Quote of the Week
(March 23, 2026)

Those who disparage our experience love to point to creatures who perceive things we cannot. Wouldn’t we live in a different reality if, say, we had the infrared vision of some snakes or the “sonar” (echolocation) sense of a bat? Of course we would — but only in the way those who are deaf or blind would live in a different reality if their senses were unimpaired. Perhaps the most striking thing about our perceptual worlds is their continuity and coherence, despite the supposedly discrete nature of the sense data and of the different senses themselves. Adding a new sense gives us a richer picture, but it is a richer picture of the unified world we already know.

It can be difficult, as an adult, to cope with an overwhelming content of sense perception through organs of sense that have not, in the normal course of things, already been educated by thinking. But the fact remains that the normal course of education presents no particular difficulty at all.

If the bat’s echolocation were suddenly and miraculously added to our own array of senses, we would presumably suffer some disorientation. Like all our other senses, our new sense would need to be educated by our thinking. But we would have no reason to think that our new world stood in contradiction to our previous experience.

Nor is there any reason to think that a person naturally born with a capacity for echolocation would find his world conflicting with that of the rest of us. The two worlds would certainly vary in the richness of the contributions made by the different senses, but they would no more disagree with each other than the truly vast difference between the most sensitive musician’s ear and the dullest, least attentive ear among the rest of us would spell a disagreement of sense perception.

(from Chapter 13, “All Science Must Be Rooted in Experience”, in Organisms and Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)

— See all quotes to date