The Blind, The Deaf, The Leper, And God's Tasteless Joke About The Nosey Parker

TheMadFool

What if god had shown himself to the blind, had spoken to the deaf, and had touched the leper? The blind couldn't have seen him, the deaf couldn't have heard him and the leper couldn't have felt him. What if, on top of all this, god is odorless and tasteless or if god did have a taste or an odor, he had himself placed on a tongue that had lost its ability to taste and wafted himself up a nose that was incapable of smelling?

I'm hinting at the possibility that an x exists but, due to some unknown, as yet undiscovered, "law" of probability/chance/luck, our senses and instruments are always mismatched with its properties, resulting in x never being detected and we never coming to know of its existence. Imagine a pentagon, each side representing a property - 1. visual, 2. acoustic, 3. tactile, 4. odor and 5. taste and that this pentagon rotates at some (unknown) speed. Our position is fixed and as this pentagon rotates, we get access to only one side at a time. As luck would have it, when we use a particular sense organ to check if the pentagon exists, it always happens that the property not detectable by that sense organ faces us. For instance, when we look, it's the side with odor that faces us and when we listen, it's the side with visual information that faces us. This pentagon would exist but go undetected for as long as the particular "law" of chance I alluded is in force and that could be forever.

I'm aware that all senses are on simultaneously which seemingly invalidates my pentagon scenario but there are blind and deaf people, we've all lost the ability to taste and smell when we had a cold, and we never feel anything when we sleep.

A penny for your thoughts...

God's "laughable" attempt at a joke:

What bothered Nosey Parker the most in the burning fires of hell?

To smelt or(e) not to smelt. :smile:

Addendum

Consider a simple probabilistic analysis of the problem.

The pentagon I mentioned above has 5 sides for 5 senses and if it's pure chance what face of the pentagon I get to access then the following are true:

1. The probability that it's the side with odor that faces us = 1/5
2. The probability that it's the side with taste that faces us = 1/5
3. The probability that it's the side with the visual that faces us = 1/5
4. The probability that it's the side with smell that faces us = 1/5
5. The probability that it's the side with touch that faces us = 1/5

So, if I were to look at, the probability that I'll see it is 1/5 and the probability that I won't see it is 4/5.

For any sense organ x, the probability that I'll detect it with x is 1/5 and the probability that I won't is 4/5.

Simply put, the probability of failure to detect is higher (4/5) than the probability of success (1/5).

debd

Yes certainly it is possible. We were unaware of microorganisms till the microscope was invented.

If some organism whose temporal perception is much longer than ours, say a single thought or action of it takes centuries or millennia to form, we may be unable to perceive its actions.

Our brains may also be unable to process or even imagine certain phenomena and we wouldn't even know it. Like other animals are unable to think of calculus.

However, if some entity/thing have a material effect on our world, we may be able to deduce their existence. The existence of genes which are responsible to heritability was deduced long before DNA was discovered.

TheMadFool

Yes certainly it is possible. We were unaware of microorganisms till the microscope was invented.

If some organism whose temporal perception is much longer than ours, say a single thought or action of it takes centuries or millennia to form, we may be unable to perceive its actions.

Our brains may also be unable to process or even imagine certain phenomena and we wouldn't even know it. Like other animals are unable to think of calculus.

However, if some entity/thing have a material effect on our world, we may be able to deduce their existence. The existence of genes which are responsible to heritability was deduced long before DNA was discovered. — debd

Yes but, not to say that your contribution isn't valuable, I was actually hoping for some insight into probability itself. Whether a probabilistic law that prevents a particular sense organ from encountering its category of perception exists? I mean it happens quite often in games based on dice. For instance I remember playing ludo once and I needed a 6 but didn't get it, then I needed a 2 and I didn't get that either, then I needed a 1 and that too failed to materialize. How long can this go on?

debd

I think if a sense organ did not encounter its intended stimuli often enough and in a significant way enough then evolution wouldn't have selected that sense organ to be passed on to our progeny. Because evolution has selected the the sense organs as they are, that would mean the probability of encountering their particular stimuli will be high enough to offset the energy cost of developing and maintaining the said organ.
To extend your dice example, let us say we have an organ that detects when 6 has landed. If our environment did not contain some rolling dice like phenomenon which landed 6 often enough and it impacted the passing of our genes to our offspring, then evolution would not have led to the development of an organ who only function is to detect when a 6 lands. As a corollary, the presence of 6 detecting sense organ implies that event of landing a 6 is occurring and its is occurring at probably a high enough frequency to justify the development of the organ.

TheMadFool

↪debd

Evolution, we're past that point. Our senses have evolved and are at peak performance at least insofar as human-level events and objects are concerned. I'm talking about the situation when this just isn't enough.

You know how probability works, right? If it isn't zero, no matter how unlikely it is, there's no telling that it won't happen. There's a non-zero probability that a pentagon of the type I described exists and if the property it presents to us is always out of step with the sense organ we employ to detect it, it will fail to register on our sensory sytem, effectively making it, for all intents and purposes, nonexistent.

The Blind, The Deaf, The Leper, And God's Tasteless Joke About The Nosey Parker

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