Which of the Five senses is the most important?
Which do you think is the first and foremost of the five senses?
Vote first and then explain the reasoning behind your choice.
Important information about the specific sense that is unquestionably the most vital, and which will tell you more about human behavior than you might previously have been aware of, will be devulged.
More than 20 views, 2 anonymous votes with no rationale offered - on something as fundamental as having a basic understanding of your own senses!!
After being told how wrong I am about my grasp of human nature on a number of my other threads, what can be assumed from this lack of interest - other than intellectuals too insecure to put their own subjective opinion on the line without a scientific treatice on the subject to back them up? 
I voted on touch:
Without Sight, you could still find your way around.
Without Hearing you could still feel sign language. (Helen Keller)
Taste isn’t much of a big deal.
Smell is an extension of taste.
touch is the closest in the non-exhaustive list of senses that you put up but I think there are much more critical senses to our survival than any of those…
for example, chemoreceptors and baroreceptors that monitor and control our blood pressure and blood chemistry. Proprioceptors which monitor and control our muscle positions and movements.
I would say that those three senses are more important than any of the list items. Although, like I said, I chose the best answer from the poll question.
cheers,
gemty
smell is the most important
you can’t see the shit around the corner
-Imp
i chose hearing. when you take hearing out of the equation, you take out people and music. i don’t care if i would be able to feel sign language/braile… it simply would not be the same.
Before I can vote, I need you to explain what you mean by this question.
if you lose one or two of your senses you can still do well. Taste is just a form of smelling, sight is a form of touching, hearing is a form of sight. The meld around the edges of each other.
You left a sense out or maybe two. Instinct is one sense that is highly protective. We use it like the others. Most call it guessing, hunches, or gut reactions. Without instinct it would be hard to make it through a day especially if your day gets hectic.
I contend that love is a sense also but, that is being debated or defined on other threads. So moot point here.
But, instinct is the foremost of our senses It keeps us from danger and possible death. It causes us to react and act in defense. It uses the other senses to help with input and it formulates a reaction or action but, the input is not needed to act or react. At least not all the time.
I am going to choose hearing.
It is the last one to go to sleep and the first one to wake up.
When we go to sleep, taste and smell are the first ones to retire then you close your eyes. Touch, well, some toss and turn in bed, maybe sheets are wrinkled, your sleep clothes are making you uncomfortable, the bed is lumpy, your partner is restless, etc. Then you hear many things, even you can hear silence. Then finally, the boss of your senses tells your hearing to go to sleep. But it is the first one to wake up to your bed alarm sound, or any light sound, then everything else wake up at the same time, eyes opened, feel the taste in your mouth, smell your environment, or feel colness or warmness.
There is one primal sense that is shared by all animals. It informs the base of the brain’s intelligence gathering complex and therefore supercedes all the other centers.
If all the above were so, then every sense would register in the same neuro recepters in the brain. This is not so.
As a practicing metaphysician I subjectively agree with with the underlying importance of extra-sensory perception - which in my view constitutes an instantaneous permutation (intuitive insight) of the in-coming intelligence regisitered and transmitted by any two or more of the physical senses. This immediate impression is flash-filtered through the memory banks and constitutes the “hunch” that most lower-order animals react to instinctively.
But this question is limited to exterior information that is transmitted to the brain for analysis via the physical senses.
Love, as you say, is another matter which dictates everything. 
Are you asking us to identify, in our opinions, what this primal sense is? Because quite honestly, I’m not even convinced there is one.
No, that would not be extrasensory perception; that would be intuitive processing of sensory data and so extra-logical or extra-conscious, but not extra-sensory.
There are experimental data that seem to indicate perception without any relevant sensory data at all. If these data are valid (an argument I won’t go into here), they cannot be explained in terms of extra-logical or extra-conscious sensory processing, but are genuinely extra-sensory.
Magnet,
I have to disagree with you but, if you just want on of the five as first, I would have to say none. You can live well and survive without out each. many people around the world prove that everyday. I am not particularly attached to any sense.
Hmm, although the world would be better off if more people used their common sense. 
Megnet Man: I said sight, but I feel that they are all pretty much equally important in evolution. I mean if you can’t see you could walk off a cliff, if you can’t touch you can’t hold things in your mouth or anywhere, if you can’t smell or taste you don’t know what’s poisonous, if you can’t hear you don’t know whether a predator is sneaking up on you.
The majority (61% so far) list sight as the most important sense. The rest of your opinions are spread across the other four senses. So we can agree that there is a serious degree of confusion among us regarding our awarness of the most important functions that determine human behavior.
Since I believe that we can all arrive at a consensus, and via that agreemen, perhaps make a valuable contribution towards understanding the fundamental motivations behind human behavior, I am hopeful that you are serious enough about the problem to stay with this argument and help to try and clear up the confusion.
The bad news behind this confusion is that nobody has as yet made full use of their deductive skills to arrive unerringly at the root of this or any other puzzle. And the reason why you are not accessing this innate genius is because you have been trained not to - via a rote-learning system that asks you to mainly memorise thousands of logical-sounding conclusions that were deduced by earlier detectives and which does not make you search for the answers yourself. Thus the magic of life has been robbed from you by revealing the trick behind it. Luckily the trick behind the root of the senses remains hidden and you are now asked to find it yourself.
The good news is that underlying the twelve and more years of classroom brain-washing that the state compelled you to undergo, lies thousands of generations of practically imprinted pre-literate hunting and farming genes, which can be willfully accessed by digging a little deeper into your vast wealth of common sense - which is the motivation behind posting this particular thread in the first place. If you combine that with the research skills you learned via text book indoctrination, your innate genius for self-survival will produce the correct answer.
(I cannot even begin to describe the depth of anger I experienced when (via a massive dose of LSD) I broke through the classroom indoctrination and accessed my native genius - hence the sub-conscious feeling why so many of us have an intuitive sense of a sinsister conspiracy in continuous operation.)
Since I do not believe that sight is the most signficant sense leading to mankind’s super-conscious state of awareness, I would like to demonstrate how I deduced this via a process of elimination - using my base of common sense mixed with scientific learning and see if you agree.
But first I would like to see, via a full lay-out of a more extended process of deduction, (whether you think sight is the most important or not), that clearly shows how you go about logically trying to illiminate it.
I will give you a clue on how I began. Darwin’s original comments about the “absurdity of the eye” aside, I started by trying to understand and appreciate the biological development and complexity of the eye and how the emergeance of sight gradually lifted us to our present supreme position of technological capabilities and awareness on the planet - and then asked myself which of the four other basic senses must have immediately preceeded it - and then kept going sequentially backwards from there.
Oh Holy crud MagnetMan, I figured your question meant the most used or most important not the first sense our body aquired. I would bet the others thought the same. first and foremost put together like you did generally means the most improtant or needed, not the first aquired.
So which is it? The most important sense or the first aquired sense that you are after?
The first sense that evolved out of the primeval soup has to be the most vital, for it is the base of organic intelligence on which all the others are built. At an instinctive level input from this first sense continues to determine our basic behavioral relations. Most people will be surprised when they find out the extent of its primitive power.
The eye the most complex organ in Nature, is a comparitively late evolutionary development and is therefore last on the list. All four of the other more instinctive senses superceded it.
However, in terms of our on-going technological progressions, the most important survival sense in humans is sight. Without it we would not be able to continue to engage in the manufacture of the artificial tools that elevated us above nature and which are needed to accomodate the exponetial increases in human population.
There are metaphsyical connotations linked to the sense of sight that can be discussed on another thread if anybody is interested
There is only one sense, if you think about it.
Let’s deconstruct the ontological conditions of this proposition, Sauwelios, I think it’ll be fun.
There is a function in the statement that denotes a dichotomy of necessary premises for the proposition to work out. The function is “about” and the two parts of the dichotomy are “sense” and “think,” which presupposes the “you.”
At this point, we have to assume that either “you” is more than sense, and is the “thinking about” sense, or that “you” and “thinking” is another sense.
Either way we cannot have only one sense, because if there was only one sense, there would be no sense in asserting anything. A sense wouldn’t be considering or thinking about its state.
I only show this because it is opposing your idea that everything is “imagination,” and that therefore there is no corporeal.
The mechanics of the proposition are the workings of a dialectical process Hegelean in nature. The only thing that forever remains ontologically true about the “case” of your proposing the above is that it is always either true or false, and a conclusion is a synthesis of this. There must be more than one sense because “sense” is composed of a real object and a conceiving of it in language-- the thinking in words about events.
But since I don’t consider “consciousness” to be a “sense,” and I don’t consider the real to be a case of one sense, I conclude that consciousness is transcendent to the object and that its relationship to the object will always be a conceptual synthesis of the ontological states of “true” and “false” and that the concept, which is not the object, is never either true or false, but a sysnthesis, since a term in language must have an identity, but that identity must also be infinitely reducible to smaller parts and surfaces.
Here, I have reached a triangulational paradox.
We cannot speak of the “consciousness” without its transcendence-transcended, yet we cannot attribute “being” to the nature of “consciousness” so to make it an object of study. It remains a mysterious epistemological entity.
Nor can we speak of the state of the object which we consider sensible, because its nature is definitional and therefore it is eternally deferring.
All we can know for certain is that the states of true and false do exist and indeed must for the possibility of the synthesis of the ontological states which can be “occured by” in the case of a real object.
I believe this is Kantian phenomenology through and through.
Let’s not, as 1) I don’t think it’d be fun, 2) I’m not here to have fun, and 3) I don’t think it would be either relevant or interesting.
So let’s leave my statement squarely within its context. For your information, if one person has five senses, two people still have only five senses in my opinion. I am not saying there is only one consciousness. What I’m saying is that all of the five traditional senses (in alphabetical order: hearing, sight, smell, taste, and touch) may be reduced to only one sense, as more and less subtle forms of this one sense.
Good, good. Only one thing though. “1” is redundant because if “2” were true, it wouldn’t matter if you thought it was fun or not, since you are not here for fun either wway.
In other words, only two were necessary.
Its like saying 1) I don’t like the taste of apples, 2) I don’t like fruit, and 3) I don’t think I would enjoy doing laundry right now. (really anything would suffice for number three)