The Sixth Sense
Still reading Huxley.
In Heaven and Hell, Huxley states that Science is free to look into the knowable world. The world around us. But that no one has attempted, legitimitely, to look into the unknowable world and that certainly no one has ever attempted to catalogue, categorise or improve our ability in that unknowable world. His words are still true today close to 80 years later.
The unknowable world being that of the unconscious. That state in which we exist during a trip, hypnotism, religious experience, dreams, meditation or near death. The actual experiences that the brain goes through, that we consciously or unconsciously experience while under these influences.
No one, to my mind, has found a unifying idea between these seperate states of existence, no one that is except Huxley who wished to expand our knowledge of such experiences and expound them and discover the true mind or universe or supreme being or whatever. Basically he was on the search for Life the Universe and Everything, just as so many people have done. The fact is that he has found a unique path which no one but no one has seen fit to follow since, possibly because the experiences of Mind are unquantifiable, unrecordable, unreliable and unverifiable by current scientific means. Therefore the only people who embark on such studies are, by nature, quacks, even Huxley. Although Huxley was one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century, your average psychic is not.
While not aspiring to be Huxley and having no Peyote or Mescalin to partake of the experience myself I just want to record my own thoughts on the nature of Mind, Life, Universe and Everything.
It is blatantly obvious to anyone with eyes to see that we as conscious beings, do not have control of our Minds. We are capable of thought, and this has become such an overriding thing that it drowns out our natural Mindscape.
Human Beings have a Sixth Sense. It is a very obvious Sixth Sense, not at all mystical. We are able to detect Electricity on a very basic level. Stand underneath a pylon, and even discounting the evidence of your eyes and ears you would know that an inordinantly large amount of Electricity was passing overhead. Walk into a room with your eyes closed and most people would be able to detect if an electrical appliance (of sufficient wattage, such as a telly or computer) is operating, even if that appliance is completely silent. But, probably, they would have no idea how they could guess such a thing.
All animals have this sixth sense. In the build up to a storm, animals will become agitated hours before.
Birds are also apparently capable of navigation through magnetism. It is entirely possible that many animals are aware of magnetism, so closely related to electricity it would not be inconceivable.
And yet we do not admit that we can sense Electricity. We have five senses that we are aware of. See, hear, feel, smell and taste. Thus the mystery of the sixth sense that has no apparant apparatus but plugs directly into our brain. We accept that we have five senses and do not attempt to search for what the brain is capable of feeling by itself.
This is what Huxley was trying to find, he takes the theory that the senses/consciousness is a reducing feature. Our senses/mind take in an incredible amount of information. Consciousness reduces that information to what is important to what is neccesary for survival. This is an excellent theory. Humans are not very specialised animals. We can survive in almost any conditions. As our ability to survive has increased, our information intake has reduced as we need less information to survive than the average animal. Most animals have at least one super enhanced sense - Dogs have incredible noses, Owls have excellent hearing and eyesight. Dolphins and Bats have senses that allow them to recieve sonar or radar, certain Lizards and snakes have heat vision, or rather heat taste.
Our senses by contrast are ridculously average. We are capable of seeing in TriChromatic Colour, but that is a freak genetic mutaion rather than anything useful. Most animals get along quite happily in black and white. One day our eyes may mutate into QuadroChromatic organs, which will make what we see now seem very dull and tame. Our hearing is quite good but nothing spectacular, smell is almost pointless, we have to stick our noses into a rose to smell it. Taste is pretty much pointless, having evolved only to stop us eating poison although I am personally glad that we do have it. Touch is not bad for the organs that utilise it (hands) and pretty rubbish in other places. We have no frame of reference for how well other animals sense of touch is developed apart from the Cats Whiskers perhaps.
Now how do we define Sense? Sense is the tools through which we percieve our environment. It is the traditional belief that we have five organs to do so which are then made sense of by the brain.
What may be evident however is that the Brain itself may be a sense organ, that it may be able to sense that which is other. If we look at the physical world, we find several phenomena which cannot be percieved - Magnetism, Radiation, Electricity, Gravity, Light (which cannot of itself be seen, it merely illuminates), Waves (Radio, Micro, Sound, InfraRed, UltraViolet).
Recently there was an experiment conducted in which people attempted to predict the person who was about to ring them on the telephone. The success rate was 70%.
There could be no physical perception of this knowledge through any of the five senses. How then could such knowledge be acquired? There are two possibilities. The Telephoner and the telephonee were in some kind of telepathic contact. Attractive but coming close to the realm of fantasy. Or the electronics connecting the two phones provide a certain pattern which although probably undetectable to the conscious mind, buries itself in the unconscious mind as a recognisable connection to the person calling, reinforced through repetition.
We know that humans are capable of detecting electricity somehow, it is easy for an individual to test themselves, but because we have made no attempt to develop our brains beyond simply an analytical computer, unlike our other senses which we are conscious of and develop from birth; because we surround ourselves with electricity while barely a century ago, humans and other animals experiences with electricity were scarce and confined to lightning (a threat to survival, albeit rare, but therefore a need to sense it) our sense has dulled. We are not even aware that we sense it.
Now for the hypothetical ideas. Our Brains work on Electricity, if we can detect it, if our unconscious can recognise patterns, is it not possible that we can detect each others Brain Patterns? Most telepathic claims are hoaxes, a very few are not, amongst twins especially, Hypnotic regression to a past life? Same thing. Some people have great eyesight, some don't. If the Brain is a sense organ there is no guarantee that everyone can sense to the same degree. Admittedly the electrical output of a Brain is low to very low but this is a suggestion of a possibility, nothing more. We know almost nothing about Mind as a sense or otherwise.
If we are capable of sensing Electricity, is the brain also not capable of sensing Magnetism? Possibly not from an evolutionary point of view, we diverged from birds and dinosaurs probably long before this developed. Humans have never needed to mass migrate on an annual basis. We have had visual clues such as the sun and stars and latterly maps and compasses. But that does not rule out the possibility of sensing magnetism if we know how. Who has not held a magnet in their hand and tried to feel the magnetism with their fingers, tried to push two magnets together and wondered at the invisible force between the two or attracting the two. Magnetism is related to Electricity so again it should at least be investigated. But we live with the Magnetism of the Earth our entire lives, how would we possibly separate a sense that is entirely stimulated all the time that we don't even know exists (if it does exist that is)? Birds know the difference however. They know the difference between two directions and when to fly in whichever of those two directions through nothing other than thousands of years of ingrained instinct.
Here we run into the Sapir Whorf Hypothesis, how do we even start to explain something for which we have no words to describe even if we knew what we were describing? What exactly is feeling normal? What senses are operating and are we aware that they are operating? Are there senses which we are unaware of but which are in constant operation and so contribute to feeling normal? Are there senses which we are unaware of and rarely in operation therefore possibly contributing to instinct? Gut Feelings? Supernormal/Supernatural Phenomena?
Thus we come back to Huxley. In this case. We know what we know. We know that we have at least five senses. If a person is deprived of these five senses, what does that person still have? What is that person still able to percieve? Huxley talks of sensory deprivation as a transporting device along with drugs, hypnotism, great art and everything else that loosens the reduction of the brain to survival information. Once the brain opens up through one of these paths to take in more information than is strictly neccesary for survival then the brain experiences a drugs trip, a religious epiphany, a dream or nightmare, a hypnotic regression to a past life, an imagination overload. In all these things clear images become apparant to the individual. There are several possibilities here: That the senses become super sensitive and that what is percieved is in actual fact reality or has a basis in reality; that the brain is recieving information even though the traditional information recievers are partially or completely shut down.; that the brain is capable of creating something out of nothing.
The third option is by far the most logical, but here we run into further questions. Where do we separate Mind from Brain? The Brain is us, The Mind is us. Deprived of Sensory information we retreat from our bodies to ourselves, our innermost mind which gives us? Exactly what we have just retreated from. A dream is a reality only slightly warped from the waking world. We dream within our own experience. Yet how do we see without eyes? Hear while we sleep? Our unconscious Brain takes our memories, or our thoughts and translates them into our own private reality and then delivers this to itself. Either in imagination or dreams, through hypnotism or hallucinogenic drugs. What our conscious mind recieves constantly is reality, whether real or invented by our unconscious mind. If our senses are lost they are replaced by Mind. Does a person born blind, with no conception of vision, dream in the same way we do or are their dreams shrouded in darkness also? Is their Mind capable of vision even if there may be no logic or order to it, if so, this is the man whose Mind is truly free in imagination.
This has one major impact. People in a "vegetable" state, are conscious, however damaged the Brain, we know that the Mind demands a reality in which to exist, even if it has to invent one. A Mind cannot exist in perpetuity without sensing the world except by imagining that it senses the world. If the body lives, the Mind lives.
More questions than answers, more guesswork than evidence but philosophical enquiry is full of such. Hopefully others will tread where Huxley advanced boldly. If we do not try to examine Mind properly, or even improperly, we might as well still be climbing trees in Africa. We have the physical world mapped to such a degree that we can see the entire room and are examining the nooks and crannies. Mind and Brain however we don't even know if we are even in a room, we certainly don't know what the furniture is or how to use it.
In Heaven and Hell, Huxley states that Science is free to look into the knowable world. The world around us. But that no one has attempted, legitimitely, to look into the unknowable world and that certainly no one has ever attempted to catalogue, categorise or improve our ability in that unknowable world. His words are still true today close to 80 years later.
The unknowable world being that of the unconscious. That state in which we exist during a trip, hypnotism, religious experience, dreams, meditation or near death. The actual experiences that the brain goes through, that we consciously or unconsciously experience while under these influences.
No one, to my mind, has found a unifying idea between these seperate states of existence, no one that is except Huxley who wished to expand our knowledge of such experiences and expound them and discover the true mind or universe or supreme being or whatever. Basically he was on the search for Life the Universe and Everything, just as so many people have done. The fact is that he has found a unique path which no one but no one has seen fit to follow since, possibly because the experiences of Mind are unquantifiable, unrecordable, unreliable and unverifiable by current scientific means. Therefore the only people who embark on such studies are, by nature, quacks, even Huxley. Although Huxley was one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century, your average psychic is not.
While not aspiring to be Huxley and having no Peyote or Mescalin to partake of the experience myself I just want to record my own thoughts on the nature of Mind, Life, Universe and Everything.
It is blatantly obvious to anyone with eyes to see that we as conscious beings, do not have control of our Minds. We are capable of thought, and this has become such an overriding thing that it drowns out our natural Mindscape.
Human Beings have a Sixth Sense. It is a very obvious Sixth Sense, not at all mystical. We are able to detect Electricity on a very basic level. Stand underneath a pylon, and even discounting the evidence of your eyes and ears you would know that an inordinantly large amount of Electricity was passing overhead. Walk into a room with your eyes closed and most people would be able to detect if an electrical appliance (of sufficient wattage, such as a telly or computer) is operating, even if that appliance is completely silent. But, probably, they would have no idea how they could guess such a thing.
All animals have this sixth sense. In the build up to a storm, animals will become agitated hours before.
Birds are also apparently capable of navigation through magnetism. It is entirely possible that many animals are aware of magnetism, so closely related to electricity it would not be inconceivable.
And yet we do not admit that we can sense Electricity. We have five senses that we are aware of. See, hear, feel, smell and taste. Thus the mystery of the sixth sense that has no apparant apparatus but plugs directly into our brain. We accept that we have five senses and do not attempt to search for what the brain is capable of feeling by itself.
This is what Huxley was trying to find, he takes the theory that the senses/consciousness is a reducing feature. Our senses/mind take in an incredible amount of information. Consciousness reduces that information to what is important to what is neccesary for survival. This is an excellent theory. Humans are not very specialised animals. We can survive in almost any conditions. As our ability to survive has increased, our information intake has reduced as we need less information to survive than the average animal. Most animals have at least one super enhanced sense - Dogs have incredible noses, Owls have excellent hearing and eyesight. Dolphins and Bats have senses that allow them to recieve sonar or radar, certain Lizards and snakes have heat vision, or rather heat taste.
Our senses by contrast are ridculously average. We are capable of seeing in TriChromatic Colour, but that is a freak genetic mutaion rather than anything useful. Most animals get along quite happily in black and white. One day our eyes may mutate into QuadroChromatic organs, which will make what we see now seem very dull and tame. Our hearing is quite good but nothing spectacular, smell is almost pointless, we have to stick our noses into a rose to smell it. Taste is pretty much pointless, having evolved only to stop us eating poison although I am personally glad that we do have it. Touch is not bad for the organs that utilise it (hands) and pretty rubbish in other places. We have no frame of reference for how well other animals sense of touch is developed apart from the Cats Whiskers perhaps.
Now how do we define Sense? Sense is the tools through which we percieve our environment. It is the traditional belief that we have five organs to do so which are then made sense of by the brain.
What may be evident however is that the Brain itself may be a sense organ, that it may be able to sense that which is other. If we look at the physical world, we find several phenomena which cannot be percieved - Magnetism, Radiation, Electricity, Gravity, Light (which cannot of itself be seen, it merely illuminates), Waves (Radio, Micro, Sound, InfraRed, UltraViolet).
Recently there was an experiment conducted in which people attempted to predict the person who was about to ring them on the telephone. The success rate was 70%.
There could be no physical perception of this knowledge through any of the five senses. How then could such knowledge be acquired? There are two possibilities. The Telephoner and the telephonee were in some kind of telepathic contact. Attractive but coming close to the realm of fantasy. Or the electronics connecting the two phones provide a certain pattern which although probably undetectable to the conscious mind, buries itself in the unconscious mind as a recognisable connection to the person calling, reinforced through repetition.
We know that humans are capable of detecting electricity somehow, it is easy for an individual to test themselves, but because we have made no attempt to develop our brains beyond simply an analytical computer, unlike our other senses which we are conscious of and develop from birth; because we surround ourselves with electricity while barely a century ago, humans and other animals experiences with electricity were scarce and confined to lightning (a threat to survival, albeit rare, but therefore a need to sense it) our sense has dulled. We are not even aware that we sense it.
Now for the hypothetical ideas. Our Brains work on Electricity, if we can detect it, if our unconscious can recognise patterns, is it not possible that we can detect each others Brain Patterns? Most telepathic claims are hoaxes, a very few are not, amongst twins especially, Hypnotic regression to a past life? Same thing. Some people have great eyesight, some don't. If the Brain is a sense organ there is no guarantee that everyone can sense to the same degree. Admittedly the electrical output of a Brain is low to very low but this is a suggestion of a possibility, nothing more. We know almost nothing about Mind as a sense or otherwise.
If we are capable of sensing Electricity, is the brain also not capable of sensing Magnetism? Possibly not from an evolutionary point of view, we diverged from birds and dinosaurs probably long before this developed. Humans have never needed to mass migrate on an annual basis. We have had visual clues such as the sun and stars and latterly maps and compasses. But that does not rule out the possibility of sensing magnetism if we know how. Who has not held a magnet in their hand and tried to feel the magnetism with their fingers, tried to push two magnets together and wondered at the invisible force between the two or attracting the two. Magnetism is related to Electricity so again it should at least be investigated. But we live with the Magnetism of the Earth our entire lives, how would we possibly separate a sense that is entirely stimulated all the time that we don't even know exists (if it does exist that is)? Birds know the difference however. They know the difference between two directions and when to fly in whichever of those two directions through nothing other than thousands of years of ingrained instinct.
Here we run into the Sapir Whorf Hypothesis, how do we even start to explain something for which we have no words to describe even if we knew what we were describing? What exactly is feeling normal? What senses are operating and are we aware that they are operating? Are there senses which we are unaware of but which are in constant operation and so contribute to feeling normal? Are there senses which we are unaware of and rarely in operation therefore possibly contributing to instinct? Gut Feelings? Supernormal/Supernatural Phenomena?
Thus we come back to Huxley. In this case. We know what we know. We know that we have at least five senses. If a person is deprived of these five senses, what does that person still have? What is that person still able to percieve? Huxley talks of sensory deprivation as a transporting device along with drugs, hypnotism, great art and everything else that loosens the reduction of the brain to survival information. Once the brain opens up through one of these paths to take in more information than is strictly neccesary for survival then the brain experiences a drugs trip, a religious epiphany, a dream or nightmare, a hypnotic regression to a past life, an imagination overload. In all these things clear images become apparant to the individual. There are several possibilities here: That the senses become super sensitive and that what is percieved is in actual fact reality or has a basis in reality; that the brain is recieving information even though the traditional information recievers are partially or completely shut down.; that the brain is capable of creating something out of nothing.
The third option is by far the most logical, but here we run into further questions. Where do we separate Mind from Brain? The Brain is us, The Mind is us. Deprived of Sensory information we retreat from our bodies to ourselves, our innermost mind which gives us? Exactly what we have just retreated from. A dream is a reality only slightly warped from the waking world. We dream within our own experience. Yet how do we see without eyes? Hear while we sleep? Our unconscious Brain takes our memories, or our thoughts and translates them into our own private reality and then delivers this to itself. Either in imagination or dreams, through hypnotism or hallucinogenic drugs. What our conscious mind recieves constantly is reality, whether real or invented by our unconscious mind. If our senses are lost they are replaced by Mind. Does a person born blind, with no conception of vision, dream in the same way we do or are their dreams shrouded in darkness also? Is their Mind capable of vision even if there may be no logic or order to it, if so, this is the man whose Mind is truly free in imagination.
This has one major impact. People in a "vegetable" state, are conscious, however damaged the Brain, we know that the Mind demands a reality in which to exist, even if it has to invent one. A Mind cannot exist in perpetuity without sensing the world except by imagining that it senses the world. If the body lives, the Mind lives.
More questions than answers, more guesswork than evidence but philosophical enquiry is full of such. Hopefully others will tread where Huxley advanced boldly. If we do not try to examine Mind properly, or even improperly, we might as well still be climbing trees in Africa. We have the physical world mapped to such a degree that we can see the entire room and are examining the nooks and crannies. Mind and Brain however we don't even know if we are even in a room, we certainly don't know what the furniture is or how to use it.
posted by Caractacus at 20:56
1 Comments:
I agree with you when you say that such questions should be wondered about.
But I have my differences with you as far as Huxley and his method are concerned and also with regard to that sixth sense that you mention. Although I am unable to quote off-hand, I am certain that you could easily find the results of studies into extra sensory perception and other exceptional mental activity which have been done in the past (and I am certain are still being carried out). Yes it is true that science is usually skeptical but it is sometimes hard to say whether that is a good or a bad thing.
As far as exploration itself goes, I believe a lot of us from time to time undergo such exploration each at our own level. Though not to the extent that Huxley did. And certainly in my opinion such exploration (especially when induced by drugs or religious fanaticism) is often more deleterious than beneficial. Consider what Huxley was like when he was in that state. Exploration must have its limits and it is fairly obvious that the average human being can lose control of himself or herself fairly easily. Then the entire thing becomes rather unfortunate (isn't there a spate of exploration among teenagers and young people of all races and regions these days, wonder how healthy that is). If a person is able to explore the unconscious without unconsciously affecting the conscious life of many others then I would be all for it. But if a great mind of the last century was unable to maintain coherence (and many other great minds of the last century I dare say) then how prudent is it to carry out such exploration.
My intent is not to dispel your idea of exploring the unknown (unconscious), in fact I agree that there is more to everything than meets the eye. If one could carry out that exploration like present day Buddhist monks and ancient Hindus (and many others) have done then it would be beneficial to all. But then again many Scientists as well as sub-conscious mind explorers are often skeptical of them (sadly). If people have been pursuing something for thousands of years then maybe it is not all BS.
Finally (and I apologise for the length of this) the sensing of electricity / magnetism (essentially electromagnetic waves / fields) is I believe already explained. The human brain itself generates electromagnetic waves, so it is not surprising that it should be able to detect external electromagnetic waves.
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