Perception

The textbook definition – “ an awareness of things through our five senses – sight, sound, touch, taste and smell” (van de Lagemaat).  How does awareness relate to or contribute to a way of knowing? What do we need to do to move to a higher level or greater exactness of knowing when drawing upon perception as a principle way of knowing?

Which of your senses would you be willing to give up…if you had to?

What subjects of study would you say are most strongly connected to your perceptions? What would you offer as support for your position?

How does what we expect to see impact our interpretation of what we see?  Ever proof read something a dozen times and then hand it to another person who immediately sees the the error?  Did you catch two “the”s in the previous sentence. It is absolutely not uncommon to have readers, particularly good readers, fly past that simple typing error because they would not expect to see it in the sentence. For others the error is jarring and leaps off the page almost as those it was the only word in the sentence.

Check out Visual Agnosia YouTube explanation- the inability to interpret what you see.

What do you see?  Look again?  Look at is a parent, as a teenager, as a minority. Look at kids playing in the playground as an individual who can’t get pregnant; as someone who just got pregnant. Explore the concept of “Point of View”. Ever watch a football game and gone away convinced the refs were blind?

What do you hear? Listen again.

What do you smell? Smell again.  Does AXE really hide the Pot smell?  Parody of a Febreeze commercial

Is your taste affected by smell? Sight? Experience? Ever got sick after a meal…how’d that affect your sense of taste and smell next time that food was present?

I wonder…..thoughts of others about our perceptions and knowing

Henry David Thoreau “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see”

 Erwin Schrodinger  “The task is…not so much to see what no one has yet seen; but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everyone sees”

Albert Einstein “Small is the number of people who see with their eyes and think with their minds.”

 Toby Beta “Some people say do not just a book by its cover. Well, I say not to judge at all. People can say anything they want to say, but for me, cover does matter.”

Steven Redhead “You can’t change the past, only your perception of it; but you can control the future.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson “There is an optical illusion about every person we meet.”

C.S. Lewis “What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what kind of person you are.”

Friedrich Nietzsche “And those who were seen dancing, were thought to be crazy, by those who could not hear the music.”

Aldous Huxley “There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.”

 David Hume “We can know nothing until we have seen it or experienced it.”

 Edgar Allan Poe “All that we see to seem is but a dream within a dream.”

W.B. Yeats “The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”

David Hume “Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.”

Galileo “The tickle is not in the feather.”