learning through neuroscience
and it's interaction with philosophy, is that
we're not as good at knowing about our own experience as we think we are.
We tend to think there's a characteristic feel or experience we have with each of our senses -
there's how things look or sound or feel or taste or smell, and yet we're
quite wrong on occasions about some of these sensory fields.
So we don't just have looking and then listening
and then smelling, they don't come in separate packages.
There isn't a nice neat line distinguishing each of those.
What we're learning from neuroscience is that many of these senses are not only
occurring at the same time but they're talking to one another.
Take sight for example,
you think that you couldn't confuse seeing with another sense and yet
it's actually easily manipulated by one of your other senses
Next time you sit on an aeroplane, and you strap yourself in
and you listen to the instructions about where the exits are,
look along the cabin as you sit on the ground
and you'll see where everything is in relation to you.
Now, look again when you're in the climb and you've taken off,
it will now look as though the front of the cabin is higher than you.
Now how can it look that way?
Because you're in exactly the same optical visual relationship to everything in the cabin.
So what we know is that because of your sense of balance,
these ear canals telling you that you're tilting backwards,
and also perhaps the rush in the chest of you know, feeling the engines,
that's actually influencing a visual scene and it's changing the visual scene.
Think of eating something like a lozenge of menthol.
Menthol is always at least three things: it's a minty aroma, a slightly bitter taste
and a cool sensation in the mouth, and if you take any one of those away
it's not the taste of menthol.
It's always a combination of many senses that
are producing the experience you have in consciousness at any time.
So we're learning about the senses both through a lot of new work in neuroscience
that's revising our conception of how the senses work and what they are
and they're telling us that we're dividing or fragmenting the senses into many more
micro senses and they're talking about the interactions between them that
create multi-sensory experiences.
But what's the relation between what the
philosopher is doing and what the neurosciences is doing?
I think that's an important and a difficult question to address.
So philosophers have been interested in these large questions about
how do we know the external world, how do we know ourselves?
Questions like, how can I be looking at a three-dimensional object,
and seeming to experience a three-dimensional object like a cup
when I'm only visually presented with one
side of the cup and they'd say, you know, I can't see the other side of it maybe I'm
just looking at a facade but it doesn't look that way to me, it looks to me,
in my experience, as though I'm seeing things which have three-dimensional shapes,
how can that be when I'm just looking at one side of the objects in front of me?
And I think the answer is clear when you think of it in multi-sensory terms.
An object like a cup is something you're usually holding in your hand
while you're looking and you're getting information about how it
feels in the round as well as an independent visual take on how it looks
Philosophy if it's going to continue to be interested in the problems that have
always fascinated it, it has to start with a correct description of the phenomena,
and if we've started with the wrong description taking our experience
at face value when we might be wrong about our experience that needs to be corrected.
At the same time I don't think the neuroscience will replace philosophy
it won't answer the philosophical questions.
But it will put us, as philosophers, in a better position to answer questions.
So I think once you have a multi-sensory view of perception,
you have a better chance of explaining
how we're in touch with the world and how we know about ourselves
than we ordinarily do in philosophy.
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