A Readymade Essay on Perception

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This essay consists of organized quotes.

Arial font quotes are from Understanding Psychology by Charles G. Morris and Albert A. Maisto, chapter 3.
Georgiana (this might not show up on the rss feed) font quotes are from A Primer on Postmodernism by Stanley J. Grenz.
Quotes in italics are said via Ivan Karamazov in The Grand Inquisitor: With Related Chapters from The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky. I'm pretty sure all of the quotes are from the first 30 pages.

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Perception is the process by which organisms interpret and organize sensation to produce a meaningful experience of the world.
-Human Information Processing: An Introduction to Psychology

You see, there is nothing outside us, that is not at the same time in us, and as the external world has its colors, so does the eye as well.
-Gestalt

I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for; that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage… but though all that may come to pass, I don’t accept it. I won’t accept it…. My poem is called ‘The Grand Inquisitor’; it’s a ridiculous thing, but I want to tell it to you.

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How do we see objects and shapes? Psychologists assume that perception begins with some real-world object with real-world properties "out there." Psychologists call that object, along with its important perceptual properties, the distal stimulus. We never experience the distal stimulus directly, however. Energy from it (or in the case of our chemical sense, molecules from it) must activate our sensory system. We call the information that reaches our sensory receptors the proximal stimulus.

Knowledge cannot be merely objective, say the postmoderns, because the universe is not mechanistic and dualistic but rather historical, relational, and personal. The world is not simply an objective given that is “out there,” waiting to be discovered and known; reality is relative, indeterminate, and participatory.

I have a longing for life, and I go on living in spite of logic…. I shall steep my soul in my emotion. I love the sticky leaves in spring, the blue sky – that’s all it is. It’s not a matter of intellect or logic; it’s loving with one’s inside, with one’s stomach.

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At first glance, you perceive the figures against a specific background, but as you stare at the illustrations, you will discover that the figures and the ground reverse, making for two very different perceptions of the same illustration. The artwork or stimulus hasn't changed, but your perception has changed.

Postmodern philosophers applied the theories of the literary deconstructionists to the world as a whole. Just as a text will be read differently by each reader, they said, so reality will be “read” differently by each knowing self that encounters it. This means that there is no one meaning of the world, no transcendent center to reality as a whole.

You know, dear boy, there was an old sinner in the eighteenth century who declared that, if there were no God, he would have to be invented. S’il n’existait pas Dieu, il faudrait l’inventer. And man has actually invented God. And what’s strange, what would be marvelous, is not that God should really exist; the marvel is that such an idea, the idea of the necessity of God, could enter the head of such a savage, vicious beast as man. So holy it is, so touching, so wise, and so great a credit it does to man.

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Brightness constancy means that even though the amount of light available to our eyes varies greatly over the course of the day, the perceived brightness of familiar objects hardly varies at all. We perceive a sheet of white paper as brighter than a piece of coal whether we see these objects in candlelight or under bright sunlight. Brightness constancy occurs because an object reflects the same percentage of the light falling on it whether that light is from a candle or the sun. Rather than basing our judgment of brightness on the absolute amount of light that the object reflects, we assess how the relative reflection compares with the surrounding objects.

Nor are postmoderns necessarily concerned to prove themselves “right” and others “wrong.” They believe that beliefs are ultimately a matter of social context, and hence they are likely to conclude, “What is right for us might not be right for you,” and “What is wrong in our context might in your context be acceptable or even preferable.”

People talk sometimes of bestial cruelty, but that’s a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel. The tiger only tears and gnaws, that’s all he can do. He would never think of nailing people by the ears, even if he were able to do it.

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In linear perspective, two parallel lines that extend into the distance seem to come together at some point on the horizon. In aerial perspective, distant objects have a hazy appearance and a somewhat blurred outline. On a clear day, mountains often seem to be much closer than on a hazy day, when their outlines become blurred.

they even dare to dream that two parallel lines, which according to Euclid can never meet on earth, may meet somewhere in infinity. I have come to the conclusion that, since I can’t understand even that, I can’t expect to understand about God. I acknowledge humbly that I have no faculty for settling such questions; I have a Euclidian earthly mind, and how could I solve problems that are not of this world? And I advise you never to think about it either, my dear Alyosha, especially about God, whether He exists or not. All such questions are utterly inappropriate for a mind created with an idea of only three dimensions.

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An object that is close seems to have a rough or detailed texture. As distance increases, the texture becomes finer, until finally the original texture cannot be distinguished clearly, if at all.

According to the new understanding, scientific knowledge is not a compilation of objective universal truths but a collection of research traditions borne by particular communities of inquirers. And its discourse – its language game – is largely unintelligible outside the lived practice of such communities.

Are you fond of children, Alyosha? I know you are, and you will understand why I prefer to speak of them. If they too suffer horribly on earth, they must suffer for their fathers’ sins; they must be punished for their fathers, who have eaten the apple; but that reasoning is of the other world and is incomprehensible for the heart of man here on earth. The innocent must not suffer for another’s sins, and especially such innocents!

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Apparent movement occurs when we perceive movement in objects that are actually standing still. One form of apparent movement is referred to as the autokinetic illusion - the perceived motion created by the absence of visual cues surrounding a single stationary object. If you stand in a room that is absolutely dark except for one tiny spot of light and stare at the light for a few seconds, you will begin to see the light drift. In the darkened room, your eyes have no visible framework; there are no cues telling you that the light is really stationary. The slight movements of the eye muscles, which go unnoticed most of the time, make the light appear to move.

Living in a postmodern society means inhabiting a film-like world – a realm in which truth and fiction merge. We look at the world in the same way we look at films, suspicious that what we see around us may in fact be illusion. Despite a film’s disjunctions, however, the viewer can at least be certain that it expresses something about the minds that produced it; the filmmaker provides an often unattended center to the world the film creates. Looking at the world, on the other hand, postmoderns are no longer confident that any Mind lies behind it.

With my pitiful, earthly, Euclidian understanding, all I know is that there is suffering and that there are none guilty; that effect follows cause, simply and directly; that everything flows and finds it level – but that’s only Euclidian nonsense, I know that, and I can’t consent to live by it!

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Our desires and needs shape our perceptions. People in need are likely to perceive something that they think will satisfy that need. The best known example of this, at least in fiction, is a mirage: People lost in the desert have visual fantasies of an oasis over the next dune.

He wants to chasten the modern pretension to assign fixed meanings to the flux of experience.… For Derrida, there is no “outside the text.” All we have is the text itself, not some external meaning to which the text points. The “book” is actually our “reading” of the text.

For the secret of man’s being is not only to live, but to have something to live for. Without a stable conception of the object of life, man would not consent to go on living, and would rather destroy himself than remain on earth, though he had bread in abundance. That is true.

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In an experiment that revealed how strongly perceptions can be affected by a person's values, nursery, school-children were shown a poker chip. Each child was asked to compare the size of the chip with the size of an adjustable circle of light until the child said that the chip and the circle of light were the same size. The children were then brought to a machine with a crank that, when turned, produced a poker chip that could be exchanged for candy. Thus, the children were taught to value the poker chips more highly than they had before. After the children had been rewarded with candy for the poker chips, they again were asked to compare the size of the chips with a circle of light. This time the chips seemed larger to the children (W.W. Lambert, Solomon, & Watson, 1949).

Different groups of people construct different “stories” about the world they encounter. These different languages, in turn, facilitate different ways of experiencing life. As a result, people do not merely espouse different political opinions and religious beliefs; they actually live in different worlds with respect to basic matter of personal identity, time, and space.

“Ah, you’ve picked up yesterday’s phrase, which so offended Miusov – and Dimitri pounced upon so naively and paraphrased!” he smiled queerly. “Yes, if you like, ‘everything is lawful,’ since the words have been said. I won’t deny it.”

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If someone were to ask you whether perceptual experiences match more closely the image on the retina or the outside world, what would you say? What examples would you select from the chapter to make your point most effectively?

Linear Perspective: A form of perspective in drawing and painting in which parallel lines are represented as converging so as to give the illusion of depth and distance.
[Answers.com]

Aerial perspective or atmospheric perspective is the effect on the appearance of an object by the atmosphere between it and a viewer.
[Wikipedia]

Even if parallel lines do meet and I see it myself, I shall see it and say that they’ve met, but still I won’t accept it. That’s what’s at the root of me, Alyosha; that’s my creed. I am in earnest in what I say. I began our talk as stupidly as I could on purpose, but I’ve led up to my confession, for that’s all you want. You didn’t want to hear about God, but only to know what the brother you love lives by. And so I’ve told you.

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"Rebellion? I am sorry you call it that,” said Ivan earnestly. “One can hardly live in rebellion, and I want to live."