I’m sure I could have been clearer. 
Let’s go back a step. Do you need senses? Would you be able to survive without them? Could animals survive in the wild without their senses? If we agree that we need senses then what is it that they are used for? For example there are some people who have no sense of what is hot to the touch and what is cold. The result is that they constantly burn themselves - they don’t know when their skin is burning because they don’t feel a burning sensation. Do you think that a lack of such a sense is a hindrance or a benefit, therefore? Do we need such a sense?
Yes, we need our senses to survive in this world. 
This thread is about the issue of trusting our own senses to help us make decisions raas opposed to allowing experts to advice us despite what our senses tell us. This brought us to the issue of what senses are for.
Ok, so one function of senses is to allow us to survive in this world. For example, you need the sense of sight to detect light so that you can see that there is a gap in the traffic and that it is safe for you to cross a busy road. Now, suppose that you have been blindfolded and can’t cross the road without someone’s help. So that someone, a total stranger, stands by your side and tells you when it is, or is not, safe to cross the road. When they tell you it is safe, you cross. However, you are here putting your life in the hands of a total stranger because (temporarily) you have lost your sense of sight.
So, now to the issue of trust. Would you be happy relying totally on a stranger to tell you when it is safe to cross a busy road? Or would you prefer to trust your own senses to tell you when it is safe to cross the road?
Thus, assuming you would prefer to put your trust in your own senses, are you then perfectly happy to allow experts (total strangers) to make decisions for you that could otherwise be made for you by use of your own senses?
In other words, who would you rather put your trust in - your senses or experts?
I think both are useful because our senses can be fooled. Ultimately I trust my own judgment most. My senses relate only part of the information I need to make ‘good’ judgements. As I originally said, in spirit I’m with you - unless I’m misunderstanding something.
As a general comment about the importance of using our senses and what there is to lose if we don’t, then this reference may be of interest. It’s a book:
An Anthropologist on Mars by Oliver Sacks (specifically the chapter entitled To See and Not See).
In this chapter is described the experience of a man called Virgil, blind for most of his life, who undergoes an operation to get his sight back. Contrary to popular belief, when one gets one’s sight back after even only a few years blindness, it’s not simply a matter of ‘switching on the lights’. One has to learn to see all over again the way a baby learns to see and in an adult that is extremely difficult and very, very stressful. In other words, gaining the use of sight again is not merely gaining the act of seeing, it is learning how to interpret what we see. For example, take tribes of people who live in rainforests and have never been outside the rainforest. It has been reported that when they do emerge, never having seen for distances of more than a few feet in thick jungle, they completely fail to interpret distance and try to touch distant mountains that they perceive as being only a few feet away.
So when we allow experts to make decisions for us instead of using our own senses, our senses become disabled. Then, if we try to get them back again, we undergo similar difficulties - on a psychological level - that virgil did in a physical level. Virgil didn’t get his sight back and he became blind again. So not using one’s senses to the full has extremely serious consequences. If you don’t use them you loose them and might not get them back again.
(As an aside, that story of Virgil may be familiar to some of you as a film “At First Sight” with Val Kilmer playing a blind masseur who undergoes an operation to restore his sight. It is worth a look for a better understanding of the difficulties of restoring lost senses.)
Is losing any amount of our senses an impediment of any sort. What about someone who is deathly afraid of the dark and one day becomes blind? Adaptation to their situtation will certainly be the prescription of the day. The other senses will take up the slack and the pyschological problem concerning the dark will be made to be dealt with. While I would like to keep and possibly enhance the senses I have, maybe we shouldn’t put so much store in them?
I’m not quite sure about what you mean when you say we shouldn’t put so much store on our senses. Could you please clarify?
Tobe, our senses can be fooled. Don’t you think?
What I mean is maybe we shouldn’t put our senses on such a high pedestal. If we are higher reasoning beings, we should be able overcome sensory deprivation.
Yes, our senses can be fooled when they are not working properly or have become disabled through lack of use. Advertisers rely on fooling our senses, for example, as do experts.
To learn to use one’s senses properly, one must learn to differentiate ‘signal’ from ‘noise’. It’s a bit like tuning in a radio programme (analogue or digital, I suppose). On either side of the desired frequency one hears some of the radio programme but lots of interference. The further away from the desired frequency the less ‘signal’ and the more ‘noise’. Too far away and it’s only noise or even a totally different signal from the one we are searching for. When tuned correctly we get a strong signal and very little, if any, noise. That is the ideal.
So, speaking again from personal experience, I have learned how to ‘tune’ my senses. Here’s a practical example of what I mean when I talk about using my senses and trusting them:
I have had many a boss at work who has told me that he has my best interests at heart, that I can trust him, that he will solve the problem I have presented him with, when every sense in my body screams out that this boss is a sheep in wolf’s clothing. If I then challenge this boss in any official way, it is the words spoken or written that matter and all that my senses have been telling me is disregarded. There might even be accusations of defamation if I am to tell the truth about what I sense. So my senses are working in a very reliable way, they reveal the truth about a person’s intentions or motives, they reveal how authentic a person is being, but not based on what they say, based on what my senses tell me is happening. But my senses are not allowed in today’s world to be used as ‘evidence’ in any way whatsoever. They are totally disallowed, even though they tell the truth - in fact, because they tell the truth!
Now in such situations one’s senses can be fooled - but only if we can’t use them properly and can’t distinguish signal from noise. When one has learned to distinguish signal from noise, then one’s senses such as I describe above, are very reliable. However, as I suggested there are a lot of vested interests out there that don’t want us to use our senses, for what our senses reveal can be very inconvenient to those vested interests, as in the case of those bosses I have encountered!
One of the worst things that creates ‘noise’ and stops us from getting a clear sense-signal is our emotions. One way of getting a stronger sense-signal is to develop a degree of emotional detachment. Then one experiences situations in a more detached and calm manner and that optimises sense-signal strength.
(I might add that one of the experiences that taught me to use my senses was the travelling I did in the 70s and 80s. I back-packed and hitch-hiked to many remote out of the way countries where there were few, if any tourists. One learned how to ‘think on one’s feet’, that’s for sure. I learned to trust my gut-reaction to the people I met. I honed my signal detection skills in those days. I learned to tell the difference between a person who was authentic and a person who was not authentic. I learned to identify the conmen in other words. As a teacher, I see more and more children growing up who have never been allowed to get the experience to tell whether a person is authentic or not. These children are, as a result, easily fooled and prey to any conman who comes along. That’s the consequence of failing to use our senses.)
Sounds great Tobermory! 
I still wouldn’t put 100% faith in my senses though.
No. I wouldn’t expect you to believe me any more than I think you should believe advice offered from anybody.
In my experience, experience is the only teacher. When I have had my awareness raised over some issue, I often find that I get experiences which raise that awareness further until I get to a situation where personal experience either backs up a theory or causes me to reject the theory. It may be, then, that over the next few months you start to get experience of what I suggest is true about the senses, and you then use those experience to decide for yourself whether what I claim is true or not.
Well, I’d answer that by saying that ‘reason’ is a purely intellectual pursuit. Reason is about thinking things out whereas our senses are for interacting with our world. In the play Hamlet, Hamlet got so caught up in reason that it disabled him from coming to decisions easily. Like suppose you were in a situation where a child was drowning in a lake. You see the child and want to rescue it. Your senses will tell you immediately whether or not it is safe/feasible for you to rescue the child whereas to sit and reason it out would probably result in the death of the child before you could reach a decision.
So I suggest there is a big difference between reason and the senses and using reason cannot compensate for the loss of senses.
But you are forgetting that reasoning is what processes what our senses pick up tells us how to deal with those inputs.
Well, in that case, I suggest your statement implies that animals are capable of reason too. Do you suppose that animals use reason to process what their senses pick up?
I would say yes in a rudimentary level. Their instincts are honed more than their deductive abilitites. Our instincts are honed too, but animals lean toward their survival.
I would say yes in a rudimentary level. Their instincts are honed more than their deductive abilitites. Our instincts are honed too, but animals lean toward their survival.
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When you talk of animals and to a greater extent humans using reason, what exactly do you mean by ‘reason’'?
However, on the assumption that you mean simple logic - please correct me if I am wrong - science uses maths to process data. Maths is the most advanced reasoning process we have at our disposal, in fact. But, even mathematicians have proved their own limitations in Godel’s theorem: There exist truths in maths which cannot be proved.
In simple terms, this is saying that there are truths out there inaccessible to logic and reason. Therefore we obviously need something more sophisticated - that something is our senses.
At my philosophical site I have, I had put this statement/question out describing my views on reason:
"What is reasoning? Is it a comparison of variables which results in the best decision? I would argue this to be a close definition of it. The human mind doesn’t just work with a series of true/false, on/off recognitions. It also weighs ethical and moral considerations. Do synaptic impulses converge with spirtual endowments to form epistemological humanism? Reasoning affects mathmatical conclusions, matters of the ‘heart’, common sense issues, all manner of vices and conscience.
Our brain encompasses neural recptors that control the autonomic regions in our bodies. These receptors also flow to our vision, sense of smell, taste, hearing and touch. These can work in various combinations or all together to get processed and activate reasoning abilities that formulates understanding of our environment. So, does emotion fit in with reasoning, or does it cause knee jerk responses which makes you lose footholds on reality.
Let’s look at emotions a littler closer. Are we the only species that recognizes it? Knows of its weaknesses and attributes? Can it weave itself into the fabric of reasoning to make a useful and beneficial appendage for mankind? Perhaps it is what sets us apart as a species that will draw us to a higher plane of thought. It must infuse compassion is us all. Sets up guidelines for moral and ethical behavior."