I am going to have to disagree a little bit with this.
I will start in this thread with your post rather than some of the "upstream" contributions and if I have to become a salmon, well so be it.
So I take it("and define it") just now,
quote:
define it as according to our senses. O(corrected cap)ur senses are our filters of what we define as reality, so no they are not really part of reality in the same way as what we sense.
Now I step back...
Look what Faith or I call "reality" you or Crashfrog may not. Look at it this way, by pursing my own "reality" (or version thereof) I came around to an understanding of my TOTAL REALITY (of anything I have or may have in the future to post on EVC) that organic "senses" (eyes, ears, touch, taste etc.) EVEN as "filters" and being anatomically located (in two places on my body at the same time)no matter the aspect under projection lead(past tense) and lead(present tense) me INTo>was and is the same reality and senses I have had before I had to try to communicate what sense and reality I have or had or will so to.
I will explain. Our sense Are filters, yes, of course. I even will suppose in this particular post that our "reality" is *defined* accordingly ("to our senses").
But in my case and in case you have the same eyes, ears, nose etc, there has been IN (my) REALITY some difference of opinion (NOT ABOUT ASPECTS OF REALITY) but about what it meant to be called "filters",i.e. what the "senses" really are.
Being interested in reptiles and amphibians, I have always been keen to try to figure out how these creatures "sense" and how these "senses" are different than mine (human). One day I dug a large snapping turtle out of a pond on the golf course at Cornell. All (reality)was balls and grass that day. This specimen had unusually long turburcles protruding BELOW its chin. I took this creature to the local Cornell Herpetologist expecting to find out what kind of "sense" could be made out of these fleshy appendages that were odd (even)by my own experience of collecting a couple dozen of the same species prior. Not only did the herpetologist have no idea if the blobs were "sense organs" or possible sense organs he had NO INTEREST AS A HERPETOLOGIST in the anatomical part, no matter what it was.
This is a small example how my "sense" of "sense" and the reality that surrounded it was being confounded or misconstructed. He was a "herpetologist" after all. That is what he was supposed to be interested in. He responded worse than the Romance Studies proffessors did to Hawkings' book about time.
I say this in the past tense because I have now resolved that biologists have not been wholistically in touch with the relation of sense itself, to even ^simple^ horizons of reality. I just posted a case where Sharks may have gel that is responsive thermoelectically and sensically
http://
EvC Forum: Re-activation of the human thermoregulating functions -->
EvC Forum: Re-activation of the human thermoregulating functionsand this CLEARS all of my own speculations on sense physiology from non-scientific angles showing that where some ichythologist has a phd saying that electric fish have "AND" gates in their brains and senses is out of this mind physically because (regardless of the real truth (it is relative to confounding or confusing me only in this case)) the computer science "and" could simply and more easily be "sensed" (in the human way) as concurrent fluctuations of temperature and electricity, thus "spoofing" an IT concept. Instead, before this resolution, it was my mind, that cared more for the snapper than the birdie being golfed, that was SENSED as off real. It was not. It was actual and the scientists' have been only aspects of the same. Not the whole kit and Kaboo000000dle.
So even if our reality is defined as our senses and AS filters this does not seperate them just because they are not smooth muscle nor glial cells. Just the possibility that turtle barbels use thermoelectric gels removes all possibility that I was not ipso facto thinking correctly physically/sensically. By the way a mud turtle I have from S. Carolina has FOUR projections from its lower jaw and these might be used specifically as seperated in space to actually sense the SAME reality that I have defined with my human ability.