rants of a philosopher

to be born with no senses at all

and when i say no senses i mean none. as some may know theres more than a general five

sight

smell

touch

taste

hearing

others are sense of temperature, pressure, itch, pain, thirst, hunger, direction, muscle tension, proprioception (sense of where your limbs are without looking), equilibrioception ( ability to keep your balance and sense movement in terms of acceleration and directional changes) , stretch receptors ( found in lungs, bladder, stomach, blood vessels, and gastrointestinal tract), chemoreceptors (these trigger an area in the medulla in the brain that is involved in detecting blood born hormones and drugs), and lastly time (for which i will keep this as the only sense he might feel, which i will explain in a bit)

now for this imagine that in this hypothetical situation not only is it possible to mature his brain but that he is also being kept in a hospital, someones always moving his limbs to keep from deterioration and sores, he is being feed and watered through tubes, he has the full ride of all the things needed to keep him living. 

also that this person is basically just a brain in a tube. has no idea of a connection to something like a body though it is connected. therefor the only things affecting this brain are things within the brain

i say that it is possible for his brain to mature because as some would know it is almost impossible for a child to develop the reasoning structures required to facilitate a sense of self and a basis for meaningful communication if they do not acquire some form of language by age 2-5. the brain would never grow and would therefor always be in a baby's state of mind. an example of this could be shown in baby's in orphanages who often get so little care or kids living in closets and never get the social need to keep there brain stimulated. the result of this is that they do not develop emotionally, mentally, or even physically. they often develop habits like head banging, rocking, etc. without senses your a brain without a body and nonetheless a brain that has never had a body from which to guide its own development and therefor not much of a brain in the first place without sensory input many of the various neuronal connections would die and so this persons brain would deteriorate.  So to go along with this hypothetical situation lets rule this out o play. the person with no senses's brain does not deteriorate into mush

to set this up a bit some information about how this would be like, this person could not even be compared to a child's state because even children experience senses this would be comparable to the state of a 4 month old fetus. still in the womb but has no ides of anything other than itself. never kicked in the womb or reacted to the parents voices. to the point that this baby wouldn't even no if it left the womb.would not have felt the pain of birth or cried.  

Back to this hypothetical person and his senses brings into perspective that so far senses are the only way for us to get information into our head to be processed, the stream of information from our various senses is the means by which the brain develops, producing and refining connections and thereby the foundation for our conscious experience. if that processing never occurs because all pathways are blocked. the brain will never crave the information that exists because to him none of it exists at all. does this person become a negative entity or live in a blissfully ignorant state.  without senses i would argue it would be hard to have any real conscious thinking whatsoever perhaps you might have feeling but about what? what is there to be sad or happy about if you don't experience pain or pleasure. this brings us to the topics of his emotions

so it is also known through experiments with sensory deprivation chambers that people who have experienced these often go insane and start hallucinating. the question hear is would this person even experience this. he has nothing TO hallucinate could he or would he even go crazy ?