Sometime in our lives, we, all of us, acquire the insight that nothing we experience is experienced for the first time; that life is merely a cycle that we all must go through, from birth, through adolescence to death; that the things children feel move into things adolescents feel, and into things older people feel. (Still,…

Introspectivism I think that the problem is quite simple (but I may be wrong): once you believe that your mind is something in you, you must also think that the way to find out what the mind is is by looking inward (introspection), and that seems only logical. And because of this, you cannot know…

1. Philosophy of Perception as a branch in aesthetics regards the awareness of aesthetic qualities, properties or values. In short, it concerns the awareness of subjective properties of things and events. Here the philosophy of perception is a phenomenology of some kind. 2. Philosophy of Perception as a branch in epistemology regards the veridical—or illusory—nature…

Dreams are boring. For the others. They are all subjectivity, and consist only of [tooltip title=”Gibson’s term” placement=”right”]affordances[/tooltip]. There are no non-realised affordances in a dream: everything happens for your sake. Hence, there are no choices or options for others to empathise with. Readings Gibson, J.J. 1986. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. London, Hillsdale,…

In the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein discusses the ambiguous duck-rabbit picture as illustrating a specific kind of seeing, seeing-as: we see the drawing now as a duck, now as a rabbit. Wittgenstein thinks seeing an aspect means seeing the internal relations of the thing with its surroundings. (The duck looks to the left, the rabbit to…

Crimes make images Perceptions do not produce images, or mental representations, in the mind. The images are out there. We see the things before us and the events which take place around us directly. If we remind ourselves of an event from the past somehow we re-perceive it. Even in such cases, it makes no…

Banksy makes public art. (If you don’t know his works, please Google.) It is public; the works are out there, on the streets, for all to see. They are accessible to all, and make ample use of circumstances available on the streets (empty walls, holes, sidewalks). The pictures are always carefully, and beautifully rendered and…

Thinking does not seem to require objects (real things, I mean)—all it needs are subject matters. Thinking as such cannot establish whether there is an object out there. Action needs a way to assess objects—it seems perception provides that way, rather than (or next to) thought. If I throw something at you, how do you…

My view of perception as farming out to the external objects has a clear advantage over receptive views of perception. When we perceive a chair we not only collect but farm out visual aspects to the chair itself, and not only visual characteristics but tactile audible, etc. ones, too: noticing a chair means attributing “to-be-sat-uponness”—which…

In the so-called Ames Room two twins move about and seem to the viewer to grow and shrink as they move. In certain sweet spots they appear of the same size (as in reality they are). The Ames Room is presented in the literature as a problem for theories of perception. Sometimes the effects on…