My Games

Thursday, September 15, 2022

Weird Senses

Shoutout to SemiurgeBugbear Slug, and Harris for suggestions! Several of these are my interpretations of some of their suggestions, we had a lot of intersecting ideas, there's way more one could do with this concept than is fully explored here for sure. They had several more suggestions that I didn't think fit with what I was doing here, but were still really cool in their own right, so hopefully they will do their own versions of this too. Here I focus more on the senses per se than the sense organs, but they had great suggestions that had more to do with form and in a few cases I couldn't resist, but another table could lean more so into that.

As with Weird & Non-Violent Superpowers, I had intended to write 50, but coincidentally ran out of steam again at 21, so maybe I'll just start making that a thing.

  1. Broadband Electromagnetic Vision: Micro, radio, infrared, ultraviolet, etc.
  2. Anti-Pattern Awareness: Acute awareness of irregular processes.
  3. Subjective Time Differential: Intuit the difference in the relative experience of time between two or more individuals such as due to traumatic stress, fun, boredom, etc.
  4. Inflammasome: High-resolution conscious awareness of inflammasomes, microbiomes, pathogens, and DAMPs.
  5. Infra/Ultra-Sonic Hearing: Hear low- or high-frequency soundwaves.
  6. Empathy: Advanced awareness of emotional states.
  7. Hyperspatiality: Perceive higher dimensions.
  8. Multiversity: Awareness of other selves across the multiverse.
  9. Simulation: Maintain full conscious awareness of one or potentially more imagined spaces, or simulations, and mentally move through and perceive them as if real.
  10. Mutagenic Digestion: A gooey pouch-like organ. When a sufficient mass of sensory organ of another species is placed inside and digested, it temporarily takes on that organ's form and function.
  11. Will: Awareness of the will to live of those in the vicinity.
  12. Reflection Tracing: Perceive the source of a reflected signal like light or sound, or anything along its path.
  13. Smooth Time: Experience the flow of time not as single moments, but as the rolling average of ~6s of normal time, like lotion moisturizing consciousness indulgently.
  14. Infomatica: Perception of the coalescence or collapse of information i.e. enthalpy and entropy, in all its forms.
  15. Beyond the Cave Awareness: Awareness of the Platonic Form, Prototype, or most Exemplar of any thing.
  16. Genopathic Chemoception: Chemocept the genetic or evolutionary history of organisms via something like taste.
  17. Cherubic Pressure: Sense love density as a kind of pressure. Passion and lust acute like pain, attachment and contentment firm yet dull, like a squeeze on the shoulder.
  18. Econometric Temperature: Sense the exchange of money and goods or services like wispy phosphenes in the periphery and broad market trends like storms and bolts of lightning.
  19. Super-self Awareness: Recognition of the self as part of one or more super organisms, the ability to mentally graph the network like a map, and sense one's place in the map, like if a cell in your body could in part commune with you.
  20. Morpho-Lucidity: Perceive nearby dreams as if they were real (be careful not to lose track of what's real and what's a dream...).
  21. Anthropocene: Awareness of social constructs, legalism, taboos, and other epiphenomena of human civilization; like seeing the source code of the matrix or the fine print of a contract or the view from a CEO's corner office on the top floor of a skyscraper.

4 comments:

  1. This sparks the imagination, both in terms of how these senses would be instantiated in play and in terms of what other weird senses there might be or what metaphors we might use to help us understand them. Nicely done!

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    1. Thanks! Ya I feel like I'm only touching the surface here, I imagine this stream of consciousness will percolate for a while but I think I'm on to some new directions for how I'm thinking about certain things, but we'll see...

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  2. Some really cool stuff! I think Monk has Anti-pattern Awareness. That's like an extreme but useful form of OCD

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    1. Ya you could sort of map anti-pattern awareness to something like wisdom or spirituality. Especially to the extent that it sort of implies the converse, that they are hyper-aware of patterns. I intentionally framed it as anti-pattern awareness rather than some kind of super pattern recognition, because at least with humans that leads to a ROC Curve with high False Positivity which is largely at the root of superstitiousness and ritualism, and so I wanted to explore a kind of "pattern recognition" that is mechanistically different (albeit in an intentionally underdefined way because I have no idea what that would actually entail offhand or if it would even be possible...)

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