what's in a place

#question #philosophy

• motivated by the short story writing class - sixth sense assignment where we're asked to "describe a place using all five senses."

Summary of my thoughts so far

What's in a "place"?

• Something we can recognize via our senses
• Dictates what can influence us in the moment.
• Is a relative constant. Changes smoothly w.r.t. time (though much a much less so now with high speed transit)
• Ultimately, it's a set of variables which correlate with each other.
  • The typical notion of place doesn't actually correlate that strongly with the senses of touch and taste and of interoception. This suggests trying to redefine place in terms of locality of these senses.

More in depth thoughts

On the characteristics of "place"

• Physical locality... but what does that mean? What makes a place consistent throughout time?
• We can find it; we can recognize it when we do find it
  • It's often recognized and found visually. Via our 3-D sense of the world. E.g. Dana Square park is the place I can walk pretty much straight due east from Sid-Pac and hit. It has a large grass lawn with an ovular asphalt walkway surrounding it...
• There's some sense of potential influence. Being in this place means that the people who are also at this place influence me, whether just via the fact that I see them, or hear them. That the animals here are the animals I hear. The flowers here are the animals I smell.
  • [n] On the other hand the senses of touch and taste seem to correlate much less strongly with physical location.
• But perhaps most important is how we feel (interoception). The feelings and emotions. Perhaps these can be associated with a place; but more often these are becoming very disconnected with place.
  • How happy I am is more to do with what's been happening over the past days, or who I'm spending time with right now, etc...
  • This also has to do with influence. When we talk about influence, we don't usually just mean, how things influence are perceptive field or what not. We usually speak of how they influence our internal state. How we feel, how we think, how we view the world.
• At some point in history, place used to also be relatively constant.
  • But now, we inhabit many places. And we can choose what place we inhabit at will.
• But ultimately a place is a set of variables which correlate with each other. Some more strongly than others.

On alternate notions of place satisfying said characteristics

• A people. This fits both with the influence and the senses definitions. It's really the people I'm around which has the biggest influence on me (much moreso than geographical location). And they dictate
  • Examples:
    • High school friends
    • Acapella group
    • Josh
• A location in a social network. This fits the influence and constant characterizations. Who we talk with, what we read, dictate who we are.
  • related:: do the five people you spend the most time with still really contain a lot of information about you?
  • Also, this is a strong constant in our lives. We have yet to develop a plane for this.
  • Although perhaps physical locality does still play a big role in determining our social network...
• A food
• A book
• A feeling
  • Could especially play around with this idea of sensory locality. What are all the senses that correlate with a particular feeling?