Touch is measuring motion or sustained pressure. Taste doesn't care about how hard the molecules hit your taste receptors, only if they bind to the taste receptors or not. Our eyes don't measure the photon pressure[1], the photons react with the atoms in our photoreceptor cells[2] triggering an electrochemical process.
Our sense of hearing is the closest to touch. We have hairs on our body which is part of our sense of touch, which react to motion and pressure, both from physical objects and the air around us.
Similarly the hairs in our ears react to the pressure waves of the air around us. However a big difference is that they're shielded by the ear drum and don't react to sustained pressure, only relatively high-frequency air pressure changes.
Why we call them different things is mostly because they're used for different tasks. An electrical generator and an electrical motor can be the same thing, it's just what it's used for.
If you're going to categorise senses into the usual five, which is what seems to be going on here, then hot, cold and pain are going to count as "touch" too. Those aren't about measuring motion so this explanation doesn't seem to work.
Hot and cold do measure motion, if we want to be very technical (since temperature is just a measure of the average momentum of molecules).
Pain should probably be considered a separate sense indeed, though it can also be argued it is something different from the senses themselves, since it is fully internal, it doesn't reveal some fact about the outside world.
Trigger warning: description of medical procedure.
Yes pain seems more like the interpretation of sense data, like if something sounds nice or tastes good?
When I had an operation under local anesthetic I still felt the knife cutting into me, but was able to interpret it as not painful? This is how opiates (for pain relief) have been described to me -- still allowing you to feel the sensations but allowing you to not 'feel' the pain.
Perhaps seeing with human biology knowledge can tell me why this is wrong!?
> Although in some cultures five human senses were traditionally identified as such (namely sight, smell, touch, taste, and hearing), it is now recognized that there are many more.
Yes of course (e.g. orientation from inner ear; proprioception; and others). But the context of the conversation was about the traditional understanding of "touch". I was trying to avoid the commenter I was replying to backing out of their point saying that they considered hot/cold and pain to be separate senses.
Our sense of hearing is the closest to touch. We have hairs on our body which is part of our sense of touch, which react to motion and pressure, both from physical objects and the air around us.
Similarly the hairs in our ears react to the pressure waves of the air around us. However a big difference is that they're shielded by the ear drum and don't react to sustained pressure, only relatively high-frequency air pressure changes.
Why we call them different things is mostly because they're used for different tasks. An electrical generator and an electrical motor can be the same thing, it's just what it's used for.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_pressure
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_phototransduction