“Blind golfer offered to play me a round for $100/hole. He had two rules. We play his home course and we tee off at midnight.”
A new sense?
That's unheard of. We can map any signal to an existing sense, but not create a new sense/sensation.
That would be one of the most relevant developments in human history and a gigantic step towards cracking the whole qualia problem.
I read a more interesting takeaway, perhaps: that we can — and do — develop new "senses" for any given signal we can perceive. A possibly-shoddy example of this is what social media does to us: the social networks provided everyone with a novel social sense, and indeed everyone who uses social networks perceive and attenuate to that sense in different ways.
This has practical implications: given that we don't have infinite cognitive capacity or even much moment-to-moment bandwidth, we should be careful about which of these digital senses have our attention.
There're obvious links here to "augcog" (augmented cognition; [1]), but also I feel like Ackoff's five assumptions about "management misinformation systems" are relevant somehow[2].
Interesting to think about!
[1]: Especially DARPA's work and similar — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_cognition#DARPA's_Au... [2]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2628680
Please let me know if someone has a mirror/alternate link.