"Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information on it." Samuel Johnson


We discussed the difference between knowledge, false knowledge and ignorance in the last entry of the Epistream. To expand on where we left off, King Thamus was skeptical of Theuth's new invention, writing, because he felt that it provided "the conceit of wisdom, instead of real wisdom".

Essentially, anyone who takes anything that they read to be gospel (including the Gospel... and the Epistream) is furnished with this "conceit of wisdom", or false knowledge.

• A priori knowledge is independent of experience.
• A posteriori knowledge is dependent on experience.

So, we're all going to be more inquisitive. If something interests us, we'll try to find out all we can about it. If possible, we'll do this through experience too. Using our nine senses.

Wait... Nine senses?

If you thought there were only five, get with it people.

Aristotle was the first to set out the original five senses. Sight, Smell, touch, taste and hearing. We should really take anything he said with a pinch of salt though. This was a guy who thought that some baby animals appeared by magic, without parents, out of mud and water. Obviously, this was because he didn't have a microscope to observe the minuscule eggs. But, come on. He also thought that eels didn't breed, bees were created by rotting bull carcasses, flies had four legs and intelligence came from the heart rather than the head.

So, the sixth sense? No matter what you've heard, it's not for danger, or for a bargain. It's Thermoception. The top of the class will have already worked out that this is a sense of heat.

Sense seven, Equilibrioception. Again, you guessed it, this is our sense of balance.

Sense eight, Nociception. Right, a gold star for knowing this one... It's the perception of pain from the skin, joints and organs. Excluding the brain, which has no pain receptors. Regardless of where your headache feels like it's coming from.

Sense nine, Proprioception. Often referred to as "body awareness", this is the sense of where your body parts are when you can't see or touch them.

It might not even end there. Neurologists often argue the case for your sense of hunger or thirst, sense of depth, or even a sense of meaning.

And what about Synaesthesia? Which is a neurologically based phenomenon where stimulation of one sense leads to automatic, involuntary experiences of a second sense.

In color-graphemic synesthesia, letters and numbers are perceived as inherently coloured.

In ordinal linguistic personification, numbers, days of the week and months of the year seem to have their own personalities. Whereas, in spatial-sequence synesthesia, numbers, days of the week and months of the year elicit precise locations in space.

Visual motion / sound synesthesia involves hearing sounds in response to visual motion.

Pretty weird huh? Well, maybe not. Outwith our species, we have evidence of some really interesting senses.

Electroception allows sharks to sense electric fields.

Birds and insects migrate using their sense of magnetoception. The sense of magnetic fields.

There's also echolocation in bats and dolphins.

Even infra-red vision in owls.

All of these amazing, information gathering tools. And we rely on googleception?
Well, I think King Thamus would have a pretty dim view of it, don't you?