Originally posted by debbiejo
It wouldn't be like Helen Keller. There would be no sensation at all. It may become like a dream state for these type of people.
Right, but something would still be happening. All sensation is is neural synapses firing in the brain, and this wouldn't stop completely just from lack of outside stimuli. It would limit the brain's funtioning severely but wouldn't halt it entirely, simply because certain functions need to continue to happen if the person is to remain alive (which he is in this scenario).
So we have no way of knowing what the experience would be like....but there would be experience. It's just a biological inevitability.
Originally posted by debbiejoNot only would it be interesting to know what dream content would be (after all, most if not all of what we dream reflects sensory experience), but how would one, in this instance, even differentiate between a dream and waking state (assuming this person still had biorhythms of sleepfulness and wakefulness, which, offhand, I think he would)?
It may become like a dream state for these type of people.
Originally posted by The Black Ghost
Would they even know they had no senses? Would it be like if you were asleep, just all the time and with no dreams...meaning, would they basically be in a coma without even knowing it?
Yes, but in this case, you would have no connection to the real world...nothing. Except direction, knowing the feeling of being upside down or not...even if you didn't know what the feeling meant. Which brings up the question: why isnt our sense of up/down a sixth sense? Its practically a different sense from all the others.
My assumption is, without contact with the world, there would be nothing to make the brain feel much of anything. Chemicals/hormones could really not be triggered for anything, because they are not defined to any specific thing. For example--if you lived in a cave, in the dark all your life, you would never feel the sensation of fear because it was dark. But if you lived in the light, like humans, and then go into a dark place for the first time, we have something to compare it to, therefore we see it as an "unknown" and very different from what we know. That "unknown" is what causes fear in that situation. But to someone who has never experienced anything but the virtual nothingness that they live in, they would probably be emotionless and mostly thoughtless...for as long as they lived.
TIme would probably be nonexistant after a while, the brain would shut down and just give up on your consciousness, so you would be in an eternal coma/dreamlike state. You could not dream though, so, if you know anything about sleeping without dreaming, you know that you basically just fall asleep and wake up feeling different. No sense of time or place while your dreaming.
Now if this person had ever previously had their senses...that would be a different story. It would be the ultimate torture...nothingness.
Originally posted by leonheartmm
no means no though. that includes the fealing of being upside down.
actually, not exactly. This is what you said was removed from people:
Originally posted by leonheartmm
and yet if sumhow, u lost copletely, the ability to touch, see, hear, smell and taste?
The sense of being upright or whatever comes from small cavities of fluid in our brain. Within these cavities, there are receptors that work almost identically to the way the air bubble in a level works. As we tilt our head, the fluid moves, and we perceive ourselves as being prone.
However, if we never had sensory input from the other senses, it is entirely unlikely that we would understand the stimulation from the receptors in the cavities relates to our body's position in the universe.
The absolute answer to your question is that it depends on what physical structures formed during development and whether or not the lack of sensation was from conception or learned later in life. It is also highly dependent on what causes the lack of sensation, and this would be particular to each sense. For instance, losing the V1 of the visual cortex would be much different from losing the eyes, much like losing your somatosensory cortex would be far different from not having any tactile receptors in your skin. Give a specific situation with a specific injury or deficiency and it would be way easier to talk about. For instance, if from birth a child was missing eyes, ears, tactile receptors, a nose and tongue (ie, the physical receptors are gone) the brain would just never develop the areas responsible for that, and likely the only neurons that would survive into adolescence would be those in the brain stem that control autonomic processes. However, if instead of the physical receptors being gone, it was something like the thalmus or the primary sensory cortices being damaged, much of the brain would still physically develop, though still not nearly as much as normal, and much of it would just be useless matter.
However, it seems you are more interested in the philosophical "consciousness" question, which I'm not getting into, simply because it confuses a fairly straightforward answer.