Sensory Expansion

If you were sightless, tasteless, touchless, deaf, and you were incapable of smelling anything, then bereft of your five senses, would you still be able to perceive the world?  The concept of existing through these five senses alone is rather archaic, the answer to the question above is yes you would still be able to perceive the world even without those senses your consciousness in and of itself would continue to exist and you would still be able to think and feel things even if you didn't have the ability to do that in a literal sense.

One of the things about Artificial Intelligence that I find fascinating is the fact that traditional approaches to its development took this idea in reverse, developing a consciousness first before giving it the ability to sense things.  Perhaps this is why a truly sentient AI was something that we initially thought would never be possible, because we were going about the process in the wrong order.  The algorithmic representation of evolution is incredibly simple, you make varying changes and if those changes do not hinder the progress of the subject then the algorithm continues.  There is no verification nor validation with evolution, you can develop defects and hindrances which do not impede the advancement of the subject initially so they persist long after they first appear.  Many genetic conditions are examples of this in practice, there was no part of the evolutionary algorithm that removed those defects when they occurred.  There is a concept known as natural selection which is often paired with evolution as being a form of validation whereby only the strongest of a species survives and the weakest die off, but again that isn't an accurate definition in practice, it would be truer to say that only those who do not develop fatal flaws go on to reproduce.  There's an important distinction to make here in that natural selection doesn't determine what is the best or most effective solution, just that which can survive, the two are not synonymous.

When you look at Humanity and the focus it has on the five senses that we traditionally use to define our perception of the world, there are many arguments made about possible additions to those senses.  I'm not talking about extrasensory perception - ESP, the traditional descriptor of claimed psychic abilities - although there is something to be said about those claims, they aren't the focus here.  Instead the focus is on things like intuition and spatial awareness, abilities that most human possess but in themselves are often deemed as secondary senses because they rely on one or more of the primary five senses.  Spatial awareness as an example relies quite heavily on your sense of hearing and your sense of sight to be able to be aware of your surroundings and to be able to position yourself within a conceptual 3D space within your mind.

Other abilities that we possess like the ability to sense temperature, heat and cold, are extensions of our sense of touch and feeling, but beyond these extensions there are many things that we can do which cannot be explained by these five senses alone.  The fact that you would still be aware of your existence even if you were to lose all five senses demonstrates that there is a sense of being that persists that goes beyond those five senses.  Your sense of balance also persists in the absence of the first five senses, you can still tell if you are the right way up or not, and whether you can walk upright, although we associate these heavily with our other senses and we may rely on them in part for them, this sense would not disappear without them.

When it comes to machines and the potential they hold, one of the things I find intriguing to ponder is the idea what we will be able to give machines senses that we do not possess.  We cannot hear radio waves, we cannot see radiation, we cannot feel magnetic fields, or see heat, yet these are all things it is trivial to enable a machine to be able to do.  These are all things which we have been able to create sensors to measure for decades now.  This does open up an interesting question about the limit of human progression and how much further machines will be able to go ahead of us with these abilities.  If we have achieved all that we have as a species using those five basic senses and the others that we continue to debate, then what might a machine be able to achieve with these abilities? 

Further still, the range of our perception within our five basic senses is limited, taking hearing for example most humans can hear between 20 Hz and 20 KHz, some people can hear beyond those limits, and many more hear much less.  Our ability to hear diminishes with age, what advantage will be given to machines that can simply replace sensors when they are no longer efficient, or whenever more powerful sensors come along.  How different would our experience of the world be if you could widen the bandwidth of electromagnetic radiation that we perceive as the visible spectrum, if you could expand human hearing form as low as 1 Hz to highs of MHz, or GHz?  The limit of what we refer to as acoustic sound is that of human hearing, just as the limits of the spectrum of visible light within the electromagnetic spectrum is defined by what humans can see, both of these scales can go much higher than we can perceive.  Sound for example in terms of acoustic frequency can in theory enter GHz, that's just difficult to produce.  What might the world look like and sound like with perception expanded to such extreme limits?