The Extension of Senses
The Embodiment of Senses January 1, 2025 Babu Thaliath
The puzzle of how senses extend both inside and outside the body remains unresolved in philosophy and science. Smell, taste, and touch are felt in specific body parts, while sight and hearing extend far beyond, with objective localization showing vast extra-bodily extension. This mystery involves longstanding aporias from ancient philosophy, especially concerning vision: perceiving size, distance, solidity, position, perspectivity, and dioptric phenomena like reflection and refraction. Prevailing internalist theories of perception block acceptance of an objective externalization of the senses, which would resolve these aporias, including the moon illusion. A synthetic unity of material and mental structures points to real, transcendental-subjectively irreducible spatiotemporal structures and the need for a unified philosophical-scientific theory of perception.