Cognitive Framework for the Study of the Senses: A Synthetic Approach through Scientific and Philosophical Perspectives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Currently, in both scientific and philosophical disciplines, many consider the visual and auditory senses as the “higher senses,” viewing them as objective faculties, particularly in humans. Conversely, the tactile, gustatory, and olfactory senses are regarded as the “lower senses,” primarily subjective. The approach to such differentiation involves comparing and analyzing them based on an insufficient conceptual understanding of objective knowledge. We argue against it, finding it unnatural, biased, and non-synthetic. Towards a change in conception, a more effective strategy could be to consider overall cognition as the interplay between the senses and cognitive processes. When viewed through this lens, three essential elements of this interplay emerge, which we identify as its salient features as follows: 1. Functional aspect - the senses inform of the pattern-based macro world rather than its micro constituents. 2. Objecthood aspect - all five senses put the organism in direct touch with the objective world without exception. We have comprehensively redefined objecthood to encompass both the object and stuff (its material composition, such as woody, watery, metallic, etc.). 3. Abstract or representational aspect - information through the senses is further manipulated by high-level cognitive processing. We term it the “cognitive sense.” In this article, we elaborate on these features and propose a normative theory. We believe this can serve as a framework for both scientific and philosophical exploration of the theory of the senses, informed by a comprehensive literature review conducted across both disciplines. Our study examines the roles of the chemosenses (smell, taste, etc.) and the tactile sense, which we term the vital senses, in grounding the organism in its biological basis of life. In contrast, the highly acclaimed distal senses of vision and audition can mislead the organism about reality and objecthood because of their connection to abstract cognition, thereby challenging the contemporary perspective.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".