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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This is exactly why a cold coin on the carpet floor can mimic the sense of wetness to a surprised foot for a moment before realizing the truth of the situation.
Sub question:
Is water wet?
It’s actually a lie that humans can’t sense wetness. It relies on an unjustified assumption that only direct nerve input is a “sense.” That’s not how the human sensory network works.
We know what wet feels like because we know the effect that water has on our skin. We feel the transfer of heat and feel the water move on our skin. We’re wired to put that together into a repeatable experience called “wet.”
We may not have nerve endings specifically for that but why do we need to? Some nerve endings give us part of the picture, some gives others, and your brain puts it together. Which is exactly how the human sensory system works.
In other words we CAN sense wetness. Your body and brain have all the sensory input they need to put 2 and 2 together into a repeatable experience that can be defined and described between humans as “wet.” Two humans can be talking and one says “wet” and the other knows what that feels like. It’s just not all coming from 1 source which is a ridiculous and irrelevant requirement.
By the same argument we don’t now what pizza tastes like because different receptors pick up different parts of the sensory experience and the brain puts it all together rather than having a specific “pizza tasting nerve ending.” Ridiculous argument.
Interesting… Is there any experience that will trick your brain that the thing you’re touching while blindfolded is wet? Could be a fun party trick
Have you ever bottle fed an infant? The way you test whether the milk is the right temperature for them is to squirt or shake some through the bottle’s teat onto the inside of your wrist. If the milk is the correct temperature, then you won’t feel it. You’ll plainly see the milk splash your skin, but you won’t feel a thing.
This is because the milk is at blood temperature, as is the inside of your wrist. Without a temperature gradient, the milk doesn’t feel cold or hot; the spray is too light to trigger your pressure receptors, and there’s no hair on the inside of your wrist for the droplets to brush against. Therefore, because you don’t have a “wetness receptor” on your skin, you just…don’t feel it.
You will after a second, though, when it starts to cool down and evaporate.
So, are their animals that can truly sense wetness?
Is there any experiment i can perform to validate this fact by myself?
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.
We do feel all that, and then our *brain* processes that information and concludes “this feels wet.” That’s not a wetness receptor, that’s 3 simpler receptors and a central processing unit that synthesizes that information.
What we lack is a wetness-specific receptor that fires off a signal directly when it detects x level of moisture in the environment, the way, say, heat receptors fire faster or slower depending on the temperature they’re exposed to.
I think it’s like this: [https://youtu.be/4dVTRYOKUec](https://youtu.be/4dVTRYOKUec)
In the video, there are no vocals but you can hear them if you know the song. Wetness is like that. You get used to certain properties of pressure and temperature and you recognize water.
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