I'm reading a natural history book about a rainforest. The text emphasizes the experiences of the creatures in the trees--how shape, lineage or senses vary, but aren't traits an animal thinks too much about--we share a common environment and focus on practical actions. Our sensoria (particular arrays of senses) vary, but that matters less than identifying friends, neutrals, foes, and lunch at all.

"Getting over to that fruit that seems ripe, while avoiding a fight with that grumpy, territorial critter" is how we think, not "My color sense says..." or "my magnetic sense says" or "I shall now use my legs" or "I shall glide" or "I shall coil". Who does that? We just use what senses and talents we have to get by among the creatures we face.

There are some broad differences in attitude toward the world--fliers are freer to move around, but must take extra care to avoid injury--that can ground you and grounding means death--so their attitude toward space is looser, but touch is fussier than in ground-dwellers. Swimmers share some of fliers' three-dimensional mindset (not all--faster pressure changes in water make them less free to change levels), but aren't as touch-wary. And these attitude-differences between walkers, fliers and swimmers aren't unbridgeably vast--friendships across species, families, and even classes prove that.

No surprise! The whole point of senses is to let us effectively build a picture of our shared world and interact usefully. Selective pressure favors our understanding other species reasonably well; limiting comprehension to just us, wonderful us, faces a stiff Darwinian headwind. Suicidally stupid.

I look up from the book. Think "I agree--these philosophers who say "we" can never understand others are just hanging out with too many damn humans."

And wake.

Huh. A dream-essay! Maybe it generated that book to give its thesis more authority? But awake, I still disagree with those "we're boxed in" folks, and agree with the dream--not because text has any special authority, but because its theory fits my waking experience.

My experience isn't human. I grew up with five typical human senses, but also with two nonhuman ones--a unusually strong magnetic sense, more avian than human (normal humans have a weak, unconscious one); and I feel/sense/smell a sort of field around people and animals (less around plants) that conveys immediate mood (and often a lot about longer-term character); while I don't know if this energy envelope is what mystics mean by 'aura', I use that term for simplicity. My aura-sense of other creatures tells me directly that most creatures have similar, quite comprehensible emotional palettes. While there are both logical arguments and empirical research backing this up, I want to emphasize I don't believe it. I know it. I experience it directly. If you smell things, others' claims that a Fifth Sense is "theoretically impossible" just don't matter.

This means the dream doesn't have to convince me that other creatures have similar minds and feelings; I sense that directly. I think instead the argument the dream is making is that since sensory differences between me and normal humans make it harder but not impossible for me to understand you, your claim "we" can't grasp the world of a bat or a dog seems thin. Our sensoria/palettes are different, highlighting different aspects of the world--but all of us do construct a picture of that world--one which must usefully correspond to reality, or we die.

Humans, at least modern ones, are oddballs in one way though: most creatures must constantly deal with neighbors with different senses and characters. A lot of humans deal mostly (or only) with other humans, and acquire the lazy-minded notion that their sensorium--and the biases it brings--are universal, are the reality. As a sensory nonhuman myself, I find that pentasensory humans often jump to mechanistic or solipsistic beliefs about those of us with different sensoria, just because you guys are really bad readers of others. Most of us animals are better at it than you.

Why not? We need to be.

Note: I dreamed this several months before reading Ed Yong's bestseller An Immense World, on the diversity of animal sensoria.

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