The Unreliable Five Senses

Can we see reality?

In response to a recent video that we posted on Instagram that asks, “Why are scientists so confident in the physicalist model?” a commenter responded in the following way:

What came through your five senses, that is called reality. These spiritual BS folks cannot differentiate between imagination and reality.

Thinking that perhaps this person was unaware of the stature of the scientist, Dr. Marjorie Woollacott, who was speaking in the video, and wanting to counter the incorrect notion that she is one of those “BS folks,” I responded like this:

Marjorie Woollacott, Ph.D., is an Emeritus Professor of Human Physiology and a member of the Institute of Neuroscience at the University of Oregon. She was chair of the Human Physiology Department for seven years. She has published more than 200 scientific articles and written or co-edited eight books.

Assuming that I had established her authority to speak on scientific matters and thus to credibly assert that the spiritual is a real component of our reality, I was surprised (and not surprised) when he said:

That doesn't matter. She has lost touch with reality. She should read David Hume. He will smack some sense back into her and bring her back to the real world.

So there you have it; just pop open “An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding,” and we will all quickly abandon the folly of the unenlightened and genuflect to the hard truth—that the five senses are the only way to obtain true information. Before pointing out some of the serious issues with this line of thought, let’s take issue with Hume’s view itself.

What it amounts to, as was outlined here by Dr. Ed Feser, is that just because we observed something before does not mean we should expect it again (we need to see it every time on its own). This would mean, for example, that just because leafy greens were healthy in the past or just because the sun rose many times does not guarantee that these things will be the same in the future.

This may be technically true but has no relevance in the “real world” that our commentator wants us to exist in so badly. Presumably, Hume set dates on his calendar—expecting the sun to rise daily, and ate what he assumed to be nutritious yesterday. Dr. Feser summarizes Hume’s argument as “overrated” and explains: 

As David Stove once said of Plato’s Theory of Forms, the sequel to Hume’s argument has been centuries of rapturous applause among philosophers. Stove didn’t mean it as a compliment; he was mocking something he took to be overrated. The mockery is, in my view, not justified in Plato’s case, but it would have been justified had the barb been directed instead at Hume’s overrated argument. For what we have here is one of many instances of Hume’s application of general philosophical presuppositions which we know to be highly problematic at best and demonstrably false at worst. 

Now, exploring a few of the issues and implications if the five senses are all that we call reality:

Love, justice, and meaning do not exist

Our ears cannot hear love, nor can love be measured (as an extension of our five senses) in any lab. You cannot pour a cup of justice or describe it in any units that we are familiar with. The idea that something can be “meaningful” is nebulous and subjective and cannot be determined through touch, taste, or smell. One can certainly retreat to the (absurd, in my opinion) position that, yes, all of these ideas are indeed fictitious. There is no love or justice. But through what faculty have we come to believe in these universal experiences? It would seem through something other than our five senses. How do we know that whatever it is that generates the feeling of love is not, in fact, more reliable than the senses that cannot perceive it?

The senses are often wrong

When I gaze at a striped straw that’s been inserted into a refreshing glass of Sprite, it looks bent, which, obviously, it’s not. The scratch-and-sniff books I used to buy my kids smell an awful lot like the item that they are simulating. These odors are fake. Though blindfolded, I might have no idea that I was not smelling the real thing. And who knows what the AI revolution might bring in terms of its capacity to trick our feeble senses into accepting a false reality. 

This view destroys the notion of morality 

If the five senses are all that we have and the invisible concept of morality is a fiction, then it becomes logical to want to indulge those senses to the greatest extent possible. This is the inevitable result of that worldview. Why spend time trying to cultivate your character when “character” can’t be seen or measured and, therefore, does not exist? The senses might prefer sleep, steak, and sex as often as possible. It would not matter how these were obtained, as no one ever saw or measured “ethics.” 

Taken to its logical conclusion, we end up with the view of the Marquis de Sade: “Virtue can never bring anything but a fantastical happiness…there is no true felicity except in the senses, and virtue gratifies none of them.” 

The Doctrine of Physicalism is slowly dying 

Finally, the entire notion of physicalism is suspect as more and more scientists and philosophers are coming to recognize. Do our senses even provide a remotely accurate account of the world as it is “out there?” Cognitive psychologists like Donald Hoffman, in taking stock of the “Hard Problem of Consciousness” and understanding that our experiences are not generated in the brain, have concluded that the physical world is a sort of dashboard that we use to navigate in the world and not (ultimate) reality itself. 

In the same way that the pixels on your home screen are useful representations of real things like the electromagnetic activity in your computer but are not themselves that activity, the world as we perceive it with our senses is only a metaphor for something deeper. For a thorough and comprehensive presentation of this idea, check out Bernardo Kastrup’s course in Analytic Idealism at the Essentia Foundation’s website. The first installment is called The Incoherence of Our Ordinary Intuitions.  

In summary, the physical senses are obviously highly useful in daily life and can also be a source of manifold delights. At the same time, they are often misleading, unreliable, fragmentary, and, if mistakenly taken to be the only lens on reality, dangerous. Just as we all use the mind’s eye when the physical one won’t suffice, there may be ever higher ways to interface with what we call reality. The truly scientific path would be to remain open to these when credible arguments are presented. 

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