quotations about perception
We perceive time as continuous just as we perceive a line as continuous even though its ink is of discrete atomic nature... According to our model, the output of unconscious processing is discrete, meaningful, and rendered conscious at once. Large parts of unconscious processing will never reach consciousness.
MICHAEL H. HERZOG, THOMAS KAMMER & FRANK SCHARNOWSKI
"Time Slices: What Is the Duration of a Percept?", PLOS, April 12, 2016
Your agreement with reality defines your life.
STEVE MARABOLI
Life, the Truth, and Being Free
It is one of the commonest of mistakes to consider that the limit of our power of perception is also the limit of all there is to perceive.
C. W. LEADBEATER
attributed, Reasons to Believe
Nevertheless, when the term perception is employed, it generally is used with regard to how one experiences the world of objects and events around him. This process, of course, would be related to arousal, to attention and to the ability to extract information from the tremendous influx of stimulation which is constantly bombarding us.
THOMAS L. BENNETT
Perception: an Adaptive Process
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
CHARLES DICKENS
A Tale of Two Cities
A true moral perception is never an irrational perception; indeed, strictly speaking, the mere power or act of perception is never itself moral, and we justly term it so only in a figurative sense, when directed to moral ends; as we say that a sword is valiant, when it is valiantly used.
HUBBARD WINSLOW
Elements of Moral Philosophy
The more earnest our affections, desires, emotions, the more vivid are our perceptions; and, on the other hand, the clearer our perceptions, the more intense are our feelings.
HUBBARD WINSLOW
Elements of Moral Philosophy
Everything you see or hear or experience in any way at all is specific to you. You create a universe by perceiving it, so everything in the universe you perceive is specific to you.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
Mostly Harmless
That is certainly one way to look at the matter. There are others.
PATRICIA C. WREDE
Thirteenth Child
Now if perception is thus the common act of all our motor and affective functions, no less than the sensory, we must rediscover the structure of the perceived world through a process similar to that of an archaeologist. For the structure of the perceived world is buried under the sedimentations of later knowledge.
MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY
The Primacy of Perception: And Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology
That books do not take the place of experience, and that learning is no substitute for genius, are two kindred phenomena; their common ground is that the abstract can never take the place of the perceptive.
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
The World as Will and Representation
The power of perception is always the same, to whatever truths it may be directed. To suppose that a man has two perceiving faculties, one for one kind of truth, and another for another kind, is as preposterous as to suppose that he is two persons.
HUBBARD WINSLOW
Elements of Moral Philosophy
Where perception is, there also are pain and pleasure, and where these are, there, of necessity, is desire.
ARISTOTLE
Physica
To perceive means to immobilize ... we seize, in the act of perception, something which outruns perception itself.
HENRI BERGSON
Matter and Memory
The general difficulty is that perception is not inference from beliefs. When I believe on the basis of perception that the book is red, I do not infer that belief from something else that I believe. Perception is a causal process that inputs beliefs into our doxastic system without their being inferred from or justified on the basis of other beliefs we already have. This seems undeniable, and it appears to constitute a conclusive objection to all linear positive coherence theories.
JOHN L. POLLOCK & JOSEPH CRUZ
Contemporary Theories of Knowledge
But tangible differ from visible and sonorous impressions, in that the latter are perceived by the medium acting in some way upon us, while the former are perceived, not by, but together with, the medium, like a man who is struck through his shield--for it is not the shield which, having been struck, strikes him, but the shield and he are simultaneously struck together.
ARISTOTLE
On the Vital Principle
We think perception is going to become a commodity over the years.
KARL IAGNEMMA
"Game-Changer: NuTonomy Wants To Be Brains Behind Self-Driving Cars", Nasdaq, April 22, 2016
Words create perception, and perception is reality. But, c'mon. There are degrees. There is context and there is intent, and there is using your head.
PAUL DAUGHERTY
"Doc: This is Marty Brennaman, like it or not", Cincinnati, April 21, 2016
Our brains interpret the input from our sensory organs by making a model of the world. When such a model is successful at explaining events, we tend to attribute to it, and to the elements and concepts that constitute it, the quality of reality or absolute truth. But there may be different ways in which one could model the same physical situation, with each employing different fundamental elements and concepts. If two such physical theories or models accurately predict the same events, one cannot be said to be more real than the other; rather, we are free to use whichever model is most convenient.
STEPHEN HAWKING & LEONARD MLODINOW
The Grand Design
To take mystical experience as a form of perception is not to beg the question as to the upshot of the inquiry. It still could be true that sense perception is genuine perception of its putative objects, whereas mystical perception is not, and that sense perception provides justified belief and knowledge about its objects--whereas mystical perception yields no such results for any belief about anything. The point is only that the problems, both as to the nature of the perception and as to the epistemic status of the perceptual beliefs stemming therefrom, arise in the same form for both.
WILLIAM P. ALSTON
Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience