Consciousness and Touch

 

And so if  you were born with only the sense of touch, how much could you become conscious of  the reality of existence? What could you deduce from the conscious awareness induced in your mind as the resulting of touching something?

You could sense that what you touched as either a solid or a liquid or somewhere in between because of the repulsion of the electomagnetic fields in your finger and whatever it was that you touched.  You could sense whether what you touched was hotter or colder than your finger. You could hold a tennis ball in your hand and come to recognize its shape as that we call a ball or sphere. You could feel the smoothness of the fur on your cat. You could feel the prick of a cactus needle ... or was it the prick of sewing needle?

By while consciousness of feel is sufficient to do many things -- use a bind person's walking stick to navigate, read Braille, induce you to take your hand of a hot stove, etc. -- it is far from sufficient enough to gain much knowledge of the reality of existence. Indeed, the sensation in the conscious awareness of touch is but a reflection of reality in your conscious mind. What as aspects you cannot come to know through consciousness of  feel you can never you can never know. 

The entirety of existence is held by natural philosophers of science as mass, force and energy and we can feel none of them. We can only gain indirect evidence of their existence through conscious awareness of their interactions. We find evidence of energy by feeling the hotness and coldness as energy flows either from or to your fingers as you touch something. you can feel the mass of a tennis ball as the force of gravity acts on it. You can feel the force required to push the mass of a stalled automobile of the roadway. But you can feel nothing of their properties to cause these effects.It is only consciousness of the effects of their causes of interaction that we can consciously know.