I Have a Philosophical Idea

Here is my philosophical idea it's mine and I don't care if some ivory tower jerk thought of it first it's mine and wholly original: Somatic sensations are merely beliefs.

See, when you have a normal somatic sensation like hunger, it doesn't feel like a belief to you. You may feel that your sensation of hunger is spawning beliefs (beliefs like "I am hungry" for instance), but that your sensation of hunger is its own thing, irreduceable ghostly etc. This is not so. You are merely assigning hunger a status above beliefs because of your intimate familiarity with it, and because it so often goes along with the same beliefs and sensations (fantasies about meals, stomach cramps) and thus forms a cohesive, easily recognizable package, more so than even the most obessive normal beliefs.

Here is a nice experiment you can perform to blur the line in your mind between somatic sensation and belief. Pretend you are hyperventilating, and put a plastic bag over your mouth and breathe in and out. (Fun fact: This is no longer recommended as a cure for hyperventilation. I think the suggested alternative is weak sauce.)

Once you have breathed into the bag long enough, you will experience a sensation (if you are like me and I hope you are) that is a belief-that-I-had-better-stop but undeniably a somatic sensation (because it is a sensation about what is going on inside of you). The only reason we are able to recognize this as a belief is through our unfamiliarity with it. I can easily imagine doing this every day and assigning it its own phenomenological character ex post facto.

I can think of a few other sensations that are experienced to some degree as beliefs or desires, including the knowledge that your veins are being pinched and your circulation is cut off, depth perception, and magnetoception. In short, any sensation that you don't feel too often, or consider too deeply, begins to feel a lot like belief.

Question for discussion: Is it just the case that all sensations, sensory and otherwise, are just beliefs? In other words, when P experiences X, is it just that P believes that he is experiencing X for all X? I hope.