What is Perception?
Process Philosophy
Perception
To perceive something is the ability to become aware of that something through the senses (or through extrasensory means). We can have, for example, a perception of time where we focus our minds on a clock, trying to diligently observe it like a scientist. Or a perception of space, where we become aware of our surroundings through our senses, what our immediate space might look like, smell like, or sound like. A popular grounding mindful exercise involves doing a scan of your five senses, attempting to tune into each sense like a radio tuning into a certain frequency, such that you can hold an awareness of its flow of change. Change is novelty, that is why we refresh our newsfeeds and read the newspaper – for the very same reason that a dog or cat might chase a laser pointer, it is something peculiar that has arrived in your immediate field of vision. A perception of change in general becomes quite abstract to talk about however, where speaking of a perception of change in particular, such as through your immediate senses, is always accessible through our intuition. This body we possess, however, contains curious properties. As mentioned in the latest Bergsonism, Part 2, the body to Bergson, is very distinct in that “we do not know it only from without by perceptions, but also from within by affections”.
“All seems to take place as if, in this aggregate of images which I call the universe, nothing really new could happen except through the medium of certain particular images, the type of which is furnished to me by my body.” Matter and Memory, Bergson
From Latin we get, perceptionem, that means, “perception, apprehension, a taking”, used as a noun of action from, percipere, or, “to perceive” which has a Latin meaning of, “to obtain, gather, seize entirely, take possession of''. Figuratively meaning a grasping of the mind through learning or comprehending – ultimately deriving from the Proto Indo European root of kap, which is “to grasp”. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous system, which in turn result from physical or chemical stimulation of the sensory system – vision involves light striking the retina of the eye; smell is mediated by odor molecules; and hearing involves pressure waves. Our senses allow us to navigate the world, and work in fantastical concert with one another to feed our mind important information about what is happening to, and around, our body. The act of recognizing and waving to a friend, requires nearly a billion neurons (sensory nerve cells), to communicate with the brain making it so we can instantly read and react to situations.
“If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.” William Blake
Sense Perception
We have five primary senses: vision, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. Some argue we have around 21 secondary senses, such as: hunger, thirst, balance, fatigue, pain, temperature, muscle tension, pressure in our gut and bladder, and more. These senses all work in unison to keep the body running smoothly through homeostasis. Our senses help us consciously create and experience the world around us, they can bring us pleasure through art, they can alert us to danger, and are high resolution enough to distinguish between sweet and sour, hot and cold, etc. Yet while we all live in the same physical world, each of us experiences it uniquely – not only do our senses respond to different elements in the environment, but our brains assign different meanings to the same sensations. In this way, a perception has intrinsic to it a unique meaning for an individual. As we further develop in our life, we also experience different realities as our sensory systems age and evolve along with us. Because of this phenomenon, what might have tasted great when you were younger might not be so when you are older.
A major mystery of neuroscience is how the brain, which contains about 100 billion nerve cells, processes all the sensory signals it receives in fragments and unifies them as a whole into our overall perceptions. This is what is referred to as, “the binding problem”. Visual images, for example, may be parallel-processed in twenty-five or more regions of the brain, each with a specialized job such as: color identification, depth perception, motion detection, etc. How does the brain pull all of this back together and form a coherent, unified, interpretation? When we see a friend, and recognize them as such, we see a multiplicity of data like the particular color of hair or clothes, the outline of their face and how far away they are, and even whether they are moving or not. All of these pieces come together to form a capacity to identify the object in front of you as a friend, at the same time all sorts of messages are flooding in from your five primary senses constantly – along with inputs from your memories, previous experiences, and the context of the situation – the brain is constantly making multifaceted connections while simultaneously shaping perceptions with astonishing speed plus precision.
“We still do not know how this operates, but it is known that beyond the simpler parts of the cerebral cortex, there are a number of association areas that are sensitive to more than one sense at a time. So they must be excited by sound or by a visual stimulus or by touch simultaneously.” Dr. Hudspeth, Neuroscientist
This leads to the notion that this, association cortex, is involved in higher processing of information but also somehow responsible for pulling together all of our multitudes of perceptions into a unity. Emotions also influence our perceptions of the world, seeing a close friend elicits a myriad of feelings associated with that person. After we’ve identified someone visually (using the cerebral cortex Occipital Lobe), the message moves to the amygdala (housed in the Limbic System, or house of emotions) which is an area of the brain that helps us determine the close friend’s emotional significance. Conditions such as Capras syndrome, where a loss of emotional connection from a damage to the neural pathways connecting the visual cortex system to the limbic system, offer compelling evidence for how our perceptions are not only shaped by the sensory information, but by how the information is processed and interpreted in the brain.
Our sensations influence our perceptions, which in turn affect our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. If we feel cold, for example, we put on a sweater, or if we feel pain we might reach for a pain reliever. Our conscious awareness or attention directs our perception and novelty or change grabs our attention. We use our senses as an early warning system in a way that our nervous system filters out continuous input and focuses on anything that is novel. We experience this when our senses are exposed to the same stimuli for an extended period of time and therefore tire from this same old stimuli. We adapt to repeated experiences, when riding a roller coaster for the first time, for example, we are enamored with it – but by the fifth experience we begin to become bored with the activity. Adaptations like this can illustrate how our senses not only mediate our perceptions of the world, but also filter and distort them. Our nervous system reacts only to a selected range of disturbances and is limited by our genes, previous experiences, and our current state of mind. In this manner, our senses capture energy from our primary sense organs, and convert this energy into electrical signals that the brain or nervous system then can interpret. It is important to note here that during this process, there is a stage of conversion in which there is always a certain amount of filtering or distortion performed in the activity because the external world necessarily has to be represented as an electrical signal. This mechanism of filtering is a critical one as it prevents information overload and keeps us focused on what is important, or at hand. We have sensory receptors in our ear that constantly work to cancel out noise in the environment that is not selectively advantageous. We can become aware of this if we are in a conversation on the phone and instinctively cancel out any unwanted noises in the phone, such as background noises, and hear only the speakers’ voice. Also, genes influence the sensory information we receive.
Animals seem to possess senses that appear different from our own. Migratory birds have a magnetic sense that guides them to food and warmth south in the fall and north in the spring, sharks, bees, and other animals share in this sense. Rattlesnakes can sense body heat from other animals by utilizing heat-sensing organs on the sides of their heads allowing them a capacity to see heat images of prey that are fractions of a degree warmer than their environment (a narrowing or broadening of their sense perception), day or night. Bats, of course, can navigate by emitting high-pitch sounds and interpreting their echoes. This echolocation, is a radar-like sense that can detect the size of an object, as well as its location and movement, therefore allowing it to distinguish objects as prey or not prey. Electric eels have an ability to stun their prey and defend themselves by producing electric currents at will, they seem to have an electrical sense that also can orient themselves in water, as well as communicate with other eels. Honey bees are able to see light in the ultraviolet range whereas humans cannot, effectively produce a reality that is fundamentally different from that of humans – these can be thought of as two different sensory worlds. Dogs, for example, possess both a brain and nose that currently in combination emerge as the most sophisticated odor detection devices on the planet.
Think of smelling freshly baked cookies, or fresh popcorn, these often trigger memories for most people that can have emotional content. Thinking of the cookies, for instance, has a certain intensity magnitude, but actually smelling the freshly baked cookies would have a greater intensity and possess an even greater emotional reaction. Smelling engages emotionally vivid memories, increases your heart rate, and a whole variety of other mechanisms. Our sense of smell is linked intricately to our memories – the olfactory nerve synapses link directly into the amygdala. The Olfactory Cortex is the portion of the cerebral cortex concerned with the sense of smell and is part of the Cerebrum. From an evolutionary standpoint, the emotional centers of our brain grew out of the olfactory area, so it is completely possible that if we did not have the sense of smell, we might not have emotion.
We can speak of the brain as semi-conscious, and the spine as unconscious, in which the spine can perform simple decisions but the brain is needed for more complex ones. The central nervous system combines both the brain and spine, as they interact with the peripheral nervous system where the sensations reside. The peripheral nervous system where the primary five senses, and other sensations are such as balance, position awareness of where our limbs are intuitively. But it is also the peripheral nervous system where the autonomic and somatic exist, these systems contain a capacity to control a whole range of pulleys and levers in the body. The autonomic nervous system is responsible for the sympathetic response of fight or flight in which the heart rate goes up, as with the blood flow, but digestion decreases; also here is the parasympathetic which allows for rest and digestion; as well as the enteric which controls digestion more directly and can sense changes in the gut. The somatic nervous system holds the sensory nerves carrying afferent nerve fibers, that relay the sensation from the body to the brain or spine, and the motor nerves carrying efferent nerve fibers, that relay the motor commands from the brain or spine to stimulate muscle contraction or action.
Intuition versus Intellect
The intellect is a bad master but a good slave, therefore we should allow our intuition to guide our intellect. Bergson calls on us to allow our intuition to lead our intellect and have our instinct follow through to the end. Instinct, intuition, and intellect all take on functional differences philosophically. In intuition, we can discover differences in kind (non-measurable), whereas the intellect is good at creating differences in degree (measurable) and therefore is the best faculty at stating problems. However we should utilize our intuition to take the properly stated problem from the intellect further by using intuition specifically to discover the truth or falsity of the problem – this can bring us into a deep struggle between the intuition and intellect that is well worth the fight. After this fight between intuition and intellect, instinct finally delivers us the solution to the problem. Our intellect slowly gathers facts, evaluates situations, and logically attempts to develop solutions over time, however our intuition is fast, automatic, and unconscious. Intuition accomplishes this by performing all of its actions below the surface and instantly picks up and judges all sorts of information without us being aware of it.
Heuristics, or rules of thumbs, are a kind of mental shortcut performed as an intuitive reflex or habit of mind. This is used as a time-saver to accomplish the faster speed at interpreting the world around us. For example, the recognition heuristic, declares that when in doubt, go with what you recognize – this is what many of us instinctively end up doing. Intuition becomes the kinds of things we have learned but don’t realize we’ve learned them. Some attribute this capacity to a concept called, “thin-slicing”, or rapid cognition. This refers to an ability of our unconscious awareness to find patterns in situations and behaviors based on very narrow slices of experiences. We thin-slice whenever we meet a new person or have to make a snap sense of something quickly. This is done out of a necessity or requirement of the situation, so much so, that we come to rely on it due to an existence of a multitude of situations where careful attention to the details of a very thin slice, even for more than a second or two, can tell us an awful lot about something (difference in kind). Intuition also shapes many of our fears through a combination of previous experiences and our habit of making snap senses of situations. We have a habit of giving primacy to an immediate object in our field of vision, rather than focusing on an absence of an object – this results in a kind of limitation on intuition that we need to be aware of. Intuition as a faculty has its limits just as the intellect does, and we perform a kind of balancing act on the two.
Balancing our faculties of intuition and intellect, as best we can, provides optimal approaches to life. Experts balance analytical and intuitive thinking all the time that allows them to sharpen their instincts. For example in basketball, a high-speed intricate game is unfolding filled with split-second, spontaneous decision making – but this spontaneity is only possible when everyone first engages in highly structured and repetitive practice. To this end, spontaneity is not random and how good someone is at decisions under fast-moving, high-stress conditions of rapid cognition is a function of training, rules, and rehearsal. Intuition begins with recognizing a situation, chess players in blitz chess make moves on average every six seconds. Intuition helps experts “size up a situation” quickly, and almost instantly create an action plan based on knowledge gained from past experiences (through Bergsonisms recollection of memory which interpolates the past into the present). They are then able to promptly evaluate and refine decisions by imaging scenarios and how they might play out (and determine quality). Intuition, for Bergson, allows us to go beyond the state of experience toward the conditions of real experience (not to be confused with general or abstract broad notions). By utilizing tendencies to pull from a broadening force of the pure perception of the whole of matter (of the body), and the pure memory of the totality of the past (of the mind).
Philosophy of the Body
The body is the center of action and conscious perception, but cannot produce representations. The objects which surround my body that my body is aware of reflect possible actions that my body can take upon them, or from them. Therefore, the perception of these objects that surround my body (matter) therefore provide reference to my body as to a possible, eventual action. However, the body can only sense intensive quantities, these lack any qualities and cannot be imagined or represented. All the body can ‘see’ is intensity in the form of objects surrounding it, possessing potentiality that the body can exchange with. The mind differs from the body in that it is concerned with motor reaction, that is, reflex motor functions – but not with conscious perception. The mind, however, is an image itself and therefore cannot create images, it does not manufacture representations but only complicates the relationship between a received movement (an excitation from the senses) and an executed movement (response to that excitation). The mind does not create images, instead it establishes intervals, where by virtue a being can retain from those ‘material objects’ that surround its body only that which interest it in its potential, virtuality (a bike is a virtual machine until it is actualized, that is put into use by a human-being). Perception, then, is not the object plus something, it is the object minus something – that is, minus everything that does not interest it. Material objects that surround our body contain not only a real perception in this manner, but also a virtual perception: the object of our focus itself merges itself with a pure virtual perception but at the same time our real perception merges with the object of focus from which has been abstracted only that which did not interest us (the lack). By narrowing, or broadening our horizon, we can think using a pure perception identical to the whole of matter, and think using a pure memory identical to the totality of the past. This is to not to go beyond experience towards Kantian concepts, for these concepts only define conditions of all possible experience, but instead going beyond experience towards pure percepts (objects of perception) that are a united whole.
Kant gives an expression of perception as representation with consciousness, from which two new notions emerge: that of sense perception; and cognition. Maurice Merleau-Ponty says that sensing in sense perception, in contrast with knowing from cognition, is a “living communication with the world that makes it present to us as the familiar place of our life” investing the perceived world with meanings and values that refer essentially to our bodies and lives. That is a personal, subjective reference that we bring into a narrative type structure ala mental tricks of duration. We however forget this “phenomenal field”, the world as it appears directly to perception, as a consequence of perception’s own tendency to forget itself in favor of the perceived that it discloses (is interested in). Perception orients itself toward the truth (“we see what we desire to see”), placing its faith in the eventual convergence of perspectives and progressive determination of what was previously indeterminate. But it thereby naturally projects a completed and invariant “truth in itself” as its goal, that it cloaks in confusing mental operations of false problems. Representation in general, is divided into two directions that differ in kind, two pure presences that do not allow themselves to be represented: perception of matter that puts us at once into the body; or perception of memory that puts us at once into the mind. All of our false problems, Bergson reminds us, derive from the fact that we do not know how to go beyond experience, towards the articulation of the real, and rediscover what differs in kind in the badly analyzed composites that are all around us (in the forms of intensities).
“We are condemned to an ignorance alike, of pure perception and pure recollection, to knowing only a single kind of phenomenon that will be called now recollection, and now perception, according to the predominance in it of one or other of the two aspects; and consequently, to finding between perception and recollection only a difference in degree, and not in kind.” Bergsonism
The real in metaphysics can be described in two ways: Wholistic, or the moving continuity of the whole; and, Immanent, or the continual change of form within a living body. However, when speaking of the real in this way, we must note that form is only a static snapshot view of tradition or habit. What our perception does, then, is solidify the fluid continuity of this real as an “open whole into discrete and discontinuous images”. It does this necessarily as a condition of its evolution and adaptation. The changes taking place in the whole, however, are received by the perceptual-living system as if on a surface (therefore we confuse it with false problems). Our perceptual system has evolved habits of representations that either turn away from the real movement of life, or become interested only in the un-moveable static part that we assume is the movement, rather than the actual movement itself.
“An infinite multiplicity becomings variously colored, passes before our eyes: we manage so that we see only differences of color, that is to say, differences of state, beneath which there is supposed to flow, hidden from our view, a becoming always and everywhere the same, invariably colorless.” The Creative Mind: Perception of Change, Bergson
Bergson has a famous Cinematographic model of the Real, in which the real movement of continuity of the united whole is concealed from us, by our habits of representation that are largely spatial (through extensity). We simplify this movement into something mechanical because of a kind of cinematographical character of our adaptation to the current moment. This is owing to a practical character of our understanding and intellect, where we generate an illusion of ‘change as illusion’ in which change becomes disposable in this way into states of the will. Out of these states of decomposition, we produce a movement from a kind of ‘series of immobilities’, or images like in an animated movie of just flipping pictures to make a film. By doing this, we foster a bad habit of extracting from the variations to make a “great image of becoming in general”, where a movement of images causes an infinitely varied becoming.
Bergsonism, Becoming and Time
The grasping of consciousness is a very important concept for figures such as Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, and other phenomenologists where they deem it a kind of intentionality or presence-ing. Presence (Aristotelian taking-as) and wonder (Kantian sublime) are very important metaphysical concepts that modern science is mostly blind to in their pursuits. For Whitehead, the empiricists get apprehension wrong as well, for they think apprehension of concepts (conceptual prehension) is first rather than the apprehension of affects (physical prehension).
“The greatest step that our time has to take is to realize that with the correct sense of philosophical intuition, the phenomenological grasp of essences, a boundless field of work becomes visible.” Edmund Husserl
In giving an account of the whole and our place in it, scientists such as Stephen Hawking must make use of concepts they cannot explain – presence and wonder. Wonder derives from the metaphysical capacity of the sublime. Someone like Kant considers both the beautiful and the sublime as "indefinite" concepts but where beauty relates to the "understanding", sublime is a concept belonging to "reason", and "shows a faculty of the mind surpassing every standard of Sense". For Kant, one's inability to grasp the magnitude of a sublime event such as an earthquake demonstrates inadequacy of one's sensibility and imagination. Simultaneously, one's ability to identify such an event as singular and whole indicates the superiority of one's cognitive, supersensible powers. Ultimately, it is this "supersensible substrate," underlying both nature and thought, on which true sublimity is located. Taking-as, is another important concept for metaphysics as it refers to a kind of presence-to in which brings unity to the notion of human-being and being. That is to say that the human-being ‘takes-as’ being, in the same way a human might take a ship to sail. Another example here is how a human-being might take-as a God that one should respect. Aristotle argues that at the essence of human existence is a unity of different modes of Being that is grounded in a capacity of this mechanism of ‘taking-as’.
Hume’s empiricism was based on experience and observations of the external world, whereas Husserl’s phenomenology was based on an internal world experience. Phenomenology as Husserl conceived of it, could be used as a collection of certain methods of how we engage in the world, such that we can learn from our psyche to form knowledge of ourselves. This began with intentionality, which considers consciousness having a kind of ‘aboutness’ to it. In dreams, we seem to take the dream as our object of focus, in such a deep trance, that it is only when we wake up that we remember we were simply asleep. Heidegger transforms this using Aristotelian metaphysics where intentionality, becomes a kind of care, or being-in-the-world that utilizes a mechanism referred to as dwelling. This dwelling is what gets used to describe presence, for dwelling is the way in which dasein (dynamic subject) gets a more fundamental ‘temporal-unity’ that characterizes its being-in-the-world. Being denoting a presence, whereas nothing denotes an absence.
For Heidegger, to be human is to have an essence of human existence that is grounded in a fundamental ontology or temporal-unity that characterizes care (being-in-the-world). Das seins, or beings, therefore become differentiated from das dings, or things, due to this notion of presence-ing or taking-as. This das sein has three elements: first, a capacity to attribute meaning to external world through contextualizing it and combining experiences into a whole (i.e. differences in kind); second, a psychic state of mind as opposed to empiricism or escapable by empirical tools; and third, a capacity for discourse, that is, things understood which put into language and subjected to our affects. This allows us to view a kind of history of Being, conceived of as a series of appropriating of events, that is, each historical event gets appropriated with das sein itself – the human-being taking-as history. Once the event is appropriated, das sein operates according to a specific set of established sense-making practices utilizing a priori structures of the mind. We can then ask what is doing the appropriation of das sein? To this Heidegger responds, this appropriation is Being unfolding. “Be-ing needs man in order to hold sway”. That hold sway, is an unfolding and where dwelling comes into play. Dasein characterizes a type of subject that has care, where dwelling is bound up with the idea of Being appropriating Dasein. Where one dwells, it is where one is at-home, or quite simply where one has-a-place through a kind of presence. This sense of place is what grounds Heidegger’s existential notion of spatiality (Bergson’s extensity). In dwelling, Dasein locates a set of sense-making practices and structures with which it is familiar, and that is the process of appropriation. Where Being is an event that appropriates place or appropriates dasein in that in its unfolding it essentially happens in and to Dasein’s patterns of sense-making.
“Being of dasein finds its meaning in temporality. But temporality is at the same time the condition of the possibility of historicity as a temporal mode of being of Dasein itself, regardless of whether and how it is a being in time.” Being and Time, Heidegger
Merleau-Ponty argues that the basic level of perceptual experience is the gestalt experience (a new novel experience), the meaningful whole of figure against ground, and that the indeterminate and contextual aspects of the perceived world are positive phenomena that cannot be eliminated from a complete account. Sensing, in contrast with knowing, is a “living communication with the world that makes it present to us as the familiar place of our life” investing the perceived world with meanings and values that refer essentially to our bodies and lives. We forget this “phenomenal field”, the world as it appears directly to perception, as a consequence of perception’s own tendency to forget itself in favor of the perceived that it discloses. Perception orients itself toward the truth, placing its faith in the eventual convergence of perspectives and progressive determination of what was previously indeterminate. But it thereby naturally projects a completed and invariant “truth in itself” as its goal.
Part 1 of a multi-part series
In Part 2 of this series, we will continue into the works of Henri Bergson’s, “The Perception of Change”, as well as Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s, “Phenomenology of Perception”.