Sensory Qualities


Guyau

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It's coincidental that I came across this thread as just last night I was talking to my brother about what goes on inside the brains of our furry little friends, specifically, our cat. We humans are introduced to language at such an early age it's hard to imagine sensing the world without assigning words to it, but then it's hard to imagine a cat somehow describing an object or a situation to another cat.

Also, I wonder if we humans first communicated with our hands. It's evident, as can be seen with sign language, our species' ability to create a complex language through the use of our hands and arms, or more definitively, the use of gestures. This also makes me think of something my high school teacher taught me: verbs are vital to language. After all, communicating is itself an action whether we do it through gesture or word.

Edit: Cat's do gesture.....

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It's coincidental that I came across this thread as just last night I was talking to my brother about what goes on inside the brains of our furry little friends, specifically, our cat. We humans are introduced to language at such an early age it's hard to imagine sensing the world without assigning words to it, but then it's hard to imagine a cat somehow describing an object or a situation to another cat.

Also, I wonder if we humans first communicated with our hands. It's evident, as can be seen with sign language, our species' ability to create a complex language through the use of our hands and arms, or more definitively, the use of gestures. This also makes me think of something my high school teacher taught me: verbs are vital to language. After all, communicating is itself an action whether we do it through gesture or word.

As for wordless thought, humans often think (imagine, recall) using imagery. Other species, probably much more so. Some other species also communicate different things to one another with different vocalizations.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Bobby, related to your second paragraph of #26, I thought you might like to know that Maria Montessori called the hand “the instrument of the mind,” considered that the hand operating with the brain creates the child’s intellect, and put this conception into the structure of her educational system. Also, this coming April, MIT Press is coming out with The Hand, An Organ of the Mind, edited by Zdravko Radman.

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Bobby, related to your second paragraph of #26, I thought you might like to know that Maria Montessori called the hand “the instrument of the mind,” considered that the hand operating with the brain creates the child’s intellect, and put this conception into the structure of her educational system. Also, this coming April, MIT Press is coming out with The Hand, An Organ of the Mind, edited by Zdravko Radman.

That explains why I cannot do mathematics well unless I have a paper and writing instrument. Just the -act- of writing seems to focus my analytical processing. Just the right scribble (which involves both hand and eye) and buzz-click the pieces fall into place.

I will my mind on getting this book to hand when it comes out.

Ba'al Chatzaf

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  • 4 months later...

Perceiving a straight rod partially immersed in water is perceiving the rod as bent. It is not perceiving an appearance of the rod as bent, but perceiving the rod as bent. One can realize that the rod is truly straight from other, weightier experience of the rod as straight and say truly that the partially immersed rod only appears to be a bent one. But from that saying about its appearance, one should not slide to disavowing that one genuinely perceives the rod as bent. We perceive firstly, cogitate about appearances secondly.

Perceptions deliver things as true. They do not wait on our thought about them to present themselves as true. The partially immersed straight rod is presented as continuous and as bent. Both its continuity and its bend are presented as true in the perception, notwithstanding our knowledge external to the perception that the rod is truly continuous, but straight.

Delivering themselves as truth, perceptions have degrees of it. Having degrees of veridicality, perceptions are assessable for fidelity in presenting the way their objects are. The only ones I recall as totally false are one’s that come from defects in sensory apparatus. Such are floaters, due to faults in the retina; there is no such speck out there where it is seen (or anywhere else). Perceptions with fully intact sensory systems of sight and touch are always partly correct in their presentations as true. Please correct me with a counterexample if you think of one.

Having degrees of truth in their expressions of truth, it would seem perceptions have degrees of objectivity in their presentations. My floaters are not objective at all. They are not subjective in the sense of being causeless or fanciful, but they are completely lacking in the objectivity of other items presented in the visual field. Most perception is highly objective. Here, then, is a sense in which objectivity is rightly applicable to perception.

The lack of objectivity in the floaters, I notice, is a case of poorness in the engineering-performance sense, which I spoke of in #2. That is not so with the type of deficiency of objectivity at hand in the case of the straight rod seen partially immersed in water or in the case of Mach bands enhancing grayness difference at their joins all around us.

Related References

Tyler Burge’s Origins of Objectivity (2010, 396–404).

John Haugeland’s “Objective Perception” in Having Thought (1998).

David Kelley’s The Evidence of the Senses (1986, 81–95).

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  • 6 months later...

Hallucination: Philosophy and Psychology

Fiona Macpherson and Dimitris Platchias, editors (MIT 2013)






What about hallucinations. Sometimes they cannot be distinguished from perceiving something that exists.

You can search for hallicination here using the Look Inside feature.



See also page 27 of Kathleen Touchstone’s “Attentional and Perceptual Disorders and the Nature of Consciousness.”*

Arguments against perceptual realism from hallucinations are countered by David Kelley on pages 133–38 of The Evidence of the Senses.*

The argument from hallucination is the subject of Part II of The Problem of Perception (2002), by A. D. Smith, the preeminent direct realist in philosophy of perception today. There is extensive discussion of the relation of perception and hallucination, as well as leads to the current literature, in Bill Brewer’s Perception and Its Objects (2011, 108–117).

Those realists include refutations of philosophic arguments based on total hallucination against realist perception, that is, based on hallucinations in which there is no object at all triggering the hallucination. I have not yet found cases of such hallucinations outside philosophical hypotheticals. I think the realist counters in the literature are good against arguments from total hallucinations, whether they be real phenomena or only hypothetical. However, in the analysis and positive account by Smith, I was particularly left with a sense that such treatments really ought to include treatment of the relation of hallucinations, total or less than total, to dreams.

My one experience with hallucinations was certainly not total. It was due to a temporary condition of metabolic encephalopathy, due to a medical condition. It included a melting quality to any kind of shiny plastic and the hands of the clock on the wall of the hospital room going around fast like in a cartoon. My estimate would be that the ability for not only visual observation, but visual percepts was being degraded. Fortunately, my mind was not alone in the world those couple of days.

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