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I fear I'm going to make myself unpopular and disagree with Molly's eloquent tripartate hypothesis of reality - everything we've discussed, every reality we've encountered, every mutual experience has all been mediated by salt water rushing into and out of.

All three of the realities discussed come to us and are interpreted by our brains; they are thus all subjective and subject to the same error as a "private" reality. While it cannot be denied that there is verbal agreement in the community as to the location of a wall, or a rock, or a planet, the only reason you know it's there is because someone saw fit to pass air past their vocal chords, which in turn struct your tympanum, was translated into electrical signals and constructed in your head as whatever you experience sound to be.

I wouldn't be surprised to discover years from now as our understanding of the cabling of the brain beings to flourish that we do perceive our subjective realities very differently. All you've experienced is background, with salient CSs associated with meaning by participating in a verbal community. What if it turned out that my auditory cabling shunts information solely to where most people process what they see? Much as a congentially blind person cannot fathom blue, my experience is such that what most people hear I experience as sight - because I cannot get out of my box I'd be none the wiser, kind of like an ex-boyfriend of mine was unaware that he had two uvula until someone took a good look.

A question for Professor Grobstein -

At the beginning of this dissection of sight, Professor Grobstein asserted that much the same processes are in play for the perception of other senses. However, one sense in particular is very different in the way it is processed in the brain, and I'm wondering if this may also allude to the I-function not only as story-teller, but as a definer or map-maker if you will. Smell runs from the olfactory bulbs straight to the proto-mammalian amygdala in the limbic system - it is not mediated by any of that wonderful neocortex we're so proud of. I have also read somewhere that cross culturally smell is not only an incredibly emotionally valent sensation, but that on the whole we as humans lack words to describe it.

I put forth, then, that the I-function is repsonsible in part of compartmentalizing "reality" into seemingly distinct senses by allowing our "higher" processes to interpret the information differently - the perception comes not only from what proteins we have to sense with, but also how it's put together. I cannot account for where or how this process occurs, but it seems to me that smell may harken back to a proto-mammalian synesthesia: it is tightly bound with another perceptive event (affect) and does not lend itself to critical analysis in daily discourse for a simple lack of words. I am guessing not being able to parse out the subjective experience of smell into words is a consequence of less cognitive processing and splitting of the experience before it is fed to whatever the I-function is. Synesthetes do not disprove this conjecture - instead they maintain vestigal proto-mammalian higher connectivity, and even this augmented perception has been shown to be subject to higher processing influences: one study found that color-grapheme associatations could be set by a childhood set of magnets.

In sum - I'm not necessarily saying that there's nothing out there. I'm just saying that just because you and your friend know about it doesn't make it anymore true than if you yourself knew it because it's all mediated by a system dedicating to constructing something by breaking it along characteristic fault lines which may actually have no bearing anywhere outstide of your head.