A question raised during a friendly gathering recently seemed simple at first but soon evolved into a fascinating philosophical discussion: Which sense is more important to human beings—hearing or sight?
I expected the answer to come easily. Instead, I was surprised by the diversity of opinions.
Some argued that sight is humanity’s greatest window to the world and that losing it deprives us of beauty, colours, faces, books, and nature itself.
Others believed that hearing is more important because it is our gateway to language, music, spoken knowledge, and communication with other people.
The disagreement was not merely about which sense is more useful. It was really about which world would be more different from our own.
I then found myself approaching the question from another angle: Are we speaking about someone who lost a sense after living with it for many years, or someone who was born without it?
The difference is profound.
A person who saw the world for some years before losing sight carries within them an immense archive of images. They know the faces of those they love. They remember the colour of the sea, the shape of trees, the glow of a sunset, and the sight of a rainy sky. When they hear the word “rose,” no explanation is needed.
Someone born blind, however, has not lost those images because they never possessed them in the first place.
Here lies a remarkable truth that many people overlook: a person blind from birth does not live in darkness.
Darkness itself is a visual experience.
Such a person does not see continuous blackness, as sighted people often imagine. Rather, they live in a world where the very concept of seeing does not exist, just as we do not feel deprived of a sense we have never known.
The world of someone born deaf is different in another way.
A blind child can acquire language through hearing. From the first moments of life, voices, words, and conversations become part of their world.
A deaf child, however, is deprived of this natural pathway to language and must rely on alternative systems of signs, gestures, and visual communication.
For this reason, some have said: “Blindness separates us from things, while deafness separates us from people.”
The statement may sound harsh, but there is a measure of truth in it.
A blind person cannot see the world, yet can hear people. A deaf person cannot hear either.
Different worlds
The world of the blind is far more fascinating than most of us imagine.
It is built from sounds, scents, textures, temperatures, and memory.
Many blind individuals do not describe a place as we see it; they describe it as they hear it.
The echo of footsteps.
The reflection of sound from walls.
The movement of air.
The subtle noises made by objects before they are touched.
It is as though space itself becomes a language.
The world of the deaf, by contrast, is intensely visual.
It is a world of small details: facial expressions, lip movements, gestures, light, shadow, form, and images.
This is why many deaf individuals develop an extraordinary ability to notice visual details that most of us miss entirely.
Nature of dreams
Another question intrigued me even more than the first: How does a person dream if they have never seen light?
The scientific answer is as fascinating as the question itself.
A person born blind does dream, but not in pictures as sighted people do.
Their dreams are composed of sounds, touch, smells, movement, and emotions.
They are complete dreams, yet they are not projected onto an internal screen of images.
A person who became blind after years of sight, however, often continues to see images in dreams for many years—sometimes for the rest of life—because the brain retains the visual memories it has stored.
At that moment, I realised that even dreaming is not the same experience for all human beings.
Each of us dreams using the tools with which we built our world.
Limits of perception
Yet the deepest philosophical question has little to do with hearing or sight.
It concerns all of us.
If a person who has never seen the colour red does not feel deprived of it, how many other things might we be unable to perceive simply because our senses are limited?
Is the universe we experience the whole universe, or merely the fraction our senses allow us to see, hear, and touch?
We believe we know the world because we perceive it.
Yet the bee sees what we cannot see.
The bat hears what we cannot hear.
The dog smells what we cannot begin to imagine.
So which of us experiences reality as it truly is?
Perhaps the answer is that every living creature inhabits its own version of reality, not reality itself.
For this reason, I no longer believe the right question is: Which is more important—hearing or sight?
Each sense opens a different window onto existence.
The question that remained with me long after the conversation ended was this: If our senses shape the world we experience, how much of reality still lies hidden beyond the boundaries of our perception?
Perhaps humanity’s greatest journey, from the dawn of history until today, has been the attempt to push those boundaries further—to see what cannot be seen, hear what cannot be heard, and understand what lies beyond our natural capacities.
Indeed, what we call “the world” may be nothing more than the brain’s translation of signals captured by our senses.
If we possessed additional senses, or lost some of the ones we now have, the entire image of the universe would change. Things would acquire meanings different from those we know today.
There may be phenomena and truths surrounding us that we fail to perceive—not because they do not exist, but because our instruments of perception are incapable of detecting them.
From an even bolder perspective, some of the things we describe, define, and give names to may not exist in the way we imagine at all. They may simply be mental constructions shaped by our senses and by the brain’s interpretation of the information it receives.
The world may not be as we perceive it.
It may be far greater than what our eyes and ears allow us to grasp.
Perhaps true wisdom lies not in believing that we know everything, but in recognising that what we do not know may be vastly greater than what we do know.
