Hypothetical Scenario Questions- Updated once a week

[Genevra]

Cardinal had a thread like this, but it died. So I decided to remake it because the idea is awesome and I love hearing answers to these.

Basically, I'll just ask questions about a hypothetical scenario and you answer them and give your reasonings.

First question: Let's say you had to lose one of your five senses (sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell) Which one would you choose? Why?

Gogogogo.

[Nines~Tempest]

Smell.

I like videogames and food tastes good.

[Alex]

Taste, probably. If you lost smell you'd lose most of taste anyway, so at least then I'd still be able to smell stuff.

[Nines~Tempest]

Taste, probably. If you lost smell you'd lose most of taste anyway, so at least then I'd still be able to smell stuff.

then eating would just be a terrible chore.  SOME taste being lost imo is better than ALL taste.

though if I wasn't such a huge fatty maybe i'd agree but no

[Cardinal]

Shit, I forgot I used to do this. Awesome UNF.
I'd have to go with taste, I guess. It would probably make me eat more food, actually!
I value my sight (photography) and hearing (music) too much to lose them.

[Empirical Pussy]

Taste. Eating is already a chore for me. And I love smelling things. :3 Sight/hearing are out of the question.

[Rosti LFC]

Nice thread revival.

This might have been a little more interesting if you'd opened it up to the standard 10-15 senses instead of the basic five, but even then I'd still probably go with taste (or magnetoception, but that's barely a sense). I'd prefer it to smelling, but given that stuff tastes crap when your nose is blocked, I'd rather taste nothing and smell than to not be able to smell and only taste rubbish.

[Fluffy Cocaine]

I honestly do not know. I would be drastically affected by the loss of any of my senses.

I couldn't stand to lose hearing because I love music so much and I couldn't imagine being without it forever. Different foods are always a pleasure, so losing taste would really fuck things up socially and in terms of personal enjoyment. Losing my sight would prevent me from seeing the world like I want to, so I wouldn't choose that. Touch... well... the reasons why I wouldn't want to lose that are obvious

I think I'd choose smell in that case. Foods wouldn't taste great, or nearly as strong as previously, but at least they'd still taste like something.

But seriously, the idea of losing any of my senses permanently freaks me the fuck out, so I don't like the idea of any of it.

[Number 38]

Sight. The sensation of orientating yourself in the world by using only your other senses is just too amazing. I feel like it would bring me away from my physical ties to the world like most modern technology, and also force me to be more active and more in tune with myself. In other words, I think it would make me a better person.

[Rosti LFC]

Sight. The sensation of orientating yourself in the world by using only your other senses is just too amazing. I feel like it would bring me away from my physical ties to the world like most modern technology, and also force me to be more active and more in tune with myself. In other words, I think it would make me a better person.

I don't think you believe any of that for a second. Or maybe a second, but not much longer than that

[Fluffy Cocaine]

I don't think you believe any of that for a second. Or maybe a second, but not much longer than that

...why would you assume that? Is no one else allowed to have deep thoughts?

[Rosti LFC]

More that when actually faced with it I think someone would be completely crazy to pick anything that isn't either taste or smell. Losing taste or smell would be a bit crap, but the inconvenience wouldn't be anything like that of losing any of the other three senses.
It's an interesting devil's advocate to why someone would choose to lose their sight, but if he'd actually choose sight I'd be amazed, given it'd by far have the biggest impact in terms of everyday life. I did a disability awareness thing ages and ages ago in primary school, and for a part of it we had to spend an hour blindfolded. It's actually not just massively inconvenient, but pretty scary because people can do shit to you and you can't see it coming. Losing touch (assuming pain goes with it) would fuck you up no end, and hearing, aside from music and stuff, would make driving and generally being aware of surroundings a lot more difficult.

[Fluffy Cocaine]

More that when actually faced with it I think someone would be completely crazy to pick anything that isn't either taste or smell. Losing taste or smell would be a bit crap, but the inconvenience wouldn't be anything like that of losing any of the other three senses.
It's an interesting devil's advocate to why someone would choose to lose their sight, but if he'd actually choose sight I'd be amazed, given it'd by far be the biggest loss in terms of everyday life.

Well, to be fair, this is just a "hypothetical situations" thread on a message board. None of us are actually being faced with the choice in the heat of the moment, so we have time to consider it with a more philosophical approach. If someone came up to just about anyone, tied them up and said "okay, I can take away your hearing, sight, smell, taste or touch -- what'll it be?' probably just about anyone would say smell or taste. But it is perfectly possible for people to have very different answers to this question if they're sitting down and thinking about it and they know it's just something they're thinking about and not something that is actually going to happen.

I have no idea if Sean was being serious or not, but I can see the possibility of someone choosing sight. It's not what I'd choose, but everyone values something different.

Besides, this is totally cheating this thread, but if medical advancements are a consideration, I'd consider choosing sight only because it's what they've come closest to restoring through medical research. They are experimenting with implants/transplants and, last I knew, having some success in lab rats.

[Number 38]

That's interesting Rosti - when I was younger we did the same thing.

Freeze, Rosti's right to a point. Any practical person would pick taste or smell, and I accept this and I wrote what I wrote mostly expecting no one to take me seriously. Whether I was serious or not myself I'm still unsure of, but I certainly meant what I wrote.

Honestly, although I'm tied up in a technology-based life, I could give it all up in a second if I had to. Believe me or not, I don't mind. Blindness(and I know this can be misconstrued as offensive to disabled people so I don't like saying this, but...) appeals to me for the reasons I mentioned.

Who knows what I would say when I was actually faced with the issue? All I know is that I would seriously consider giving up my sight.

[Fluffy Cocaine]

I took you seriously. :x I don't know, maybe I'm just unusually open-minded, but I actually found your response pretty fascinating.

So you would consider blindness an escape from technology? I'm having a little trouble understanding what you mean at that particular juncture.

[Number 38]

So you would consider blindness an escape from technology? I'm having a little trouble understanding what you mean at that particular juncture.

By "technology" I'm referring to the lifestyle that it's created, really - TV, Facebook, YouTube, video games, anime, spending time doing shit like that. It's such a simulated lifestyle and I'm really starting to resent it and grow tired of it. Unfourtunately, like a major chunk of the world's population, I've grown too lazy and attuned to this life to do anything about it. If that makes sense.

[Rosti LFC]

I think blindness might be OK for a small period of time, but for anything long-term I'd hate it.

You're massively disabled. It's a struggle for you to just live and be self-sufficient, let alone anything else. You can't really write or draw, you can't read (or at least, not without electrical assistance), you can't enjoy television properly or the visual arts, you can't play video games, you can't drive, you can't really have a job...

I have no idea what the hell I'd do with the rest of my life if I couldn't see. Pretty much everything I do right now and plan to do in the future relies on my ability to see.


Not to hi-jack the thread or anything, but to clarify my earlier comment that might have been a little too blunt (or it was for Freeze at least), I reckon the question would be far more interesting if it included the full nine basic senses. The basic five would be a pretty obvious choice of taste from the point of view of self-survival, given that smell, touch, sight and hearing can all potentially save your life or prevent serious injury, or the second obvious choice of losing smell if you really want taste. There's not really a huge amount of serious choice there

The full spectrum of sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste, balance/acceleration, proprioception (being able to know where your hands etc are without looking), pain and temperature give a little bit more room for thought. The obvious one to lose would appear to be pain, but the side-effects of being unable to feel it are actually pretty horrific (and not necessarily in obvious ways either), so it overall it actually goes pretty high up the list for the ones you'd want to keep.

[Fluffy Cocaine]

By "technology" I'm referring to the lifestyle that it's created, really - TV, Facebook, YouTube, video games, anime, spending time doing shit like that. It's such a simulated lifestyle and I'm really starting to resent it and grow tired of it. Unfourtunately, like a major chunk of the world's population, I've grown too lazy and attuned to this life to do anything about it. If that makes sense.

It does, completely, and that's what I thought you meant to begin with.

In fact, I guess you could say that our sight and the part it plays in enveloping us in the simulated lifestyle you're referring to results in the effective loss of some of our other senses anyway... you're not going to smell the flowers or the bakery if you're sitting on a computer all day, and other than touching a keyboard/touchscreen, you're not really feeling much of anything, either. You're still hearing if you're playing music, and you're probably still eating... but you probably appreciate these things far less when there is always something to distract you.

I don't mean to hijack the thread, but I think it promotes this kind of discussion anyway by nature -- I've discovered a bit of a problem cropping up in myself lately that I would blame on my enthusiastic use of the computer over the years: I can't focus on any one thing for a long period of time anymore without getting very annoyed with it. The computer lends itself easily to doing 5 or more things at once at any given time, meaning that you can constantly be switching between windows and going to different things within those windows. There's almost always something new to see, and you get into this chain where you distract yourself from something by doing something on the computer and within 5 minutes you're already distracting yourself from the first distraction and what you were originally doing is totally lost. I used to love reading books. It's tough for me to see the value in it anymore because it doesn't flash at me. I don't really know how to ameliorate that.

[Fluffy Cocaine]

Not to hi-jack the thread or anything

I don't mean to hijack the thread

Whoa. I swear to god that wasn't intentional.

[Rosti LFC]

But if you think it'd be such a good change for you, then why don't you go through with it anyway?

I only spend most of the day on my computer when I'm at home and I've got very little in the way of other distractions. And if I truly was unhappy about that then I'd be able to do something else without as drastic an action as losing my sight.