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So, in class we've talked about sight and color. This sense is clearly tacitly understood.

This led me to think that maybe sight isn't the only tacitly understood sense. I focused mostly on touch, because I've tried to imagine what things would be like if I were deaf or blind. I think that I would rely on my sense of touch much more- it would be grounding for me in the real world.

Woah, wait a second. Grounding in the real world. Real. Touch isn't real, I learned this last week in physics.

Touch is actually our nerves sensing electromagnetic interactions with other surfaces. A desk feels hard because it's structure is rigid- so as the molecules on the outside of our hand approach the molecular structure of the desk, the electrons in the outer orbits of each object repel each other, because electrons are the furthermost objects in a molecule, and electrons repel each other. Now, that means that our hand can never actually come into contact with the desk, which in turn means that we never actually touch anything. What we feel when we think we touch a desk is our fairly non-rigid molecular structure pressing with more force against the very rigid molecular structure of the desk. What our nerves actually sense, therefore, is how much our molecular structure "squishes" 'against' the other object.

If the other object is rigid, our hand 'squishes' so we think the object is hard. If our nerves 'feel' the other object 'give', then the object is 'squishier' than our hand and is thus 'softer' than a rigid object.

Before I thought about this, if someone had asked me how I knew cloth was softer than a desk, I would probably have given them a weird stare and said "the cloth feels softer, less hard" which is not a real answer, it's only a comparison. Is this tacit knowledge?