In our day to day, we treat our senses as fixed – we have the set that we do, and no more.
The idea of adding senses seems to make as little sense as the idea of putting four dimensions into a three dimensional space. “Where does the new dimension go?”, you may ask, and there’s not much more of an intuitive answer than, “orthogonal to the other three”. The world of higher dimensions is a little kinder to us – you can understand translating through the fourth dimension as sliding through time, and you can give a user two extra knobs to understand rotations about the fourth axis, and you can take projections down to three dimensions, and maybe this is enough for the user to understand the fourth dimension.
Describing new senses seems harder, and attempts to do so rely on what a description of what more you can experience with it, or relying on connections we make to other sense, but what does it mean for yellow to be fresh and bright when you have no idea what a yellow is?
Yet, our minds are incredibly malleable, and perhaps we can build new senses through training that translate technology to intuition, being able to feel, at a deeper level, what we could once only observe.
The introduction of new sense has been done before. In an experiment, Udo Wächter built a belt with 13 vibrating motors on its perimeter, which buzzed in the direction of north, constantly.
I suddenly realized that my perception had shifted. I had some kind of internal map of the city in my head. I could always find my way home. Eventually, I felt I couldn’t get lost, even in a completely new place.
–Udo Wächter
I’d like to draw attention to this distinction that Wächter makes – that his perception had shifted, instead of just being able to measure the direction of north. I think that this distinction is really meaningful. In my process of doing Math or Physics, being able to develop an intuition for the objects I work with allows me to progress significantly faster, despite knowing the rules of how to manipulate these objects before and after developing the intuition.
In drawing this distinction I want to motivate some version of phenomenological transhumanism. In addition to transhumanism’s current focus on extending our life, becoming strong, faster, smarter – getting more of the things we have – that there is a possibility of extending the diversity of our experiences by building new senses, that is easy and achievable today.
Here’s one version of what this looks like: Smart Watches are common today and generally have a vibration motor on them. Just like the brain is able to process multiple frequencies overlaid on top of each other as distinct sounds, the brain should be able to process multiple prime vibrational frequencies overlaid on top of each other from your smart watch. I don’t think you’re going to be able to get more than 30Hz sensing or so, so you get at most 11 bits of information in this way at any point of time.
With these bits you can build proximity sensing to other people 1, magnetosensing, electrical sensing, directional help, and a whole suite of other things. Notably, this is a gut-level, instinctive sense that is not available to us today.
Yes, I’m taking this from that one r/applyingtocollege post.