Here be the threatened meandering on the subject of perception.
I raised the idea of differing perceptions on the Searching for God thread but as posted there
http://www.religionethics.co.uk/index.php?topic=10333.17825I felt that the subject was something wider than any one person's perception and, as is often the way, I seemed to find the subject related to many more threads in disparate ways.
First, let me repost the link to the wiki entry on perception which is a useful read, no matter if this post ends up not being (in your perception).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PerceptionWhile I recommend the article, the definitional part at the start is what I am going to concentrate on here, with some sub rambles on various byways. To echo a point that I was trying to get across the overall perceptual process that we use and are part of as individuals is not under the control of something conscious. We don't make choices about how we perceive things, though it seems to me that 'how' is as individual as a fingerprint, though it may be the definition of the individual.
To illustrate, let me pick up on a point that was part of the discussion between bluehillside and me in the Searching for God thread. We may, as we wander through the bush, hear a noise and think that could be a tiger, that might be backed up by the way we see the bush grass move, we tense, sweat beginning to pour, bladder signalling,adrenaline racing, ready to run, fight, and then all of sudden we see it is merely one of the bush leprechauns wending its way, and whistling to itself in a sort of tigerish way. He looks up, nods, says 'Thought I was a tiger, didn't you, to be sure, to be sure' and disappears off in a trail of stereotypes.
Now all of that is about a set of individual perceptions, and it seems to me that for the most part if there were two of us wandering the bush together , we would have had a similar set of reactions. Perhaps though if one of us knew only of leprechauns, we would have been expecting the little person but that's a question of knowledge and while our reactions would be different we 'expect' that the perceptions were similar.
However, what if our methods of perception themselves are different. I suggested in reply to Ekim on Searching for God that one minor example might be synaesthesia which I have a mild version of,
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SynesthesiaNow, it could well be to do with unusual brain wiring, but in the experiencing of it for the individual it isn't something that feels odd. It is something you find out is odd because others tell you.
Similarly, when you look at the issues that people in the autism spectrum have, there seems to be a different perception. As ever with such things, it isn't about a judgement in actuality that we say what is right/wrong but by a process of a rational ad populum. It is easier for a social species to work if the perception of the majority is taken as correct.
That trust in the perception of the majority seems a powerful force as per the Asch experiments,
https://www.simplypsychology.org/asch-conformity.htmlAnd the question I have always wondered is can extremes of social pressure, rather like Room 101 in 1984, actually change the perception of the individual as to the number of fingers or length of lines.
To loop back to the issue in Searching for God that triggered this, when I read from Alan Burns that he doesn't see the same form of self awareness in the eyes of an orangutan as I do, that seems to me (to my perception), to read as if we are actually having different experiences. It's not the case that he, or I, lack knowledge of tigers in the tiger impersonating leprechaun, it's that we aren't hearing or seeing in the same way. This is very similar to discussions had with Floo about her perception of music, which seems utterly alien to mine.
Again, I hasten to add this isn't so much about right/wrong perception but about the difficulty in having discussion if there are such differences. There are obvious cases where we know taking drugs changes how we perceive, as in the Cary Grant thread that I started around the time of raising this in Searching for God,
http://www.religionethics.co.uk/index.php?topic=13893.0And indeed, when I started thinking about writing this thread, the first title that I thought of (and used in a parodied form), was The Doors of Perception,
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Doors_of_PerceptionHowever, we also go through experiences of naturally produced chemical changes, and the language we use often mirrors that of drug based experiences, as per the discussion on losing the idea of self through live in the thread below,
http://www.religionethics.co.uk/index.php?topic=13894.0I think we find it too easy to assume that because we might be generally similar, that we are the same. The move to think of autism as a spectrum seems to me to be something we could extend so that, in many ways when we think other people have just had the same experience, we realise that they can't have had. For the most part in terms of catching a bus, the difference in how we perceive the bus won't matter for the vast majority of people. But when as things are less concrete and we move to questions of what it is to be human, where we deal with the ineffable questions, when the spectre of hard solipsism gains power, I think we need to wonder much more about those differences.
