11 – What would you have “seen” had you been blind?

The same world, differently.

This is one of those feats of imagination questions. Personally, I prefer to try and think my way - with little reward or insight - into the sensory arena of a sheep, or bat, or whelk (imagine, for a moment, having a penis 50 times your body length).

The only thing I know for sure is that the world is out there, an objective thing from which we glean information, mostly confusing, mostly by getting things wrong, from our senses.

In one of our first electromagnetics lectures at university the lecturer drew out the whole electromagnetic spectrum. The aim was one of those consciousness raising things because the sliver of the spectrum to which are eyes is sensitive is really that - a sliver. On either side there are whole octaves of harmonics - to get all synaesthesiastic about it - to which we have no sense at all. Infra-red, microwaves, radiowaves, the terahertz waves they use to peek at your undergarments in airports. On the other side the ultraviolet, x-rays and gamma rays.

What they didn't tell us was the way that our senses lie to us. The world we perceive seems so obviously real and complete, so solid and vibrant and present that it came as an enormous and claustrophobic shock to read Kant and find that we are permanently swaddled in a cloying syrupy coccoon of our senses, forever insulated from the universe as it actually is. A constant rain of neutrinos sluices through our bodies as if they weren't there, thousands of them every second. The behaviour of the world at quantum scales is lethal to common sense. Nothing in a billion years of evolution has prepared us for it, whilst all the time making clever use of it weirdnesses. At high speeds, or in intense gravitational fields space itself is stretched and warped. Our most complete theories suggest 11, 15 or 120 dimensions of space, most furled tightly and quivering. Even our own consciousness when probed closely starts to decohere, falls to tatters like a pointellist painting seen up close, just another jerry-rigged evolutionary contraption to keep apes alive.