Why can't we perceive matter, energy, gravity, space, time o

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Why can't we perceive matter, energy, gravity, space, time or math directly? We can only perceive them indirectly.

im not sure what you mean by that. i can perceive them as directly as "perceiving" itself can be called directly. would you explain to me what you meant ?

Step off a cliff and you will perceive space and gravity first hand. As you fall you will perceive time and upon your landing you will perceive matter and the conversion of kinetic energy to heat.

We can't perceive matter, energy, gravity, space, time and math directly like we can perceive color and sound directly.

I disagree.

I think.

Wait, what?

Never mind the math. I don't have the energy or time for the gravity of this topic, and I don't think it really matters anyway. Not to mention it's making the inner space in my head hurt.

I perceived all of that very directly by the way.

We don't have a sense for mass, so we have to weigh things (which is equivalent to mass in a constant gravitational field), or you have to use a counter-balance so that the gravitational acceleration on both sides balance. Lifting things does not perceive mass but a force. If you had your eyes closed and tried to pull on something hard you could not be sure of the source of resistance.

I can think of several ways in which we can more or less perceive energy. We see light and that has energy; we can sense temperature, and in a given material that is proportional to heat, which is a form of energy; and we can tell when we are accelerated because fluids inside our bodies slosh around, and the definition of energy is the line integral of a force, so you can in a crude way directly the change in energy of your body when you move.

You sense gravity through acceleration, but if you don't have any other sensory information, you cannot tell the difference between different forms of acceleration (being accelerated in an elevator and standing in a gravitational field are equivalent).

You cannot directly perceive space. If you could, you would perceive distance by staring up into the night sky, and obviously you can't. Our ancestors thought that maybe they could reach the stars if they built a tower, so if you think you can then you are just tricking yourself. The idea of space is created in our minds by seeing the relation between objects. If you don't see objects, you have no perception of distance.

You cannot sense time. If you saw a video of a car going down the street and it sped up, you would not know if the video had sped up or the car had accelerated, assuming of course that there were no other clues in the video and the car did not speed up in an unnatural fashion. You perceive time as the rate of change in the condition of objects. Without some object to compare it to, we have no perception of time. Of course there are bodily processes that take place at a fairly regular pace, so we can guesstimate time, but it is an inaccurate measure because different emotional or physical stimuli can make the processes we rely on to guesstimate time take place at different rates.

I don't even know how to begin to imagine perceiving math.

ok, i like weird thoughts, so here we go.

time requires an episodic memory to be perceived, an ability to recall past events in chronological order. as far as i know evidence in current neuroscience points towards a time independent storage of memories that are solely linked by our understanding of their causal context. even if we were to assume the existance of an objective, physical ("the") time relative to ourselves, our perception of it would be highly subjective and due to the processing speed our neurons are capable of thinking by our present is also split in (more or less) 3 second bits, and as you might have experienced yourself time passes subjectively faster or slower depending on whether we pay much attention or not.

matter and gravity can be perceived by proprioception mostly i would guess, respectively by mechanoreceptors recognising the streching of muscle fibers when we hold an object with a certain detectable mass. which is very indirect. nevertheless we feel weight, we can compare weight, we ignore weight because it would take up way too much of our thoughts to remember that we are stuck to a giant planet by our feet all the time and we only realise it when we walk after swimming for a long while because it suddenly feels strange to be pressed against the ground so much.

energy perception depends on the type of energy, "positive energy" and that kind of stuff can probably only be perceived by some pretty special people with some pretty special receptors, if it is simply emitted via temperature or light we can perceive it very directly and if it is metabolic energy transfer in form of atp (de-) phosphorylation of stuff we might not be much aware of all the actual molecularbiological things going on but we can at least feel more energetic than before we ate that sandwich.

space is usally also something, namely air, unless it has a vacuum of course. we can see space, we can feel the absence of space around us and we can eventually also hear space because sound waves are reflected differently, which would probably also account for "indirect perception" but as long as im able to not randomly walk into objects i dont care if my 3D vision makes it "indirect" by a certain definition.

math, well for math "perceiving" isnt the first verb that would have come to my mind, but lets go with it. if i perceive math i perceive a mathematical problem and its solution, basically a relation between things, geometric objects, numbers or variables. that requires logic, understanding and problem solving, so basically, thinking. thinking is the most direct process to "perceive" something i can think of and therefor i would say it is rather intuitive and even more direct than something like color or sound.

also: color perception is, not unlike time perception, not really relateable to a physical reality (strictly speaking we only perceive wavelength) and math is the only thing on your list that relates to (theoretical) physics in a different way than the other mentionings because it is a method and not an element of it.

and that would be all the jibberjabber that comes to my mind at the moment.

Ok, here goes:

Matter: All the stuff around you. Your computer. Your own body. Everything tangible, basically.

Energy: Heat. Also electrical energy (like with a joybuzzer).

Gravity: You can feel gravity right now, can't you? Go ahead and try to jump to the moon from where you're standing. Pretty hard, isn't it?

Space: That's a tricky one, partially because I don't know what you're defining space as, because it has multiple meanings. You can see outer space from your backyard on a cloudless night, if you don't live in the city.

Time: The clock is ticking. It took you some amount of time to read this sentence. There is SOMETHING seperating moments, at least in our minds.

Math: Count your fingers. Hopefully you have all 10. If you just counted your fingers, I have to congratulate you for directly experiencing a number!