Why are perception and reality seen as distinct entities?

[nyouremyperfect10]

For any given human being, isn't it the case that perception is reality?

 

 

[ajb]

No. Otherwise we could all have to accept that ghosts and UFOs are real!

[nyouremyperfect10]

really?

 

If you like ham pizza and your spouse/significant other likes pineapple pizza, isn't this subjective perception causing reality?

 

if all we can ever experience is our own perceptions, then does it not stand to reality being subjective?

 

Also, how do you know that UFO and ghosts aren't real? The BEST we can say is there is no evidence to support them, not that they categorically don't exist.

Edited August 28, 2013 by nyouremyperfect10

[ajb]

If you like ham pizza and your spouse/significant other likes pineapple pizza, isn't this subjective perception causing reality?

I don't follow. It just means one cannot define an absolute answer to "which pizza tates best", or something similar. However, if I have two pizzas in front of me then anyone who can clearly observe and inspect them will agree I have two pizzas. Assuming we have a definition of a pizza and that what I have in front of me is, by that definition a pizza.

 

if all we can ever experience is our own perceptions, then does it not stand to reality being subjective?

Don't take anyones perceptions as absolute truth, not even your own. You should seek independent varification from as many sources as possible and use this to understand what is going on.

[StringJunky]

if all we can ever experience is our own perceptions, then does it not stand to reality being subjective?

The notion of reality is subjective at a personal level but we can get a more objective view by seeking an Intersubjective consensus based on repeatable observations or experiments. Where there is commonality we can agree that such is so within the defined parameters which is relatively better than an individual assessment i.e. improved negation or consideration of variables.

[WWLabRat]

StringJunky's right. OP, Perception and reality, by their very definitions are separate.

 

 

per·cep·tion noun \pər-ˈsep-shən\

1

a : a result of perceiving : observation (see perceive)

b : a mental image : concept

2

obsolete : consciousness

3

a : awareness of the elements of environment through physical sensation <color perception>

b : physical sensation interpreted in the light of experience

4

a : quick, acute, and intuitive cognition : appreciation

b : a capacity for comprehension

 

 

re·al·i·ty noun \rē-ˈa-lə-tē\

1

: the quality or state of being real

2

a (1) : a real event, entity, or state of affairs <his dream became a reality> (2) : the totality of real things and events <trying to escape from reality>

b : something that is neither derivative nor dependent but exists necessarily

 

By these definitions, both provided by Merriam-Webster, "Perception" is that which is observed, whereas "Reality" is that which is in a state of being real. Someone who hears disembodied voices perceives them, observes them, but that doesn't make them real. How do we know what's real? As someone whose maternal grandmother was schizophrenic, I have been asking this same question my entire life. After many years, I settled on the basis that what's real is what is scientific, and thus what is real is what is physical and measurable, not that which is abstract and unable to be tested.

[StringJunky]

StringJunky's right. OP, Perception and reality, by their very definitions are separate.

 

 

 

By these definitions, both provided by Merriam-Webster, "Perception" is that which is observed, whereas "Reality" is that which is in a state of being real. Someone who hears disembodied voices perceives them, observes them, but that doesn't make them real. How do we know what's real? As someone whose maternal grandmother was schizophrenic, I have been asking this same question my entire life. After many years, I settled on the basis that what's real is what is scientific, and thus what is real is what is physical and measurable.

 

I suppose you could define one aspect of reality as: That item or property which can have a state of presence independent of an observer.

 

Another thing, semantically, reality is a mental construct and perception is a process so they aren't synonymous although people often treat them as such.

Edited August 29, 2013 by StringJunky

[WWLabRat]

I suppose you define one aspect of reality as: That item or property which can have a state of presence independent of an observer.

It may not seem it at first, but that's a fairly loaded question... The simplest answer would be yes. Yes, I think that would be a fair supposition.

 

To elaborate a bit, I am of the opinion that nothing is entirely unable to be observed. Everything is constantly interacting with everything else all the time. Granted it may not be apparent, at least on the macro. However on the atomic scale, you can see that atoms are in constant motion. Suppose you have a box, sitting in an empty room, no windows to look through, no scent emanating from the box, no one in the room with it either. No cameras, etc. Molecules in the air are still bouncing off the box and scattering about the room. And each of those atoms are hitting off of other atoms, and so on. At some point, this chain of collisions will make it under the door and then hit a person. The box has now indirectly interacted with an observer without them even knowing. I know this is probably taking it a bit overboard, but it's similar to a butterfly effect (no, not the movie) where a butterfly flapping its wings in America will cause a tsunami in Japan.

 

My point with all this being that since that box is still interacting with atoms in the air and on the floor, it still physically exists.

[tar]

WWLabRat,

 

I think we all usually have a grasp of reality. That is, we know what is a proper noun, and we know what is an abstract noun. We know which and what parts of reality are PROPER and fitting and which take a bit of imagination to understand or concieve of. And generally we know by the actions and words of a person, when they have lost their grasp of the distinction between the two types of nouns.

 

Regards, TAR2

[WWLabRat]

WWLabRat,

 

I think we all usually have a grasp of reality. That is, we know what is a proper noun, and we know what is an abstract noun. We know which and what parts of reality are PROPER and fitting and which take a bit of imagination to understand or concieve of. And generally we know by the actions and words of a person, when they have lost their grasp of the distinction between the two types of nouns.

 

Regards, TAR2

 

I apologize, but I feel I'm missing something... When did this become a discussion about parts of speech?

 

Second thing is, are you insinuating that I have lost grasp of the difference between the two? Last I heard, atoms are still considered matter. Matter is physical, as in not abstract. So what I said in the previous post is not an abstraction, it's an explanation of the interaction of particles with the world.

[StringJunky]

It may not seem it at first, but that's a fairly loaded question... The simplest answer would be yes. Yes, I think that would be a fair supposition.

 

To elaborate a bit, I am of the opinion that nothing is entirely unable to be observed. Everything is constantly interacting with everything else all the time. Granted it may not be apparent, at least on the macro. However on the atomic scale, you can see that atoms are in constant motion. Suppose you have a box, sitting in an empty room, no windows to look through, no scent emanating from the box, no one in the room with it either. No cameras, etc. Molecules in the air are still bouncing off the box and scattering about the room. And each of those atoms are hitting off of other atoms, and so on. At some point, this chain of collisions will make it under the door and then hit a person. The box has now indirectly interacted with an observer without them even knowing. I know this is probably taking it a bit overboard, but it's similar to a butterfly effect (no, not the movie) where a butterfly flapping its wings in America will cause a tsunami in Japan.

 

My point with all this being that since that box is still interacting with atoms in the air and on the floor, it still physically exists.

Yes, I agree. In the room or out of the room this is the closest to perceiving it you'll get short of touching it. The resulting pattern of collisions with the box is actually a record of past events that then collide with your senses creating new patterns which are then interpreted by the brain. The fact that these recordings were made in the past takes us even further away from any chance of perceiving external current reality. What we actually see in our minds is a model based on current incoming sensory data mingled somewhat with data from past memories into a cohesive impression of the world around us.

 

Thinking about the original question: perception is the process of building an impression of the world around us which we call reality...reality being those things that we believe exist independently of our own existence.

[Ophiolite]

Why are perception and reality seen as distinct entities?

 

Because it really seems that way to me.

[tar]

WWLabRat,

 

I wasn't insinuating you had lost any grasp. Sorry.

 

I was trying to answer the thread question. I look at things with the aid of linquistics, because I feel that the way we put sentences together is strongly related to the way we put ideas together, and hence "thought" and language can be looked at, at the same time, and say something about each other.

 

I did realize on the drive home though that I a made a mistake. I didn't mean proper nouns as opposed to abstract nouns. I meant concrete nouns as opposed to abstract nouns.

 

Anyway, StringJunky answered the question well. In the direction I was clumbsily headed.

 

I do believe it is important to grasp the idea that a concrete world exists outside of our individual body/brain/heart group, that we interalize and build a model of, through one or more of our senses.

 

With this understanding, it is also apparent that the perception of the thing and the internal model of the thing is distinct from the thing itself. Not at all unrelated to the thing, and with direct analogies to the thing, but seen and felt as being distinct entities, because the thing in and of itself, is NOT the same entity, as the understanding we have of it, or the model we have of it, or what we perceive of it, or what we sense of it, or what we think about it, or what we say about it.

 

The thought or perception is real, in and of itself, and the thing thought about is real, in and of itself. Thus perception and reality are seen as distinct entities because they are distinct entities, according to both our senses and our understanding.

 

Regards, TAR2

[Thorham]

For any given human being, isn't it the case that perception is reality?

No, because what you see isn't always what you get. A good example is color. Color only exists in the mind, it's not a physical property. It's the brain's way to represent the frequencies of visible light, and while this representation is fairly accurate (although not under all circumstances), it's still just a representation of those frequencies of photons.

 

Another one is atomic matter. Ordinary matter may appear completely solid. That's what we see and that's what it seems like when interacting with that matter, but the truth is that solid matter is mostly empty space. Objects don't fall through your table not because there isn't any room for that, but because the objects and the table exert forces on each other that prevent the objects from moving down any farther than the table's surface.

 

Yet another one is the sun rising and setting. It may seem that the sun moves around the earth, but it's the other way around. For the moon, however, it's true, it moves around the earth. Both the sun and the moon seem to be doing the same thing, while in reality they're not.

 

Basically, we don't always see how things really are.

Edited September 1, 2013 by Thorham

[John Cuthber]

"Why are perception and reality seen as distinct entities?"

Because they are not the same thing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_illusion

[tar]

John Cuthber,

 

Well thanks for the link. Read and followed some other terms and ran into two that are important to me, and fit in well with a discussion I am having with Gees and Moontanman on the supernatural and superstition (and probably tie in well as well to the "people who believe in God are broken, thread".

 

The two terms are "ground and figure", and "unsupervised learning".

 

Given the fact, that we are human, and capable of unsupervised learning, unlike a humanly programmed machine (except perhaps the Baysian, probabilistic neural processing machines in alternate "sleep and wake mode"), it is quite reasonable and proper that we "believe" our own eyes and ears and nose and touch and other "senses" that inform us of the world around around us. These senses, bring us an analog representation of what is "true", and we learn such, immediately, in a consistent manner, that links up, or makes sense in accordance with that about the world that other people learn in this direct and unsupervised way. As such, much of the "processing" and pattern matching, and analogies, that make up "thought" about the real world, are "tried and true" understandings about the nature of the world that is just past your fingertips, just outside your view, still exhistent with your eyes closed and your ears covered. A world that you have learned about, and continue to learn about, unsupervised.

 

Supervised learning, or "teaching", speeds up the process and improves ones "reach" when information comes from a trusted source, but the individual already is grounded, already has a ground to interpret the moving and changing figures against.

There may be illusions of "ground and figure" possible, but required to have an illusion is the capability to "get it right" as well.

 

It is true that the Earth revolves around the Sun and the moon and the Earth are revolving around each other, and the Earth is rotating on its axis and so on, but this is completely consistent with what we see, when we look at these bodies in the sky. The Sun comes up, every day, tracks across the sky and goes down in the West. The moon comes up in the East and tracks to the West across the sky every day, but day to day seems to be making a monthly repeating progression in the other direction.

 

Our senses wouldn't lie to us, about either the figures or the ground we notice behind them. Not consistently lie to us. "Mistakes" are made, but predictions that turn out to be false are quickly discarded and the "real" facts, accepted and our model thusly repaired or expanded, of the "reality", that our perceptions are of.

 

Regards, TAR2

[John Cuthber]

"It is true that the Earth revolves around the Sun and the moon and the Earth are revolving around each other"

Actually, they both revolve around their common centre of mass- but that's hardly the point.

 

Our senses do consistently lie to us.

Have a look at the lowest picture here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PoggZoelMuel.png

Our senses consistently tell us that one of the horizontal lines is shorter than the other.

 

It has been documented since 1889

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCller-Lyer_illusion

 

And we still see the illusion even though we know it's not true.

So, what we perceive- two lines of different lengths- differs from reality- two lines of the same length.

 

"but predictions that turn out to be false are quickly discarded and the "real" facts, accepted and our model thusly repaired or expanded, of the "reality", that our perceptions are of."
The system hasn't "quickly" repaired that fault in over a hundred years.

[tar]

John Cuthber,

 

Point is, you know what is true, and why.

 

I can hide a 2 1/2 ton truck behind my thumb at arms length, if its far enough away, yet I don't believe its really that small. I can easily discount the appearence as an "illusion". That fact that is ALWAYS looks small when its far away is not an indication that my senses are lying to me.

 

We will have to take the illusions one by one to determine which are incorrect cognitive adjustments, and which are examples of "correct" cognitive adjustments that just do not apply to the situation.

 

Like the checkerboard with the cylinder casting a shadow over it. It is a picture, it is not a real black and white checkerboard, with a real cylinder casting a shadow from a consistent light source at a particular angle. The cognitive "adjustments" that we make are "correct" in the real situation. We know the white squares are actually white, even though they are are a darker shade of grey in the shadow. That the picture can be constructed to "fool" our normal expertise in accounting for shadows, is clever, and indicative of the nature of perception, but the picture is the lie, not our ability to account for the effect of shadow.

 

My favorite experiment to set your understanding of illusion and reality, at the proper point, in respect to "how things seem" and which parts you should "believe" and which parts you should remain a bit skeptical about is this. Stare at the same thing, keeping your eyes as stationary as possible for 30 secounds. Then shift your fixed stare to a point on a white sheet of paper, or a white wall. An image of the thing you were staring at will appear on the wall or sheet, and it will be in complementary colors. This is because you have used up the chemicals in particular cones that were actively firings during the first stare, and when you look at the white wall, which is ALL colors, requiring all the cones to fire, the ones a little depleted will not at first be able to send the full strength signal required and the same pattern you were looking at first will "appear" for a moment or two, until the slightly depleted ones catch up (or the other cones get equally fatigued).

 

Your senses are only telling you a little "white lie" in this case. A fib you are able to see right through.

 

Regards, TAR2