Perception and nerve transmission

YOU can help expand it. Guests are encouraged to do so primarily by adding sections, not by editing the existing ones. More ideas, and some possible material are on the related discussion page

The Allegory of the Five Senses, by Simon de Vos (1640) - Also gives a good idea of what our hypothetical homunculus or yourself-in-yourself has to deal with every day, confronted with a variety of sensory inputs

In other words, perceiving the touch and sight of an event is like receiving an email and a postcard that were sent simultaneously. How could the email and the 'snail mail' arrive at the same time? In physiology, they do.¹

With what we know of the complexity of the simplest actions or thought processes in daily lives, knowing the speed of nerve impulses, we can already say that it is impossible to take synaptic transmission, the interaction of neurons between each other through simple chemical messengers (neurotransmitters), as the fundamental mode of communication in the brain: reading each of these words would take you seconds or minutes.²

Walking, and looking at oneself walking, is one of those simple actions that only some neuroscientists and philosophers may focus on to solve some esoteric logical problem and etch new theories. But the fact is that, in general, they are not so good at it. Consider the common, but fiercely disingenuous, hypothesis that some problem-solvers have come up with: nerve transmission is necessary to perception; different senses transmit information at different speeds; ergo, some part of ourselves make us believe that the sensations are simultaneous! It seems that René Descartes' little genius is back, this time to fool us into ignoring that when our foot hits the ground, we first see it, and then feel it; to make us believe that our world is a single one, when in fact it is nothing more than a variety of streams of information entering our various different physicochemical channels.

Of course, no philosopher or neuroscientist, has mapped, ontologically or neurophysiologically, this Matrix-like phantasy.

Society continues to evolve under the neurochemical, synaptic, paradigm. Happiness, love, genius (and their counterparts, depression, indifference and conformism) remain molecular events, or at best, sociologically determined molecular events.

What is implied, in truth, in this ancient (in Science time) riddle?

That, when you see and feel your feet touching the ground, or your hand clicking the mouse, your senses only fullfil a secondary role, like as many court ushers, after the 'real' action occurred. Or/and, perhaps, that information can travel, like it appears to do in the quantum realm, backwards in time?³