what fresh -ception is this

[radiantfracture]

Interoception is the feeling of having an inside to your body -- all the sensations from the skin on in. (Unless, like me, you simply contain an infinite starfield.)

Exteroception is the feeling of the body meeting the external world, ex. the surface of the skin -- sensations arising from outside the body.¹

What would be the word for the feeling of the extensions of your body that exist in otherdimensional space, where inside and outside as we usually experience them are not arranged in the same way?

(cf. Flatland for the higher-dimensional ability to bypass barriers that exist in lower dimensions - or maybe it was that YA book with the ketchup)

Interoception, though it sounds official, seems to be a nonce coining from interior + receptor,² and exteroception came into being as the twin of intero-.

Metaperception already means something, our beliefs about how other people perceive us.³

Metaception seems to mean the ability to create internal representations of interoceptive states.⁴

...I could be writing but first I need to invent (or borrow) a word. Surely someone clever has already coined this (or is about to).

{rf}

1. The process of sorting out the two in infant development is something I'd like very much to investigate; I've always felt that the object-relation grammars thus given rise had a lot to do with the poetics of any particular embodiment.

2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9220286/

3. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/social-psychology-of-perceiving-others-accurately/metaperceptions/3F8F12F8D611531B8F451EA380E5312B

4. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9240682/

Comments

[ioplokon]

What would be the word for the feeling of the extensions of your body that exist in otherdimensional space, where inside and outside as we usually experience them are not arranged in the same way?
Nopereoception

[radiantfracture]

Ha, as in "nope"?

[ioplokon]

Yes, but I think I had your flatland analogy backwards; I was thinking of the circle's perspective of the sphere being noperioception.

[radiantfracture]

Well, imagine if the circle was like "what's that tingling in my circumference? Holy crap, I've been a sphere all along! I'm all bulgy in a very confusing way."

[ioplokon]

Hoperioception

[radiantfracture]

Aw I like it

[yhlee]

Flatland does this, yes! The Sphere talks to A. Square.

I am largely certain that William Sleator's The Boy Who Reversed Himself (which is the ketchup book you're thinking about, and I have "I wonder how much chirality issues would cause TOXINS" questions as an adult, but it worked great for a kids' book) was in fact riffing on this. (There have been other riffs, like Dionys Burger's Sphereland, which I know of by reputation because math major, although I haven't read the Burger.)

[radiantfracture]

I've always been confused about the sphere, since wouldn't the three-dimensional entity be, you know, a human being?

[yhlee]

Please disregard if I'm annoyingly overexplaining things you already know:

The characters in Flatland are already plane figures with the conceit that the more sides, the higher your social status/rank/class. So women are LINES (one side, so to speak) and are the lowest class of all. (Abbott was satirizing Victorian sexism and classism, and stated in at least one foreword that this was to draw attention to women rarely being accorded the attention/respect they were due.) Our hero, A. Square, is sort of an honest tradesman sort IIRC. The king is a circle, because you can think of a circle as a polygon with "infinite" sides.

As 3D creatures (so to speak), we're aware of spheres! So to extend the metaphor while retaining its largely Euclidean flavor, Abbott introduces the sphere as the 3D analog of the circle, and describes A. Square's viewpoint of the sphere as a circle whose radius varies in ways not possible with a regular circle, because it depends on how you "slice" the sphere from (Euclidean) 3-space into 2-space. You could of course describe how a human being is "sliced" into 2D slices, but this makes the argument more mathematically complicated and destroys the core metaphor. Abbott then describes, speculatively, the possible existence of a "4D sphere" (and higher dimensions). (Mathematically, of course, it's now straightforward to describe hyperspheres and other higher-dimensional spheres.)

This is an extremely weird instance of math-based fiction with a genuine novel (or novel-ish) insight! Kind of rare though, which is probably why it's so famous in math circles.

My favorite riff on this book is Rudy Rucker's unhinged "Message Found in a Copy of Flatland," which is kind of the equivalent of a literary fart joke. (Rucker is an actual goddamn mathematician.) In that story, a regular human finds their way into an attic or somesuch and is trapped with a copy of the REAL Flatland. The punch line is (ROT13):

Fvapr gur Syngynaqref pna'g rfpncr n 3Q crefba fpbbcvat gurz hc, naq guvf crefba vf ybpxrq va gur nggvp be jungrire naq arrqf gb fheivir...VVEP gur ynfg yvar bs gur fgbel vf fbzrguvat yvxr "Gurl gnfgr yvxr fnyzba."

[radiantfracture]

I think I must have read it (a long time ago) more like a fantasy reader, thinking of Flatland as a realm coincident with ours, like Wonderland, etc. -- so first I was delighted by the sphere, and then I was like "Hey wait. There are no talking spheres." Except there are now anyway, so it works in both worlds now.

[yhlee]

Oh, this is completely reasonable! I came to the book from a math frame because the person who told me about the book (and caused me to hunt it down a couple years later - Seoul Foreign School didn't have it - when we moved to Houston) was my 4th grade math teacher, who also explained the context and math bits. :)

[sylvanfae]

I loved William Sleator’s books when I was a kid! Especially that one.

[sabotabby]

Something something Naomi Klein's Doppleganger talks a bit about that, and there's a concept of peripersonal space where there is an extension of the self into spaces where you do not physically exist. I'm not sure if either of these are helpful.

[radiantfracture]

I'm not sure if either of these are helpful.

I think so, because it's all part of the suite of bodily sensations that have greater and lesser degrees of mapping to the material bodies that generate them.

In the case of the rift, it's suddenly having access to the feeling of your own extension into dimensions that hadn't been unfolded to you before.

Do you remember what she said in Doppelganger?

[sabotabby]

Okay, so she is a Big Brain Smart Woman and I am a Bear Of Very Little Brain so let's see if I can remember and give the concept justice, because it was really cool.

She talks, of course, mostly about the idea of the doppleganger in a political context, e.g., how the right is a dark mirror of the left. Not in a "horseshoe theory, both sides are the same" way, but in the sense that right-wing politics emerge from the same anxieties and pressures as left-wing ones but come to fucked-up conclusions. So, for example, class conflict can lead to socialism, or it can lead to blaming (((the Jews))).

But then there is a section towards the end that goes really bonkers, and talks about the other self as the extension of your own personhood into physical/sociopolitical spaces that you don't actually inhabit. For example, I have never been to El Salvador and will probably never go. But my physical, economic, and social existence as someone in Canada, without me having to do anything, does violence to miners in El Salvador. And so my political self extends outside of my body.

She explains it better than this.

[yarrowkat]

and proprioception is the sense of your body interacting with the space/bodies around it, before those things actually touch

[radiantfracture]

One of my favorite words / concepts / real things we experience that it's hard to talk about

[yarrowkat]

i learned the concept in a queer embodiment/tantra context and have remained delighted with it

[sylvanfae]

Outside: exoception, ectoception
Far:teleception
Beyond: ultraception
Crosswise: chaismoception
Beside: paraception
Across: diaception, transception
Away: apoception
Slanting: decliviception, dochmoception, loxoception, plagioception
Over: hyperception, superception

[radiantfracture]

Ahhh, now this is exactly the sort of thing I was trying to think of and coming up dry. What an excellent list.

[sylvanfae]

Yay! I halp! 😁

Such an interesting question!

[sylvanfae]

I’m leaning paraception or ultraception (though they’re all exciting!), but perhaps combining some of these would help get at the meaning better. Ultraparaception? Intradiaception?

[radiantfracture]

Well, for my purposes (and they need not be anyone else's), "chiasmoception" is nice because of the crossing over, which is an important concept in My Story (tm) -- but I also like paraception a lot.

But this feels like an awesome list to draw from in crafting tales of weird perception in general, doesn't it?

[sylvanfae]

Quite. 😀

[juushika]

No idea, but would poke around (/research into) out of body experiences and phantom limbs. Which I did, for a few minutes, with no luck, but it seems like those are already existing, non-speculative examples of sensations that violate or ignore inside/outside sensation.

[radiantfracture]

Thanks!

I am somewhat familiar with phantom limb discourse (well, up to say 2010 -- nothing recent) because of the parallels that get made to trans bodily dysphorias. I read a bit in the topic area for my very peculiar master's paper.

In that context, proprioception does get talked about a lot, and body ego or imago. Maybe that's indirectly where the idea came from to begin with.

[juushika]

There's a fair bit of phantom limb discourse and just plain old discussion in alterhuman communities, where it's an established phenomenon (i.e. perception of nonhuman body parts ex. wings, tails, either temporarily or permanently) that I have ... never really engaged in because I don't have phantom limbs, haha! But in what I can remember reading, I haven't seen any -ceptions or similar language used. Alterhumanity as an umbrella also includes multiplicity (discussion of innerworlds) and immersive/maladaptive daydreaming and can extend to cover astral projection and other OBE-adjacent experiences.

& AFAIK I know, none of them have an answer to your question. That kind of amazes me, because this is a community that loves labels and making up hyperspecific terminology and picking apart/justifying atypical experiences/perceptions. If anyone should have a word for "not inside, not outside, but some secret third thing," it really feels like alterhumans would have one, but I haven't seen it come up. That said, I don't think they've latched onto to intro-/exteroception as terms yet either, so ... maybe give the community a few years and there'll be a new fad in the essay posts. (I say with love.)

[radiantfracture]

That sounds like a great set of conversations, though.

I don't think they've latched onto to intro-/exteroception as terms yet either

Probably helps to have read way too much Oliver Sacks at a formative age.