What are the possibilities for "senses" which can possibly exist in our Universe?

Question

I am working on a conlang, and although people say it's an impossible task, I want to try and make it for a fantasy civilization able to travel between galaxies and stars. You never know what you are going to encounter.

In doing so, I am debating if words like "sweet" and "sour" (taste), or "stink" (smell), or even "red" and "yellow" would be reusable concepts in arbitrary civilizations. I think words like "rough" and "smooth" (touch) are reusable, because they are about the structure of matter. Colors are a small slice of a seemingly random part of a continuous spectrum of wavelengths (some bees can see ultraviolet for example). The taste/smell are basically receptors for molecules, but the experience of sweet I don't know if it's reusable across arbitrary mechanical/conscious structures. Maybe more of a philosophical question, but I thought it was better to ask the WorldBuilding community.

Words like "fear" and "hope" I think are generic, because anything with feeling would have to experience these I think. Maybe not though. But then some sharks for example have an extra "electric" sense, which I don't obviously have, so there are possibly senses for which we can't imagine. We also have sound sense, which is based on pressure changes in space/matter, but hearing the note range is just a small slice of the possibilities, but I think sound is a reusable sense. There is also motion sense (like spinning around).

It's just taste and sight which seem not that necessarily reusable. And then what could possibly be other senses. Is there any way to sort of figure this out, imagine the possibilities? Wondering if I should have words for taste/smell because they are such a narrow arbitrary slice of experience (out of all the molecules, just a handful are sweet, out of all of the millions of molecules, just a handful smell like roses). What other things could be smelled? What other senses other than smell and sight could be experienced?

Trying to gain inspiration for my fantasy world.

Answer 1

"And then what could possibly be other senses. Is there any way to sort of figure this out, imagine the possibilities?"

Senses are, well, used to sense things. Their position, motion, nature and relationships.

To sense position of objects you could have echolocation, as well as an electric sense. You could be able to sense the local magnetic field (there have been experiments to give humans a sort of magnetic sense; and according to some, this "sense" is indeed decoded and introjected by the brain after a while, so that you stop being aware of how you do it and just "experience" the new knowledge. This particular flexibility of the brain has been observed in other contexts, like artificial vision).

Motion, orientation, and composition you could also gather by sensing the polarization of the light. Some animals do (famously the mantis shrimp, that also has fourteen to sixteen different photoceptors to humans' three; but apparently the ordinary bees can do this too, and use it to orient with respect to the Sun like little Vikings).

Then there are weirder senses, born of the integration of information from more down-to-earth sensoria. Changes in sounds pattern are translated by most human brains as if they were the savannah sounds of our heritage, and used to convey a sense of danger or closeness of an apex predator (this is also thought to be the mechanism behind the "sense of being observed" - not unexpectedly, the senses developed to survive in the 400.000 BC veldt tend to malfunction in 2022 CE cities). Some people can directly perceive specific relations between objects, numbers, sounds. Others can sense when they're being lied to. Obviously, a whole civilization sharing even a rough knowledge of someone else's inner state could be radically different from ours (think Brian W. Aldiss's The Primal Urge). In her Foreigner series, C. J. Cherryh introduces the atevi, an alien race that has a more innate grasp of arithmetics than humans - to the point that some combinations of numbers are offensive or unpleasant to them. In Babel-17, Samuel Delany explains how a different language may lead to a different way of thinking and interpreting reality and its problems (this is a form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, see also Mud/Aurora by D. D. Storm), to the point that a person may be actually be, in practice, endowed with an extra "sense".

Answer 2

Look at physics - everything they can measure in every possible way/combination can be a sense.

You forgot hot cold, electromagnetic stuff(some birds), quantum mechanics stuff also can be measured observed have sensors.

Your biggest problem is that you try to describe humans, it general problem, for multiple reasons when aliens are just humans in a different wrapping, and one of the reasons are the purpose of writing, the reader, a human understands things in the bit which they know and when bits are of a different system it very hard for them to do so.

Considering your question and examples I would not recomend that you go this creation route or expect some good breaktrougths, focus on language it challengin enough by itself. And in general, scify does not have that many successeful examples when ppl did get some good results in that direction of creating creatures with extended or different world view pictures based on their all including senses.

More or less sucesseful examples were a result of their professional knowledge (like ehopraxia) or were done in not a descriptive form but in a form of thinking what it is what it can be what is the difference like solaris as an example, or asimov robots(also sort of aliens). Mm there were also few others, but I can't remember their author names and titles of their works.

Others of a more or less sucesseful kind they were pictures without much of explanations or much knowledge about their nature, for reasons authors were not that much capable of to provide it and when they did try to do so it was not necessarly as good as the initial idea itself, as initial picture - like borgs of startrek, or aliens or predators.

There is an asian stuf which is less known maybe or indian myths or stuff which also did try to expand senses like different cultivators(asian china stuff), which in a sense also are aliens which senses expanding beyond typical, or indian myths of gods and super creatures like Mahabharata stories. (Btw Roger Zelazny had a good one transition on human cognition in a setting of indian gods, do not recall the title).

• Babel-17, Samuel Delany which mention in @LSerni is one of those I tried to remember, it a great stuf, if you haven't read it then it almost obligatory to read.

• Whole buddism in a sense is actually about new words and concepts of senses if you looking for some inspirations, lol.

If you want to expand/focus on that beyond human aspect - you have what it takes, or not and no amount of explanation helps you. Because if you want to see alien life or senses or wolrd view which is different - one does not need aliens, look around the life we have there, there are tons of examples of creatures with differences like with 12 types of rodopsing not like 3 we have, or who see ligth polarisations, or who navigate by stars(some insects), or who have 40 definitions for snow(some homosapiens), or who call everyone a fish(homosapiens again) etc.

Things which outside our scope are all around us, or close to us in different societies, so as well in the people who have different knowledge and who look at things differently(in different countries or in the same). So if you need an inspiration, then do not ask for it, but just look around.

If you like to focus on linguistic aspects, then focus on it and linguisic materials, like which languages there are (there are many, some are funny as like whistle language, but there are more) enough of differences which can provide certain inspirations as well because they are reflection of worldview of those who used them, especially languages of small nations and such. I mean there are plenty of materials here to be inspiered with.

I personaly recomend, for expansion and forming a base for inspirations to read random antropology stuf, a little of everything, maybe with some more focus (later) on their linguisitic aspects. When you look at thing from a perspective of modent history of past 60million years, it really puts a lot of things in a different perspective of what can or can not be, what is fundamentally important and what is just recent stuff, and what it means to develop a language in a way.

Evolution in general and evolution simulations of your liking also can be on that recomenndation list for to form a base for thinking of what can or can not be, also forming some empirica rules and understanding how things develop.

In sense of those basic stuf, antropology and evolition, help see things around.

Your uncertainty about sour and sweet it looks funny, sweet is sweet because we run on the stuf, and if it would be the sour we run on it would be sweet. Sour and sweet are not objective categories, they are empirical ones while fear(run) or figth are fundamental ones for evolved creature, which did evolve in a survivial game.

Hope may or may not be a fundamental things for intelligent life(for a sufficiently sofisticated one), as hope it is a part of a fantasy and believe system/corpus, which is part of a game intellegent creatures do play at some point and which trains develops their brains and such. But hope not necessarly has to be as a direct concept and it can be split in different set of concepts, it is a result, a mental bit of this specific implementation for some nations but is not the only way to describe anticipation, and it may not be required, or can be replaced by "I expect probability 0-100%, or uncertain probability"(or something like that).

Try google "neural networks animal language" there are some interesting links, but beside that I have seen(recent news) some project which wants to achieve some level of translation of animal "language" - it quite interesting to think about challenges they will face on level of mismatching concepts.

Idk man, maybe some will have a better inspiring stuff or tips, but for me it looks like - if you ask for a price of it, you do not have enough money.