its4inthemorning wrote: ↑Sat Oct 26, 2024 6:18 pm
A different perception: I see "Woman Who knows Hardship" as "Woman Who Knows Wisdom."...
That's a different type of "perception" than my having seen Geoffrey's singing mob differently than the rest of you: my perception was primarily and literally visual, a sensory perception, and it was not dependent on knowing anything about the personal history of the people depicted, but merely on how they looked to me in a picture -- I literally "saw", with my eyes, screaming and clawing people. Of course, sensory perceptions are interpreted in one's mind, and how each person's mind deciphers their own sensory perceptions will be unique and based on how their mind functions and on everything else that they have ever experienced, etc., but the initial perceptions are what may be described as "raw" or "new" -- they are simply sensory data that enters the mind through the senses. In this case, my initial perception was sensory and visual, for, other than recognising Leonard Cohen, I never had any previous thoughts about the people in that drawing -- all of my thoughts about them were brand new, based on what I saw when I looked at the picture with my eyes (which was information/raw-data that my mind subsequently interpreted as being something rather horrific!).
Your "perception" involves knowing
about the person depicted, before having seen the drawing, and thus you "saw" her based on your knowledge and understanding of her and her life. You therefore used the word "see" figuratively (as many people do), in the sense of "understanding" or "knowing" ("seeing" with the mind, not with the eyes), which has nothing do with visual perception -- if somebody simply mentioned her name, without any visual representation, you might immediately think of wisdom, whereas Geoffrey might think of hardship, but again, you'd have to know about her and her life to make that assessment, for it involves a lot of information that is not purely visual.
Mind you, if Berkeley (George, the British Philosopher) was right about Idealism, then everything is actually mental, and what we think of as the objects of our sensory perceptions are really nothing more than mental images and ideas in our minds (or in someone's mind). If that is the case, then how I used the word "see", and how you (4) used the word "see" is not really all that different, for we would both be referring to mental ideas of some sort, without the line that I was drawing between visual objects (like drawings) and mental ideas like knowledge of another person's life. Of course, if one takes philosophical Idealism to one of its potentially logical conclusions, then it can lead to solipsism, in which one can only know one's own mind, and thus, even if other minds do exist (and they may not -- there would be no good reason to think that they do), one could not know anything about them. And therefore, to say that one knows about the life of another person would be no more than saying that one has a variety of ideas in one's own mind that they associate with another person, but that other person is actually no more than just a part of the mind that is having the ideas about them. Of course, using Berkeley's own motto that "to be is to be perceived", then, if one perceives another person, in any way, then that other person would exist (they would "be"), even if their existence consists of nothing more than ideas in the mind that is perceiving them.
"Perception" is such a loaded word, and such an infinitely complex concept, which can happily lead to one questioning and wondering about virtually everything that one thinks that one knows about the world, existence, and pretty much everything! Many people have written many books and articles about "perception" -- absolutely fascinating stuff! Cheers!
Perceptions can be so different, can they not?)