Does food actually has taste? Or is it just our brains releasing chemicals that tells us that it has “taste”?
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the way that your nerves work is by the movement of chemicals inside and out of membranes allowing the signals to propagate down nerve channels. so if there were no chemicals moving around in your brain all stimuli and all thoughts would stop. everything you experience as a conscious being is converted into signals by the sense organs and sent to the brain as data. that data is indistinguishable between real and faked data. If for instance you had some kind of system bonded to any of your nerves that knew the codes well enough it could pump signals into your brain to make you think anything it wanted was happening. If it knew the nerves well enough it could send a signal down the correct nerve path that tells your brain you are on fire. Your brain would have no way to know that your flesh wasn’t literally on fire and it would hurt. It could also, if again connected to the correct pathways send signals into your brain that you were hearing music even when no music was hitting your eyes and again your brain would not be able to tell that it was fake music.
In fact, there is no way for you to know definitively that you are not a brain floating in a jar hooked up to a bunch of wires that are providing the illusion of an external world. Nothing that you can do can show one way or the other.
This is actually quite philosophical. You actually bring up an interesting thought experiment about the “If a tree falls in a forest”, but instead we ask, “If there is food but no one is around to taste it, does it have taste?” Food has chemical compounds that can stimulate taste receptors, but taste perception is subjective and depends on brain processing. In this sense, food inherently has taste properties, but the experience of taste only exists when someone consumes and perceives it.
This is actually quite philosophical. You actually bring up an interesting thought experiment about the “If a tree falls in a forest”, but instead we ask, “If there is food but no one is around to taste it, does it have taste?” Food has chemical compounds that can stimulate taste receptors, but taste perception is subjective and depends on brain processing. In this sense, food inherently has taste properties, but the experience of taste only exists when someone consumes and perceives it.
is a tree falls in a forest with nobody around to hear it, does it make a sound? It depends if you define sound as the movement of pressure waves or as the sensation that a person has when those pressure waves are detected by their ears.
Same thing with your question, it depends how you define taste.
This is actually quite philosophical. You actually bring up an interesting thought experiment about the “If a tree falls in a forest”, but instead we ask, “If there is food but no one is around to taste it, does it have taste?” Food has chemical compounds that can stimulate taste receptors, but taste perception is subjective and depends on brain processing. In this sense, food inherently has taste properties, but the experience of taste only exists when someone consumes and perceives it.
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