#philosophy of perception

[compassionmattersmost]

The Architecture of Reality: How Our Minds Create What We Think We See

We like to believe our eyes are cameras and our brains are recording devices, faithfully capturing the world around us. This comforting idea suggests that what we perceive is simply what’s there — objective, unfiltered reality delivered straight to our consciousness. Yet this assumption about human perception is not just wrong — it’s misleading. The truth is far more fascinating. Perception…

The Architecture of Reality: How Our Minds Create What We Think We See

[typhlonectes]

Philosophy and Science: The problem of colour

Colours are a familiar and important feature of our experience of the world. Colours help us to distinguish and identify things in our environment: for instance, the red of a berry not only helps us to see the berry against the green foliage, but it also allows us to identify it as a berry. Colours perform a wide variety of symbolic functions...

But although colours are a familiar feature of the world that we perceive, they are also deeply puzzling. 

What exactly are colours? Do colours even exist?

Colours appear to be properties of things in our environment: apples, clothes, cats, coffee, traffic lights, and so on. Moreover, it is natural to think of them as “objective” properties of things, that exist independently of our experience of them—properties, like shape, that do not exist just because we see them, and so which would exist even if there were no-one around to see them. 

In part, this is because colours, like shapes, exhibit “perceptual constancy”: they appear to remain constant throughout changes in the conditions in which they are perceived. If you turn on a desk lamp in an already illuminated room, the colours of the things that the lamp illuminates don’t normally appear to change, just as the shape of a table doesn’t normally appear to vary as you view it from different angles.

However, philosophers and scientists have long thought that colours are not what they seem. There are two main reasons for this...

[s33]

The problem of colour | OUPblog

Colours are a familiar and important feature of our experience of the world. Colours help us to distinguish and identify things in our environment: for instance, the red of a berry not only helps us to see the berry against the green foliage, but it also allows us to identify it as a berry. Colours perform a wide variety of symbolic functions: red means stop, green means go, white means surrender.

We have a long way to go in understanding the fundamentals of how objects, concepts, and percepts relate. A color is more objective than a feeling but less objective than a tangible object. We can conjure up a field of orange in our mind's eye but that field is only an object as far as our visual experience is concerned. Unlike the fruit, the field of orange isn't a 'field' which is colored orange, since the field disappears if it has no color at all (black is a color too). Orange can be a color of an object that we see with our eyes open, or it can be subjective experience in which we can color our interior visual experience directly. A rainbow is another good example to consider, as it is in some sense the color of a tangible thing (the rainbow will disappear without water vapor in the air), and in another sense, the tangible things are only a vehicle to make the sun's light appear colorful to us.

This should be a hint that nature actually works this way in general. What we think are objects or concepts are ultimately more like color...percepts which define their significance aesthetically rather than functionally. Even subjects and subjectivity are percepts - aesthetic phenomena which present themselves in varying degrees of realism.

[theenglishnook]

Anamorphosis shows that meaning depends on where you stand. What looks distorted becomes clear only when perspective shifts, teaching that truth may exist already but requires the right angle to be seen.

ANAMORPHOSIS

[nicolae]

SetThings - Non-realistic theories in the philosophy of perception

https://www.setthings.com/en/non-realistic-theories-in-the-philosophy-of-perception/

Non-realistic theories in the philosophy of perception

Phenomenalism opposes the realism of perception by considering that perception gives us access only to complexes of sensitive data, which do not exist independently of the fact of being or being able to be perceived. The classical origin of phenomenalism dates back to George Berkeley and Work I...

[nicolae]

SetThings - Philosophy of perception - Realistic theories

https://www.setthings.com/en/philosophy-perception-realistic-theories/

Philosophy of perception - Realistic theories

(Mechanism of the vision according to a drawing of René Descartes.) The philosophy of perception is a branch of the philosophy of the mind and philosophy of knowledge that attempts to understand the nature of perceptual experiences and how they relate to beliefs or knowledge of the world. Two ...

[oneto]

But where does that leave perception? If reality is both external and internal, wouldn’t that make the idea of perception redundant? Well, no it simply modifies it. See, it can be thought of as being the process in which the internal framework of reality is enhanced, and thus also enhancing ones own perception of reality too thus changing both the internal and external processes. Our bodies, are simply the mechanics that allow us to affect the physical sector of reality and vice versa to us, they are our way into living vicariously whether we intend to or not, because whilst we are alive it seems as though we cannot leave the body, perhaps after they fail us we can but in the mean time, our bodies are our window to physical reality; our way of perceiving. But oddly enough, if this is true then that would mean that the act of perceiving, would demise any chances of interpreting an objective reality to begin with.



[fake-rationality]

Readings of the week

I surely don't think much about what I read. I just read. Almost all books are philosophical issues of some sort. Specially, mind and cognition stuff. However, I am now reading some philosophy of perception and the illusions have a very aesthestical appeal, so between famous images, I will write posts about open problems or some random question. Feedback is always good, but I suspect very few have time and patience to argue. Everyone ia now programming some kernel or disrupting the sector of dragons vs orcs(or whatever) games. But as always, some AI safety solutions first appear in community blogs, so exposing oneself is the first step. Diaries works for some people like pomodoros or time slices of thinking. I never tried, and will continue not doing so. However, linear arguments sometimes are necessary, instead of random motivated guesses.