Philosophy of Perception

Fred Dretske has formulated a representational (or indirect realist ) account of perception that includes the following two features: Fred Dretske (1) Representational Vehicles/Contents Dretske first distinguishes between representational vehicle  and representational contents  as follows: "There are representational vehicles —the objects, events, or conditions that represent—and representational contents —the conditions or situations the vehicle represents as being so" (Dretske 68). (2) Qualia Secondly, Dretske appeals to qualia: "qualia are properties that physical objects, the ones we experience, normally have. They are not properties that experiences have" (Dretske 69). Michael Huemer In contrast to Dretske, Michael Huemer formulates and defends a version of direct realism in his book Skepticism and the Veil of Perception . Huemer gives the following rough characterization of direct realism: “Direct realism holds that in perception, we are

Hallucinations & Representationalism Representationalism is the theory that the world we know and see in our minds is not a direct perception of the external world, and rather a representation, or replica, produced by our minds. A hallucination is a perception created by the mind without external stimulus. It appears real, yet it is not tangible. I recommend everyone re-watch this at home where the graphics are better and the lights are on. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MH8fPqkpQbI Naive Realism vs. Representationalism The world cannot be exactly as we perceive it to be because there are multiple illusions such as this one, and actual hallucinations, that disprove its reality. Voila!

          For my class presentation I demonstrated the McGurk effect. If you watched the video in class, you should have heard the speaker say “tha-tha” or “da-da” as you watched the speaker, and “ba-ba” as closed your eyes. This is due to the McGurk effect, an illusion that demonstrates our perception of speech is influenced not only by the auditory sensation of speech, but also visual information about the speaker’s mouth forming the words. This is an example of multi-modal perception: perception formed by inputs from more than one sense modality, such as hearing and sight. The McGurk illusion is created by dubbing “ba-ba” over video of a speaker saying “ga-ga.” The auditory input of “ba-ba” and the visual input of “ga-ga” fuse into a perception of “da-da” as the brain tries to make sense of the conflicting information.           The McGurk effect is interesting among examples of multi-modal perception because the conflicting information from hearing and sight leads the brain

My in-class experiment of the phenomenon known as "change blindness". This is a theory in which the human mind may not be aware of simple changes that occur right before our very eyes. In this experiment, I told the class that they would be watching some short videos about visual illusions. While they were distracted by the videos, I made some pretty obvious changes to my presentation that only a handful of them noticed by the end. Go ahead and watch the video to find out what they changes were!

Change blindness: is a perceptual phenomena that occurs when a change in the visual stimulus is introduced and the observer does not notice it. Inattentional blindness: the event that which an individual does not recognize an unexpected stimulus in plain sight. www.invisiblegorilla.com

Synesthesia is an uncommon perceptual anomaly in humans where one stimulus creates more than one perceptions. There are many different types of synesthesia that range from Grapheme (color/ character), to Lexical gustatory(word/ taste). This 'disorder' of sorts is very interesting for perceptual philosophy for many reasons. It has many aspects of both cognitive science and philosophical inquiry. This cognitive phenomenon is not fully understood in terms of how it works by science. There are a few theories and the most commonly accepted one explains why it can be both inherited and it can also happen while on certain psychotropic drugs. This theory is about how the brain starts off with all the senses in one spot and they migrate to different spots. The wires sometimes get crossed and Psychotropic drugs along with genetics can mix wires in the brain up at times causing synesthesia. This video from Michal Levy is an interesting depiction of an artistic remake of what it is like t

When talking about perceptions we are discussing the ability to be aware of something with our senses. Of the five senses, I would like to concentrate on just one: sight. In our eyes there are rods and cones. The rods are used for seeing in low light & used to detect motion; while the cones are used with brighter light and & used to detect color. Within the human eye there are 3 types of color receptive cones. There are cones for green, red, and blue. And it is a combination of those different color receptors that make up all the different colors we can see.              The YouTube channel Vsauce (which you can get to by clicking here ) has a very interesting video about color and how we can be tricked by computer monitors, television sets, etc. into thinking we are seeing the color yellow when we’re actually not . I’ve included the abridged version of that video below (and I encourage you to watch the whole video “ This Is Not Yellow ”): One of the things that are

It might seem a daunting task to try and do almost anything while wearing glasses that invert your vision. Even something as simple as writing your name would become quite a challenge. However, your brain being the amazing machine that it is, actually starts to adjust your senses to make the new stimulus more natural feeling. In fact, if you were to leave on the inverted glasses for a few days, your brain would even go so far as to invert the already inverted image so as to make you perceive things as upright once again (as tested by late 1800's psychologist, George Stratton). Here is one more trick. Watch the center numbers that are counting down. http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/cog_numerosity/ For the one second that the gray dots appear, you should notice that the side with the most colored dots now appear to have the least gray dots. In fact, both sides have the same amount of gray dots, with similar spacing between them. This is because your brain is registeri

Do you see this masculine looking hunk of philosophical beard? His name is Frege, and he wrote on a topic called Sense and Reference theory ( PhilosophyOfSciencePortal ) As discussed in earlier posts, or as I assert now, the perception of an "Other" in the outside world is more complicated than we seem to intuit. There are things happening between our eye and our mind where changes are made in both perceiving an object as well as expressing an idea to another person. Our ability to select and describe an object in the world is limited by many factors, one of which is the Sense in which we convey an idea. In Representationalism the Sense of an object only becomes a more powerful factor in daily life, as the representations which we use to understand the world contain a contextual bias. What follows is an example of how when we reference an object in the world, we cannot successfully inspire in another person that object without conveying some sense in which it is to be int

Humans from Heraclitus to Henry David Thoreau to Ted Kaczynki have looked for a private place - a physical retreat where they could be alone with their thoughts. Well, they didn't need to travel to find such a place.  They just needed to looked inwardly instead of outwardly. This video explains how "fundamentally in terms of our perceptions, we are all alone in our minds." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evQsOFQju08&index=5&list=PLwDbUeA6Ok9N_i4CQwLogx6VyHjSxs-x2

Each of your eyes has a blind spot on the retina. This blind spot is where the optic nerve connects to the retina. Watch this video to find your blind spot. The reason you cover one of your eyes is to prevent that eye from compensating for the blind spot in the other eye. Without that compensation, your mind then fills in the blind spot with surrounding visual stimulus. In other words, if you used a white 3 x 5 card then you noticed that the dot disappeared into the white of the 3 x 5 card. Video by Dayton Koons Voice by Emme Packer

Age and its effect on Perception What causes our perception of the world-at-large to be the way it in the various stages of our lives? During our class discussion we discovered that pain, both physical and emotional, can lead to alternative points of view. Overall, it is through the various experiences which build expectations that create a different perception. The experiences that are either significant or remain in our mind are what contribute the most to a change in perception. More often than not, when I see my grandparents, who are well beyond the ages of measurable years, they speak of how the seasons fly by. For me, being a 22-year-old college student, a year seems like an eternity. Perhaps it is the fact that I -- and those who are younger than say, 25 -- are still experiencing new things. As we take time to notice the world around us, our perception of time may actually decrease, making it seem as though less time has passed than it normally has. Time is o

Below is a video about the Ames room. This is an optical illusion developed by psychologist Adelbert Ames, Jr. Please watch. Why does it appear that the people in the room change size rather than the room alter its appearance? 

These are some of the more recent pictures taken with a Hubble telescope, of Dark Matter. Since we talked about it in class, I thought it would be nice to post them as well....