“What role does what we expect to see – or are used to seeing – play in what we observe? Discuss both sense perception and reason.” This is the question I chose to answer, and my answer is that what we expect to see and are used to seeing play a great role in what we observe. Our experiences and expectations shape our sense perception to a fault, which is where reason comes into play, and corrects the inaccuracies.
The human brain is used to looking for patterns; we regularly observe faces, for example, and rely on them for a great amount of information, from trying to assess emotions to judging the state of health of other people. Due to this, our brain is constantly looking for them. When we saw a picture in class of a face on the moon, it was an example of the flaws in human sense perception. Our brain is so used to seeing faces that it begins to make out the general pattern of a face in various objects or places where it wouldn’t reasonably make sense for a face to exist. The brain is programmed to look for patterns; sense perception observes the face, but reason tells us that ou...
Sense Perception is a way of knowing in which a person can acquire knowledge using their five senses - taste, touch, sight, sound and smell. Sense perception is an important in our understanding of the world, and is a source of much of the pleasure in our lives. But, can we trust our senses to give us the truth? This may come out as an odd question to many because according to experience and history it is known that humans greatly rely on sense perception as a means of survival. However, like all ways of knowing, sense perception has its weakness; our senses can easily be deceived. In his TED Talk, “Are we in control of our decisions?” behavioral economist Dan Ariely uses examples and optical illusions to demonstrate the roles, strengths and limitations of sense perception as a way of knowing.
Appearance is what we perceive around us; it is sometimes known as the empirical, which means known through the senses. Reality is most commonly defined as all that exists regardless of whether it is perceived or not; in other words, it exists independently of anyone’s perception.The metaphysical problem of reality and appearance can be described as the difficulty of telling the objective from the subjective. One of the proboems of reality and appearance has already been illustrated by Plato, which is that reality is genuine as opposed to deceptive. He suggests a rationalist approach to answering this question relying on reasons that focused on our senses. Our sensory knowlege and experiences are our only perceptions of reality, but that can still mean that its not really there. All that us humans have are our own paradigms of what reality “really is” which is based upon a series of assumptions and beleifes that in turn, determines their views of reality.
What we see in some things can based on our past experiences and things we’vewe have seen before. If you ever look at the clouds during the day and try to decide what you see and then ask someone else what they see it’sit is about very little chance that everyone will see the same thing. This is what I think of
In “The Anatomy of Judgmen”t, M. L. J. Abercrombie discusses how information is gained through our perception. Abercrombie claims that interpretation is a very complicated task that people have been learning to exercise since birth. Each person has a different way of interpreting the objects or situations they see, because people often relate their own past experiences. She also explains two important concepts: schemata and context. She defines schemata as a way our mind functions by understanding new things perceived through sight, by relating it to an individual’s past experiences. Past experiences help interpret what is seen further, if the object fits one’s expectation or their schemata, and not something different from their past experiences. Her fundamental insight is that seeing is more complex than just passively registering what is seen, and consists of a form judgment for...
In Stephen Jay Gould’s essay, “Some close encounters of a mental kind,” Gould discussed about how certainty can be both blessing and dangerous. According to Gould, certainty can be blessing because it can provide warmth, comfort and secure. However, it can also be a danger because it can trick our mind with false information of what we see and remember in our mind. Gould also talked about the three levels of possible error in direct visual observation: misperception, retention and retrieval. According to Gould, our human mind is the greatest miracle of nature and the wicked of all frauds and tricksters mixed. To support his argument and statements, he used an example of an experiment that Elizabeth Loftus, a professor from University of California Irvine, did to her students and a personal experience of his childhood trip to the Devils Tower. I agree with Gould that sight and memory do not provide certainty because what we remember is not always true, our mind can be tricky and trick us into believing what we see/hear is real due to the three potential error of visual observation. Certainty is unreliable and tricky.
In her essay “Seeing”, Annie Dillard focuses on showing how different people have different perceptions. Dillard gives multiple examples to support her main idea, which is that preconceived and inherited notions influence our perceptions. Dillard discusses the different ways of seeing, how people with different backgrounds have different experiences with seeing, and many more. While Dillard’s idea about perceptions is definitely relevant and accurate, but are certainly not complete as there are multiple things that influence our perceptions.
The world is full of stimuli that can attract our attention through various senses. This might include anything that can be seen, touched, tasted, smelled or heard. According to yuwachet siritham the process in which in we create our perceptions is done in three steps, which is. First we select, then secondly we sort, and finally the third one is we will interpret the data given by our environment.
In the world of science there are many discoveries. “A discovery is like falling in love and reaching the top of a mountain after a hard climb all in one, an ecstasy not induced by drugs but by the revelation of a face of nature … and that often turns out to be more subtle and wonderful than anyone had imagined.” (Ferdinand Puretz). Most people in the world we live in lack to notice and or appreciate the gift of sight in life. By not cherishing the gift of sight and using it properly, many discoveries are left unfound. In the writing piece, Seeing, Annie Dillard speaks of nature and the small things that we all are unconsciously blind to and not appreciative of. Seeing explores the idea of what it means to truly see things in this world. Annie Dillard’s main point is that we should view the world with less of a meddling eye, so that we are able to capture things that would otherwise go unnoticed. There’s a science to how we view things in nature. Dillard attempts to persuade her reader to adopt to her way of seeing, which is more artificial rather than natural.
Everyone has a different perception than another, such a different perception that should be taken into account by other people. Whether people are blind or crazy, some people of this world are impaired so their lives are limited. The unknown can be very mind-boggling to these impaired people. Though at the same time there is a strong possibility that there are also even more unknown things to unimpaired people. Plato’s “The Allegory of the Cave” and “Seeing” by Annie Dillard suggest that knowledge and reality are both a matter of perception based on experiences; and as such, great care should be taken by anyone who attempts to redefine the perceptions of another.
Bound by a steal chain and guilty as charged. If anyone has ever been destined by expectations, regardless of how ridiculous, outrageous, or downright impossible they may seem, it’s definitely me! Expectations suck, as they set us up for disappointment. People’s expectations can impact the behavior and success of a person unknowingly. Race, weight, class, gender, religion, and disability are the most common Prejudices. A lot of people, including myself, judge others based on their perspective and expect you to be a certain type of way.
The claim that we perceive the world via sense data is a possibility. However, even though Sense Data explains why illusions, perceptual variation, hallucination, time lag occur, it is not necessary to explain these problems. A sophisticated Direct Realist can explain most of these problems just as easily. As both theories have problems, they can be favoured equal to one another; except Direct Realism is the most systematic, economic, practical, and simplest theory, and thus provides the best working hypothesis.
Perception is defined as the awareness of the world through the use of the five senses, but the concept of perception is often used to isolate one person’s point of view, so how reliable can perception be if no one person’s is exactly the same? The word perception itself is riddled with different, well, perceptions of its meaning. When some hear the word, they might automatically think of it as something innately flawed, that can easily be fooled by illusions, while others may think of its usefulness when avoiding scalding a hand on a hot stove. I am here to agree with both and to argue that perception is something necessary and helpful, and something that should be scrutinized for its flaws. By looking at perception as a way of knowing in the context of memory and human sciences, it can be concluded that perception can contribute to the acquisition of knowledge by constructing a foundation on which incoming stimuli from the environment are able to be quickly interpreted and acted upon, but perception can also hinder the acquisition of knowledge by wrongly interpreting those stimuli, causing inappropriate reactions.
Observational learning is a type of learning that is done by observing the actions of others. It describes the process of learning by watching others, retaining what was learned, and
For most of us, the human face is one of the most common visual stimuli experienced on a daily basis. Starting from birth, we begin to identify the faces of those around us, soon becoming an everyday occurrence not given much thought to. In the following pages, I will be discussing face perception and the cognitive functions behind it, prosopagnosia, and the question of whether faces are any different from other specialized object recognition.
The power of our mind comes not from its ability to observe, but its ability to apply these observations to create assumptions about the world around us. In doing so our mind goes beyond the information given, our sensory information, and uses these assumptions to respond in an appropriate manner. For our purposes an assumption is any belief or prediction we have about an object or situation that could not be ascertained solely from the information given to us by our senses and is based on prior experiences with the purpose of giving us reliable information to use. Our mind makes assumptions because without doing so it would need to treat every event as a new problem to be solved, when one’s mind finally did come to the solution, it would likely be one it had come to innumerable times before. As such, assumptions tend to be helpful shortcuts that allow us to use less processing power.