Sunday, January 27, 2008

my latest ambition is pri sch science textbook writer

i was just pondering upon what reality was, and realised that our perception and belief of 'reality' is only mediated and understood through our five senses. anything that you cannot see, smell, touch, hear or taste is not 'real', since we are unable to experience reality through other senses.

why not feelings, emotions then, i wonder.

because: science was/is dominated by males, and this unfeeling, overly-rational specie has decided that feelings do not form what we know today as 'reality'. it's all in the head, they say. not something tangible you can see smell touch hear or taste.

is the experience of heartbreak any less real than touching a cold table or sniffing a zesty lemon?

i say, forget ESP. it's time we protested and officially make 'feeling' our sixth sense. from today on, all primary school children should be able to rattle offhand the six senses that they experience the world with.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Interesting take on your theory... but I guess as with most sciences, theories are intelligent guesses that are accepted by the majority. A experience of 'feeling' is something very subjective and hard to quantify it accurately.

For e.g. a feather can be touched, seen and everyone without a doubt can say it is light and 'feathery'... but how when asked to describe how you 'feel' about this feather, a multitude of answers come out...

Hence it becomes more of a realm in philosophy rather than quantifiable science. =)

Anonymous said...

Males have MUCH more feelings than females.
Females are the unfeeling species. Cruel and cold.

Anonymous said...

tootiredtothinkofnick:
well, at least u r not too tired to think about this. but when u factor in 'colour theory' and the fact that language is arbituary, descriptions merely correspond on a socially accepted level. anyway. feeling here is not thought, but more emotion.

lemme elaborate:
1. it's called philosophy here, n not science, because anything that undermines rationality has to fall outside of science so it feels as though these 'philo' stuffs are for ppl who got too much free time on their hands. others then do not take philosophy seriously n the upper strata of society gets their way (continue staying in power).

2. wad power? u ask. i believe science, like language, was created to facilitate understanding and make better sense of society. however, since power struggles are inevitable (even in the cavemen era/animal kingdom there is hierarchy), it was conveniently and subconsciously used as a tool of social control (kinda like religion). like how language shapes the way we think, science is afterall a product of language as well.

3. by ignoring the definition of senses and wad reality entails, how would our reality differ if emotions were made a sense? we now believe that rationality that is based upon the tangible is essential to order, assuming in the first place that all order is good. order is wad these ppl want us to believe in so they benefit from the order. order is wad we in our current cultural and economic situation believe in. if we were poor farmers, order would mean working damn hard for landlords for peanuts (literally in some cases).


feel-the-pooh: let's not get started on this. that's almost like arguing if a bat is more like a mouse or a bird.