From my understanding, we’re able to feel the temperature, texture and pressure of water. And if we’re able to feel all that, what more else is there? What defines wetness and what should it feel like?
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Sometimes when we ask questions, we shouldn’t look for the answer, but we should actually look at the question. You’re right, we don’t ‘feel’ wetness, we feel the heat leaving our body as the water evaporates. We feel the pressure of droplets striking our skin, and we feel less texture when things are wet because the water gets between our skin and other surfaces, creating a sensation of surfaces being slippery. We’ve filled in the gaps to call this collection of experiences “wet”.
But what you might not know, is that sometimes your brain lies. Sometimes when we touch something very cold, we, for a moment, feel like we touched something very hot. Sometimes when we touch something cold and slippery, we misunderstand the feelings we’ve got, and it feels wet instead.
So back to your question: What do you mean by “wetness”? Is it a property that water carries with it, or is it an experience that you have learned, and that you now carry with you?
Your question also talks about receptors and senses there. What if the sensation and the receptor are linked things, but the feeling is a reaction to that sense? Does this mean that the feeling and the sense are the same, or are they different? You’ve already noticed that the part of you that does the “sensing” and the part of you that does the “feeling” are separate pieces of the same you. What if you lost those senses, does that mean you can’t “feel” anymore? Are you no longer “you”? If “You” live on, and you can still feel, that means your senses aren’t you. They just help “you” sense. People who have lost body parts have reported phantom pains in the missing limb, so we already know that sensation and stimulus are different things, or to put it another say, sensing and feeling are different things.
When you put all of these questions and ideas together, you are kind of forced to conclude that “wet” isn’t a property of water. It’s just a sensation you have named and associated with water as though it were something intrinsic to water, even though it’s possible to get that same sensation in other ways.
> And if we’re able to feel all that, what more else is there?
We might have to make an analogy for this part. Let’s talk about sight. Human beings can see a very limited amount of light. We know of animals that can see much more than we can, because they have evolved special eyes that react to much more of the light spectrum. Our senses produce experiences that are useful for us within our environment. Human beings have evolved partly by chance, and partly by fitness to interact with certain parts of their environment in a way that is relevant to keeping us safe.
The universe, and what’s going on around you is far more complex than what our senses can tell us about. The answer to this question is: We’re missing out on quite a lot in terms of the information we could use as sensory input. But because we don’t have access to the outside world, except through our senses, we aren’t really missing anything. We’re getting everything our body is telling us about. What we experience is just a snapshot of what’s going on around us tailored to our bodies and brains. We aren’t really experiencing it directly, we’re experiencing messages from specialized parts of our body, which are the parts of us that are exposed directly to the world around us. This is why our experiences, and our feelings are the most real thing we have, but they are also something we should be careful about imposing on the outside world, because outside of ourselves, like we did with the “property of wetness” idea we just talked about. When we try to think of the outside world only in terms of what we sense, we’re bound to introduce some ideas that aren’t really that useful to understanding that space. Even though those ideas are useful to our experience of that space, doesn’t mean those ideas are also part of that space.
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