A Picture Of Perception

The goal here is to get the reader to see that there are problems in philosophy.

It doesn't matter that they don't like the topic or that they think it is over-thinking. What matters is that the reader sees there are actual problems. What the average person needs to learn is that things are deeper than they think. Once this is learned deeply they can applied it to topics they care about.

When in common language we use the word "see" what do we mean? We mean various things, but the most common is that we perceive something. For example, we see a person walk in a room. But is it really that simple, do we use vision alone?

And here is the key: it is at this point in learning and discussing that most people turn off. They believe that someone walking in the room and being "seen" is easy and the same for every perceiving being. For them it is not a problem. The goal of philosophy first and foremost is to show that this is in fact a problem. This truth once learned becomes the launching point for critical thinking and self-awareness (which is two sides of the same coin).

When a person walks in a room a number of things happen for a viewer. First of all, it is not always the "seeing" that comes first. It may be a sound. It may be that they sneak up on you and touch you. When you know that someone has walked in a room, you have woven together a picture that we might call perception. This perception is a confluence of the senses we understand and study and, perhaps, other senses also. There is no reason to believe that on a fundamental, scientific level, it is safe or honest to assume we know everything about the way we gather information in the world. But all of these senses, known and unknown, paint a picture of perception for us about what is happening.

A person walks in the room.

What happens truly is that we don't actually gain perception through any one sense or, if we consider it, any senses at all. Senses help to paint a picture. What does this mean? When I paint a picture in my mind of a person walking into a room, especially at a distance, this picture is not formed by my eyes. How do I know this? Well, my eyes are medically altered and they see differently (if I close one I can see the difference between them, one far and one near, it's called monovision) and if I'm watching someone at a distance it is actually my brain that gathers the data and paints a picture that is remarkably different from any of the information from either eye. Eye doctors know this about monovision and they will explain to you that even though your eyes each see very differently, your brain will merge this into an automatic picture. Otherwise, I'd be walking around seeing things differently with each eye and it wouldn't work. So, though your eyes can be thought of as tools, it is your brain that ultimately paints the picture.

But what of other animals?. Dogs do not paint a picture with sight. The truth is we don't exactly know what their pictures "look" like because we can't actually experience perception as they do. But we know that smell plays a greater role than sight. Many animals, in fact, gain perception, even at a distance, from smelling first. The reason humans walk on two legs, actually, is an evolutionary tactic to maximize vision as a primary sense-tool.

The takeway here is that all of these tool combinations lead to a mental picture which is actually how we "see." And the fact that this process is full of all of these attributes and complexities demonstrates how much one needs to know about physiology just to understand how perception happens. This knowledge may be the difference between perceiving something real or not.

Of course this discussion could go on forever and certainly it would lead to theories regarding subjectivity and objectivity, but what we are trying to accomplish plainly is that a simple idea like one of seeing contains depth. If we don't know it like that we haven't considered the primary issue in critical thought. We haven't learned that simple things can be complex. The main reason our cures for things outside of medicine never work (traffic, obesity, addiction disorders and solipsism, et al) is because we can't conceive of the problem in a complex way. As a species we are not thinkers and this lack of awareness, starting with "depth," has brought us to this tipping point where nothing works and everyone in the world but us are "idiots."