Ignorance in defense of ignorance
Apart from a few people on here, everything I have ever read or heard holds there are 5 senses.
Ian, why do you think citing your ignorance somehow justifies your ignorant statement or your stubbon defense of it?
"It is certainly true that I haver never studied any psychology or biology.
But it's very well known that there are only 5 senses. Sometimes kinesthesis is included as a 6th sense, but this provides no information regarding the environment. Pain and temperature are either subsumed under touch, or they give no information about the environment."
Are you out of your senses? I'd really like to see you try to navigate through your environment with out those other senses. While the sense of touch nerves in the skin of your feet may tell you that they're pressed hard against something firm, you'd have no idea where in space your feet are in the dark without kinesthesis information telling you the position of your muscles and leg joints. And it's information sent to the brain from the ear that tells us where the direction of up is in the world and tells us whether we are moving, accellerating, or remaining still. Do you ever bother to read what you write before posting? Apparently not. Not when you claim that the sense of pain and temperature doesn't give a person information about his or her envirnoment. If you really mean this, then I dare you to sit on a hot griddle. No, I beg you! Please go sit on a hot griddle. I want to see if the information you'll get will teach you something about the experience.
"Sometimes they include the sense of balance/limb position awareness as a 6th sense -- sometimes esp as a 6th sense. You think differently, a few others on here think differently. Fine, but why do you imagine that:
a) that I would take the word of anonymous non-entities on a discussion forum, none of whom demonstrate much understanding of my posts."
If you mean that your posts make little or no sense, I'll have to agree.
b) Why you think I am remotely interested in this issue anyway.
You think it's clearly wrong, then go argue about it with them.
Because YOU are the one who posted the ignorant statement that there are only 5 senses. I can understand why you would rather not have to defend it. That statement is no more accurate than claiming everything in the world is made up of only 4 elements. Belief in only 5 senses goes back to time when people thought the world was made out of just earth, fire, air, and water. Some of us have advanced in our knowledge. Some, woefully not.
"Go and argue with someone else Astronut. I can't be bothered to communicate with people on intellectual subjects who continually responds to my posts with non-sequiturs and tedious nitpicking and who clearly has little or no understanding of my posts. Go and pester someone else."
In other words, "stop correcting my ignorant statements." If you can't defend your statements, then keep them to yourself and no one here will criticize you. If you post your ignorant and irrational comments here, you're just asking for it. And you will get it.