Week 2: Seeing and Perception.

Perception is universal, yet individual process. We perceive about the same situation differently. Each of us experiences and interprets the world differently from the others, assigning the meaning based on what we perceive. Different people can develop or change different perceptions and meanings, thus there is no fixed meaning of something. Below is an example:

Two people with different gender were looking at the glass filled with water in front of them. The girl said that the glass was half full, while the man said that the glass was half empty. It shows that different people interpret differently about the same things at the same situation.

The realist suggests that people are not just receiving information about anything through senses; rather it is an active process (C. Boeree, 2009). For example, taste requires movement. It gives you information about what you are taste. If you never taste the flavor before, you would never classify what flavor it is even if you taste it many times. Therefore, perception is not something done with any specific sense organ. It is a multi-sensory, full bodied thing: "A one-year-old child standing on the floor of a room will fall down if the walls are silently and suddenly moved forward a few inches, although nothing touches him." (Neisser, p. 116, referring to Lee and Aronson, 1974)

We know that different people perceive things differently, so can anything be classify as real when each people in the world have their own perception? We just see something in a particular way but it does not make it so.Our version of what is reality is only stated by our belief structure, and it is essentially our perception of it; not what is so. For instance, you have been to car accident. You can choose to see that event as something terrified and tragic, or you can see it as an experience to appreciate every second of moments of your life. There is nothing such as which one is right or which one is wrong. You can control of how to respond to something, it is up to you.

"We see the world, not as it is, but as we are." - Talmud

 

Culture and society does affect perception, because each culture and society shared their own bases of social action, their own codes, beliefs and ideas, therefore different cultures give different meaning to things. For example, we as Bruneians see the hand gesture as a ‘thumbs up’ in a good way. However, for the Middle East people, they see it as a mean of ‘up your ass’, as an idea to fight over the power especially against the westerners. This shows that the culture and society does affect perception because of what they can connote signs with.

references:

1. Amit Sodha, 2006. extract from www.unlimitedchoice.org/blog/meditations/perception-vs-reality/

2. Dr.C.George Boeree. Perception and Interaction. extract from www.webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/genpsyperception.html

3. Dr. Chris lecture slides, Seeing and Perception: The World is Flat because You've Never Seen  it Round.

4. www.worldtrans.org/TP/TP1TP1-9.HTML

5. www.theoryofknowledge.info/theories-of-perception/