Beyond our five senses there is an internal signal — a sixth one, if you like — that fires when the brain feels itself. A non-verbal, concrete flash to the conscious mind, lit in a color unique to the moment. You don’t summon it. It arrives on its own terms, often before you have any words for it.
These senses are the product of cumulative years of experience with long-term feedback. They are internalized thoughts, compressed below the surface of language — not sensors, but the residue of everything you have lived through, distilled into a feeling that knows before you can explain why.
There is a real difference between deliberately reasoning over a behavior and feeling the sense associated with it. Reasoning is expensive — like inference with full context overhead: slow, costly, deliberate. Sense is cheap — like a well-trained model responding straight from its weights: instant, almost effortless. But that training is only built one way: by acting first and reflecting after. Action precedes the sense, not the other way around. (One of the quieter notes I keep returning to in a friend’s garden of thoughts.)