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This may sound like a dumb question but can anyone explain to me why our senses are not all just considered touch? Molecules touch your tongue and you taste thi

This may sound like a dumb question but can anyone explain to me why our senses are not all just considered touch? Molecules touch your tongue and you taste things. Molecules touch your nose and you smell things. Air vibrates your inner ear hairs and you hear things. Photons hit your eyes and you see things (not sure if this counts but it seems like it could).

rafale 3y ago
I think collision or interaction are better words. The word touch is meant for bigger objects, like hands, animals, furniture, fabrics, not molecules and electromagnetic radiation.
camillomiller 3y ago
Isn’t touch a biological pressure sensor though? Could be similar to hearing, sure, but taste, smell and sight are definitely more like chemical and electromagnetic sensors.
Calavar 3y ago
If you want to get that reductive, ultimately everything in the universe is just particles and forces and interactions between them, and any concepts beyond that are arbitrary lines drawn by us humans in an attempt to organize the chaos. In the case of senses, it's about perception. We perceive the signals from our retinas differently than the ones from our fingertips, so we give them different names (sight vs. touch). There are also differences in the "hardware" -- sight and touch signals start with different kinds of receptors, travel down different nerves, and are processed in different parts of the brain -- but the hardware differences don't map 1:1 to the way that we categorize senses. For example, pain and pressure are processed by entirely different types of receptors, but we still call them both touch. On the flip side, balance and hearing share a lot of the same hardware, but we consider them to be different senses.
zelphirkalt 3y ago
Similar to a question I had in physics class at school, which was quickly brushed aside by the teacher, who wanted to continue with the content: Why is temperature one of the base units? Isn't temperature just movement as well? Nowadays I know I was more or less right. Just that 1 molecule moving hardly makes temperature and one probably needs a large number.
- deleted 3y ago
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- yyyk 3y ago
  - The average movement of a solid is often zero, while its temperature is usually higher. - Movement has an implied direction even if we ignore it sometimes. Temperature does not. - A gas molecule can move a lot but have low temperature because it has little to collide with. It's more accurate to talk about vibration/collisions rather than movement.
  - zelphirkalt 3y ago
    My idea back then was: What is vibration, other than movement of tiniest particles? But yes, maybe collision is what actually makes the temperature? Lets assume all the molecules where moving like they usually do, but for some insignificantly small chance, they do have no collisions for a few seconds. Would the object have a temperature?
    - yyyk 3y ago
      >What is vibration, other than movement of tiniest particles? Imagine a pendulum, moving back and forth. The average movement is zero! Even for different pendulums moving at different speeds. Vibration is a similar case. Obviously movement is not the most useful way to examine these systems, we want to look at other things too. Temperature is a measure of the kinetic energy involved. >maybe collision is what actually makes the temperature Kinetic energy is involved in both collisions and vibrations. >but for some insignificantly small chance, they do have no collisions for a few seconds We can compare to atomic fission, where the fission is also probabilistic - but the result is very predictable.
magicalhippo 3y ago
Touch is measuring motion or sustained pressure. Taste doesn't care about how hard the molecules hit your taste receptors, only if they bind to the taste receptors or not. Our eyes don't measure the photon pressure[1], the photons react with the atoms in our photoreceptor cells[2] triggering an electrochemical process. Our sense of hearing is the closest to touch. We have hairs on our body which is part of our sense of touch, which react to motion and pressure, both from physical objects and the air around us. Similarly the hairs in our ears react to the pressure waves of the air around us. However a big difference is that they're shielded by the ear drum and don't react to sustained pressure, only relatively high-frequency air pressure changes. Why we call them different things is mostly because they're used for different tasks. An electrical generator and an electrical motor can be the same thing, it's just what it's used for. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_pressure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_pressure [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_phototransduction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_phototransduction
- quietbritishjim 3y ago
  If you're going to categorise senses into the usual five, which is what seems to be going on here, then hot, cold and pain are going to count as "touch" too. Those aren't about measuring motion so this explanation doesn't seem to work.
  - tsimionescu 3y ago
    Hot and cold do measure motion, if we want to be very technical (since temperature is just a measure of the average momentum of molecules). Pain should probably be considered a separate sense indeed, though it can also be argued it is something different from the senses themselves, since it is fully internal, it doesn't reveal some fact about the outside world.
    - pbhjpbhj 3y ago
      Trigger warning: description of medical procedure. Yes pain seems more like the interpretation of sense data, like if something sounds nice or tastes good? When I had an operation under local anesthetic I still felt the knife cutting into me, but was able to interpret it as not painful? This is how opiates (for pain relief) have been described to me -- still allowing you to feel the sensations but allowing you to not 'feel' the pain. Perhaps seeing with human biology knowledge can tell me why this is wrong!?
aeturnum 3y ago
I recommend you check out An Immense world by Ed Yong - many senses are arguably 'touch tuned for something'. Though taste and smell and vision are not.
jraph 3y ago
I would say: for useful abstraction. Both when speaking about them in everyday life, and studying them.
IshKebab 3y ago
Because that would be an incredibly useless categorisation of very different senses.
emrah 3y ago
They could be. We have words to describe the special types of touch so we can differentiate them
RugnirViking 3y ago
touch isn't one sense either. You have separate organs in the skin for high and low frequency vibrations, pressure, and more. Merkel's disks (close to surface, sense edges and slight pressure) Meissner corpuscles (close to surface, sense fine vibrations) Pacinian corpuscles (Deep, sense low frequency vibrations and heavy pressure) Ruffini endings (Sense skin stretching) Not to mention other touch-like senses like pain, heat/cold, and burns. There are also separate dedicated mechanisms for erogenous zones (Krause end-bulbs) Your brain does a fine job interpreting all of these together but they are totally different biological mechanisms
throwaway_ab 3y ago
Sure, any interaction between our bodies and the universe can be considered an interaction of touch. All of our senses involve some form of matter/energy touching us. - Photons touching our retina cells... - Molecules touching our taste buds... - Air molecules touching our ear hairs... - Some amount of matter or electromagnetic energy touching our skin... - Molecules touching our olfactory sensory neurons... IMO we do not describe them as all just being touch as: 1) Saying they all are touch doesn't help differentiate the different senses and how they work. 2) It's a bit too low level. This is similar to saying there is no need for the separate disciplines of biology & chemistry because it's all just physics after all. So we might as well dump those subjects completely. Imagine being introduced to science at school but there is only one subject, physics, so you only "eventually" learn chemistry & biology through the lens of their physical atomic interactions. Imagine trying to describe a cell through the frame of atomic interactions and no higher level abstractions allowed. All science being physics is far less useful than being able to step over the base level going's on and make higher level abstractions so that you work at the appropriate "topology/focus/subdivision" level for the scientific discipline in question. Anyways that's what I thought of when considering all senses are touch, it's just a bit too low level and ambiguous to be useful.
- aspenmayer 3y ago
  “The map is not the territory.” - Alfred Korzybski https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation
Propelloni 3y ago
You might enjoy reading Hermann von Helmholtz' and Ernst Mach's writings on sensory perception. If you do, you could do worse then to continue to read up on category philosophy. A seminal work would be Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.
truculent 3y ago
Because all those things feel different to touch
Ensorceled 3y ago
> This may sound like a dumb question but can anyone explain to me why our senses are not all just considered touch? It is a dumb question. How would categorizing all our senses as "sense of touch" be in anyway useful? Why would we categorize obviously different things that work entirely differently as the same because, "at the end of the day, everything is atoms" "Did you lose both your sense of touch and your sense of touch when you got COVID?" "No, I thankfully, I only lost my sense of touch."
dotnet00 3y ago
Sort of reminds me of the argument that nothing can be artificial because we, as natural beings are making said things and thus following the chain, everything is technically originated from nature. It's technically correct and does highlight that calling something artificial doesn't make it inherently inferior to something natural, but if we extended the meaning of natural like that, the term artificial would become meaningless while the need to distinguish between the "naturalness" of a CPU vs a plant would remain.
xkcd-sucks 3y ago
> but can anyone explain to me why our senses are not all just considered touch s/considered/named/ , if everything were called "touch" then we'd need new language to differentiate between stuff interacting with visible light, air pressure waves, etc. \ The other question is can the sense of "touch" be broken down further? And the answer is yes, there are distinct "sense of touch" systems that measure different kinds of movement (stretching, low frequency vibration, high frequency vibration, ...) and these are used in ways that may be surprising (e.g. feeling details of a surface is mediated more through vibrations than by "displacement/distance" type senses) also for building practical intuition, they can be temporarily turned off via adaptation - i.e. hold on to something vibrating at 20Hz for a few minutes, now you've blown out the Meissner's Corpuscle / low freq system while retaining the others Some intro material below - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatosensory_system - https://pressbooks.umn.edu/sensationandperception/chapter/mechanoreceptors-draft/ - https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/mechanoreceptor - chapters are on scihub: https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-1-4377-2411-0.00024-1
goodbyesf 3y ago
> Molecules touch your nose and you smell things. Air vibrates your inner ear hairs and you hear things. Photons hit your eyes and you see things (not sure if this counts but it seems like it could). You can see things in the dark with your eyes closed, you can hear things in a vacuum sealed isolation chamber, you can smell things without any there being anything smelly and you can feel things without touching anything. Rather than every sense being touch, every sense seems mental.
_el1s7 3y ago
Don't confuse the word touching, or when two things get in contact, with the actual human sense of "touch". You don't smell and see through your hand, do you...

rafale 3y ago

I think collision or interaction are better words. The word touch is meant for bigger objects, like hands, animals, furniture, fabrics, not molecules and electromagnetic radiation.

camillomiller 3y ago

Isn’t touch a biological pressure sensor though? Could be similar to hearing, sure, but taste, smell and sight are definitely more like chemical and electromagnetic sensors.

Calavar 3y ago

If you want to get that reductive, ultimately everything in the universe is just particles and forces and interactions between them, and any concepts beyond that are arbitrary lines drawn by us humans in an attempt to organize the chaos. In the case of senses, it's about perception. We perceive the signals from our retinas differently than the ones from our fingertips, so we give them different names (sight vs. touch). There are also differences in the "hardware" -- sight and touch signals start with different kinds of receptors, travel down different nerves, and are processed in different parts of the brain -- but the hardware differences don't map 1:1 to the way that we categorize senses. For example, pain and pressure are processed by entirely different types of receptors, but we still call them both touch. On the flip side, balance and hearing share a lot of the same hardware, but we consider them to be different senses.

zelphirkalt 3y ago

Similar to a question I had in physics class at school, which was quickly brushed aside by the teacher, who wanted to continue with the content: Why is temperature one of the base units? Isn't temperature just movement as well? Nowadays I know I was more or less right. Just that 1 molecule moving hardly makes temperature and one probably needs a large number.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
yyyk 3y ago
- The average movement of a solid is often zero, while its temperature is usually higher. - Movement has an implied direction even if we ignore it sometimes. Temperature does not. - A gas molecule can move a lot but have low temperature because it has little to collide with. It's more accurate to talk about vibration/collisions rather than movement.
- zelphirkalt 3y ago
  My idea back then was: What is vibration, other than movement of tiniest particles? But yes, maybe collision is what actually makes the temperature? Lets assume all the molecules where moving like they usually do, but for some insignificantly small chance, they do have no collisions for a few seconds. Would the object have a temperature?
  - yyyk 3y ago
    >What is vibration, other than movement of tiniest particles? Imagine a pendulum, moving back and forth. The average movement is zero! Even for different pendulums moving at different speeds. Vibration is a similar case. Obviously movement is not the most useful way to examine these systems, we want to look at other things too. Temperature is a measure of the kinetic energy involved. >maybe collision is what actually makes the temperature Kinetic energy is involved in both collisions and vibrations. >but for some insignificantly small chance, they do have no collisions for a few seconds We can compare to atomic fission, where the fission is also probabilistic - but the result is very predictable.

magicalhippo 3y ago

Touch is measuring motion or sustained pressure. Taste doesn't care about how hard the molecules hit your taste receptors, only if they bind to the taste receptors or not. Our eyes don't measure the photon pressure[1], the photons react with the atoms in our photoreceptor cells[2] triggering an electrochemical process. Our sense of hearing is the closest to touch. We have hairs on our body which is part of our sense of touch, which react to motion and pressure, both from physical objects and the air around us. Similarly the hairs in our ears react to the pressure waves of the air around us. However a big difference is that they're shielded by the ear drum and don't react to sustained pressure, only relatively high-frequency air pressure changes. Why we call them different things is mostly because they're used for different tasks. An electrical generator and an electrical motor can be the same thing, it's just what it's used for. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_pressure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_pressure [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_phototransduction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_phototransduction

quietbritishjim 3y ago
If you're going to categorise senses into the usual five, which is what seems to be going on here, then hot, cold and pain are going to count as "touch" too. Those aren't about measuring motion so this explanation doesn't seem to work.
- tsimionescu 3y ago
  Hot and cold do measure motion, if we want to be very technical (since temperature is just a measure of the average momentum of molecules). Pain should probably be considered a separate sense indeed, though it can also be argued it is something different from the senses themselves, since it is fully internal, it doesn't reveal some fact about the outside world.
  - pbhjpbhj 3y ago
    Trigger warning: description of medical procedure. Yes pain seems more like the interpretation of sense data, like if something sounds nice or tastes good? When I had an operation under local anesthetic I still felt the knife cutting into me, but was able to interpret it as not painful? This is how opiates (for pain relief) have been described to me -- still allowing you to feel the sensations but allowing you to not 'feel' the pain. Perhaps seeing with human biology knowledge can tell me why this is wrong!?

aeturnum 3y ago

I recommend you check out An Immense world by Ed Yong - many senses are arguably 'touch tuned for something'. Though taste and smell and vision are not.

jraph 3y ago

I would say: for useful abstraction. Both when speaking about them in everyday life, and studying them.

IshKebab 3y ago

Because that would be an incredibly useless categorisation of very different senses.

emrah 3y ago

They could be. We have words to describe the special types of touch so we can differentiate them

RugnirViking 3y ago

touch isn't one sense either. You have separate organs in the skin for high and low frequency vibrations, pressure, and more. Merkel's disks (close to surface, sense edges and slight pressure) Meissner corpuscles (close to surface, sense fine vibrations) Pacinian corpuscles (Deep, sense low frequency vibrations and heavy pressure) Ruffini endings (Sense skin stretching) Not to mention other touch-like senses like pain, heat/cold, and burns. There are also separate dedicated mechanisms for erogenous zones (Krause end-bulbs) Your brain does a fine job interpreting all of these together but they are totally different biological mechanisms

throwaway_ab 3y ago

Sure, any interaction between our bodies and the universe can be considered an interaction of touch. All of our senses involve some form of matter/energy touching us. - Photons touching our retina cells... - Molecules touching our taste buds... - Air molecules touching our ear hairs... - Some amount of matter or electromagnetic energy touching our skin... - Molecules touching our olfactory sensory neurons... IMO we do not describe them as all just being touch as: 1) Saying they all are touch doesn't help differentiate the different senses and how they work. 2) It's a bit too low level. This is similar to saying there is no need for the separate disciplines of biology & chemistry because it's all just physics after all. So we might as well dump those subjects completely. Imagine being introduced to science at school but there is only one subject, physics, so you only "eventually" learn chemistry & biology through the lens of their physical atomic interactions. Imagine trying to describe a cell through the frame of atomic interactions and no higher level abstractions allowed. All science being physics is far less useful than being able to step over the base level going's on and make higher level abstractions so that you work at the appropriate "topology/focus/subdivision" level for the scientific discipline in question. Anyways that's what I thought of when considering all senses are touch, it's just a bit too low level and ambiguous to be useful.

aspenmayer 3y ago
“The map is not the territory.” - Alfred Korzybski https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation

Propelloni 3y ago

You might enjoy reading Hermann von Helmholtz' and Ernst Mach's writings on sensory perception. If you do, you could do worse then to continue to read up on category philosophy. A seminal work would be Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.

truculent 3y ago

Because all those things feel different to touch

Ensorceled 3y ago

> This may sound like a dumb question but can anyone explain to me why our senses are not all just considered touch? It is a dumb question. How would categorizing all our senses as "sense of touch" be in anyway useful? Why would we categorize obviously different things that work entirely differently as the same because, "at the end of the day, everything is atoms" "Did you lose both your sense of touch and your sense of touch when you got COVID?" "No, I thankfully, I only lost my sense of touch."

dotnet00 3y ago

Sort of reminds me of the argument that nothing can be artificial because we, as natural beings are making said things and thus following the chain, everything is technically originated from nature. It's technically correct and does highlight that calling something artificial doesn't make it inherently inferior to something natural, but if we extended the meaning of natural like that, the term artificial would become meaningless while the need to distinguish between the "naturalness" of a CPU vs a plant would remain.

xkcd-sucks 3y ago

> but can anyone explain to me why our senses are not all just considered touch s/considered/named/ , if everything were called "touch" then we'd need new language to differentiate between stuff interacting with visible light, air pressure waves, etc. \ The other question is can the sense of "touch" be broken down further? And the answer is yes, there are distinct "sense of touch" systems that measure different kinds of movement (stretching, low frequency vibration, high frequency vibration, ...) and these are used in ways that may be surprising (e.g. feeling details of a surface is mediated more through vibrations than by "displacement/distance" type senses) also for building practical intuition, they can be temporarily turned off via adaptation - i.e. hold on to something vibrating at 20Hz for a few minutes, now you've blown out the Meissner's Corpuscle / low freq system while retaining the others Some intro material below - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatosensory_system - https://pressbooks.umn.edu/sensationandperception/chapter/mechanoreceptors-draft/ - https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/mechanoreceptor - chapters are on scihub: https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-1-4377-2411-0.00024-1

goodbyesf 3y ago

> Molecules touch your nose and you smell things. Air vibrates your inner ear hairs and you hear things. Photons hit your eyes and you see things (not sure if this counts but it seems like it could). You can see things in the dark with your eyes closed, you can hear things in a vacuum sealed isolation chamber, you can smell things without any there being anything smelly and you can feel things without touching anything. Rather than every sense being touch, every sense seems mental.

_el1s7 3y ago

Don't confuse the word touching, or when two things get in contact, with the actual human sense of "touch". You don't smell and see through your hand, do you...