...touching on variations of this idea. Human beings quite often assume that the things we see and taste, the most notable examples of our perception of "intangibles," are the same for everyone. Colour and taste, indeed every perception, are entirely constructed within the brain, and have only a distant relation to any putative reality.

We see what we're capable of seeing, and only that. What we see is probably different from what other people see, because there are many variants of the genes which allow colour perception, and the wavelengths they code for are centred on different frequencies. Likewise taste is a third-hand edifice based on a very few inputs, and those inputs vary between people just as colour perception does. I'm a "supertaster," and I know that there are people like me, because I can look up "Supertaster" on Wikipedia and see the exact list of foods I don't like because they taste vile to me. Yet most people persist in their belief that my aversion to brussel sprouts, for one example, is "finicky" or an affectation. So I sympathise with colour blind people, who have a similar problem, that their perceptions don''t fall in line with the majority, even though it's quite likely that the things most people "agree upon" aren't at all the same thing when seen from inside.

There's an obvious metaphor here, which I won't belabour, other than to mention that this site caters to those whose perceptions may well differ from the run-of-the-mill human being.

Religious feelings are quite possibly the same sort of "sensation."

Very young children attribute "agency" to inanimate objects, and quite naturally believe that, because the Sun feels warm and follows them about, it is a benign being who wishes them well. This is why the Sun is almost *always* shown in children's pictures as smiling. Indeed, a frowning sun, or a sun with no expression at a certain age, is a possible indication of psychic trauma or mental illness.

We ourselves can look at lumps of clay, as long as they're outfitted with something like eyes, and believe on some level that they're alive, are conversing with one another, and can be "actors" in movies.

Paint eyes on a pingpong ball and you're halfway to creating life, in our minds, as many night club acts attest. Even a handkerchief can be animated through merely treating it as it it were alive.

We humans have a strong tendency to trust each other, so if we see a man talking to a handkerchief, or to a pingpong ball with eyes, we tend to half believe him, so aren't as insulted as we should be when the handkerchief says insulting things to us.

No wonder, then, that we can look at a man up on a high altar, seemingly conversing with Ba'al, if you prefer, or Ma'at, or whatever, and believe that the conversation is real, that what may be said by "Ba'al," or "Ma'at," is both real and true.

This is a hard thing for *everyone* to understand, just as the fact that my taste, or other people's vision, is profoundly *different* to that of someone else. That *they* can see quite clearly that "Ba'al" is wicked idolatry perversely insisted upon by wilful sinners, where *their* religion, the proper worship of the Holy Ma'at, is as divinely inspired and *True* as is the benevolence of the friendly Sun who loves us all.

Puddin'

Sacks, the author of "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat", has written several books on perception and neurology. IIRC one was about a colorblind painter, and it contained other case studies of people with colorblindness.

Conversely, at least two women are tetrachromal. That is, they see additional colors in the spectrum that most of us can't.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy

The senses book by Diane Ackerman talks about smell a lot. Heck, Proust wrote one and a half million words, all started by the smell of madelines and called it "In Search of Lost Time."

I wrote a book once, about an anosmiac, someone who's lost their sense of smell, and how (among many other things) it changed their mental map of the world, disappearing the very idea of smell as a part of the sensorium so thoroughly that it was difficult to remember smelling anything, a continent of memories gone down to oblivion like Atlantis.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anosmia

Puddin'
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“Smell brings to mind... a family dinner of pot roast and sweet potatoes during a myrtle-mad August in a Midwestern town. Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines hidden under the weedy mass of years.”
--- Diane Ackerman