Feeling with Wheels
When I drove a car I had a really good sense of the road beneath my tires. It seemed like I was in direct sensory connection with the road surface. I could feel whether it was slippery or not and rough or not and even whether I was sliding.
Of course I wasn't in any sort of direct sensory connection. I was sitting on a cushioned chair holding a steering wheel with my feet on the floor and pedals looking out the window. But I wasn't really aware of any of that - I was aware of what the road felt like..
I've also felt that the size of my car was MY size. I could place the car in space almost as accurately as I could place my feet on the ground.
Though we are accustomed to it, the perceptions of the driver of a car are actually quite strange. You press on one pedal to go speed up forward and another to slow down. You have a wheel to rotate to change direction. None of this is like the control experience when you're out walking.
I'm pondering the idea that the different sense of the size and location of ME when driving a car is a product of those different sensory inputs. Proprioception is the body' sense of where it is in space and it requires many sensory inputs to work. I'm thinking that (of course): if you change the inputs to the proprioception system then you will change the output, which is your sense of where you are in space.
I've owned a few cars. They all had manual transmissions and none had power steering. I drove my Dad's cars a bit and they did and I didn't like it as much. I couldn't feel the road as well.
When I was quite young I had a tricycle. I didn't like riding it much. The back wheels kept hitting obstacles because I had no spatial sense for them. Trikes are kind of nasty - they seem safe because you didn't need balance. But they are treacherously tippy in other ways. I turned the trike over onto it's handle bars and had a good time pedaling with my hands pretending I was the ice cream man ?
For personal transportation I far prefer 2 wheeled vehicles. I like motorcycles but bicycles give the best bang for the buck I think - especially in a city. When I was in shape I could get across town as fast on my bike as I could with a car and no worries about parking.
I think of a bike as flying on wires. It wasn't the spokes at the bottom of the wheels that supported me. It was the spokes at the side that kept the rim from flexing out that carried the weight.
I find that I don't feel the road through my wheels as much on a bike as I do in a car. I think it's because I can see the wheels on the road directly. But I did like the feeling of riding through freshly fallen snow. And I think a bike is safer on glare ice than walking because your balance is stable.
When we feel with wheels a physical thing becomes an extension of our senses. I think that doing that sort of thing is actually quite common. If I scrape a metal rod across my table top I feel the vibrating rod as a sense of the smoothness of the surface. With my eyes closed I can tell the difference between wood, my plate, or even plexiglas.
Once in art school the teacher demonstrated that I could detect color with my back. I was blindfolded and I could tell the difference between blue or yellow projected on my back. I suspect there was a temperature difference but I experienced it as color.
I must say that for most of my life I just experienced my experiences without much thought about it. These days I'm fascinated by experiences.
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.