Tag: perception

More direct

February 19th, 2024

I don’t believe that direct and complete knowledge is possible. That is, all knowledge is, in my experience, indirect and incomplete. Some are more direct than others, though.

Buddhists using the Indian philosophical outline of six pramana accepts but two — direct perception and inference. Using what we are given at birth our senses we experience the world with sight, sound, smell, touch and taste (direct perception) and the mind (inference).

Everything for philosophizing can be done with just these six faculties. nothing more is necessary. This is as direct as you can get to knowledge of the reality, except for the fact that you are part of the reality.
Positivism plus one

January 26th, 2023

Positivism, associated with Comte, holds that sense phenomena is the highest or the only form of knowledge.

I assume that sense phenomena here means that of the five traditional senses of sight, sound, scent, taste and touch.

But I will argue, as Buddhism claims, that mind is also a sense faculty. Like the other senses the mind has its own “objects”. Buddhism calls then mind-objects. Concepts and ideas can be considered the same as mind-objects.

The extended definition does not conflict with Comte’s – and in general, Western philosophy –more limited one. This broadening in my opinion helps makes more sense of how we understand these entities in relation to real physical reality objects.
Object, perceiver and perceivers

January 25th, 2023

Let us take the claim that objects are dependent upon being perceived.

My question is what is the difference between an object perceived by none, one or many? Does the object change in some way with the number of perceivers?
The embodied mind

January 18th, 2023

The theory of an embodied mind is neither new nor original. It is a staple of cognitive linguistics beginning with perhaps Mark Johnson and George Lakoff. The mind is never from any other perspective than the body within which it functions.
Source of knowledge and the body

January 18th, 2023

1.
There is no evidence that we can have any kind of knowledge outside of or prior to sensory knowledge.

2.
If only the mind (whatever the word means) is necessary then we should be able to have knowledge through it alone. That is, a person born with no other sense other than the mind (following Buddhism, I take the mind to be the sixth sense) then this person’s mind should be sufficient to allow him access to knowledge.

3.
There is also no evidence of a mind independent of the body, either before one is born or after one has died.
Perception, West and East

January 17th, 2023

The term perception has a slightly different usage between the West and East. For the West, there is a distinction between sensation and perception. But for the East, perception means both raw sense data (sensation) and processed data of the mind (perception). This East-West distinction needs to be also kept in mind.
Sense and persense

January 17th, 2023

A distinction is made between sensation and perception. The raw data before it is processed or transmitted to the brain is sense data. the processed data after it is processed by the brain is persense data (a term I coined). Persense data explains a lot about, for example, optical illusions, loss of night vision or unnoticed degradation of hearing.
Perception

January 13th, 2023

Buddhism considers perception (pratyaksa) to be one of two (the other being inference) valid means of knowledge (pramāna). This is uncontroversial. What is to be minimally known is the physical reality. The question whether reality includes entities other than the physical ones.