The final sense: touch.
I’m not sure what to say about touch because it overlaps with all the other senses.
For things like hot and cold, it’s very probabilistic, like smell. You can tell when you’re getting hotter and colder
But that’s just it in a passive sense. You can also actively touch things by picking them up. Then it’s more like taste.
Given time, you could even build up a spatial picture of somewhere by moving round and feeling everything.
Touch seems to be like a low-resolution, very immediate version of everything I’ve talked about so far.
And I think “very immediate” is what makes touch and feeling different. Apart from temperature, touch is all about the surface of the body. It’s not very good as a look-ahead sense. You don’t know what’s there until you’re there. If you’ve felt it, you’re in trouble already.
Aside from the ability feeling has to orient, or focus towards something, by grabbing it, aside from that, the only ability is to flinch or recoil. If something’s hot, you flinch away.
It’s a bit rubbish really. I heard of a frog in the Himalayas, up towards Tibet. It’s cold there and there’s almost no food. It’s all the frog can do to keep alive. But a very small part of its energy it stores in its back legs, and that’s its only defence. If it gets attacked and it can’t get away, it releases all that energy at once and leaps 6 feet in the air. If that doesn’t work then it’s screwed, because it can’t jump again until it has stored up enough energy again.
That’s a bit like touch, and flinching. It’s rubbish.
I think this is the reason I was having trouble thinking of a next generation web browser feature to go with touch. It’s because we already have touch.
That’s what browsers do right now: they take our body directly to the place, the page, and we feel it straight-away.
But that’s all: using a web browser today is like stumbling around in a dark building with bare electric wires hanging out of the walls. If something’s wrong, we’re in trouble.