Which is First?

It IS merely the word:

Sensing and interpreting those senses is required in order to call it “perception”.

No big deal, just find the right word.

No. Technically the hierarchy is perception, apperception, interpretation.
Consciousness, in these terms, is attributed to apperception and interpretation, not to perception.

For example, a flower perceives the sun.

Thing is, unconscious things only perceive what is of relevance to their structural integrity- what is of value (+/-) to them.
Thats one way of seeing how valuing is prior to even perception, let alone consciousness.

Do you have to update your education in English?

NO. “Perception” is NOT anything a flower can do any more than it can have an opinion of who should be the next US President. Flowers have no senses nor any capacity of interpreting what they sense. They merely react to direct affect.

Learn English if you are going to try to communicate in it.

Thanks!

Yes, perception has different interpretations, including having insight into difficult situations which requires robust cognitive machinery. I was counting on someone to have the higher form in order to perceive the lower form I meant to convey :slight_smile:

Perhaps you could assist? I struggled for the right word and was aware of the proper definitions of perception, but still regarded it as embodying the idea I was trying to communicate and therefore couldn’t resist its gravity. Unfortunately, I’m not the wordsmith I wish I were.

“Recognition” implies a template for comparison, so I couldn’t use that.
“Sensing” seemed too much like a nervous system, so that didn’t capture it either.
“Detection” almost implies intent to find which is too cognitive.

I am at a loss. What is the word for one charge being aware of another charge? Maybe the example is too simplistic. As the most fundamental lifeform, the first order of business is to form structures to perceive the environment and that is somehow accomplished without a nervous system, so it seems we’re back to the atoms because natural reactions are all there is.

Yes, all of that is true. The word that I would use is simply “reaction”. The word “reaction” doesn’t directly imply any conscious intent, yet does imply a response to being affected. When any, literally “any”, entity is affected, it “reacts”. And that includes even light photons, EMR of every sort, subatomic particles, literally every declared physical “entity” (Newton’s 3rd law). And that reaction is what FC wants to call “valuing”.

How does a sunflower follow the sun?

How does a flower know which way to grow without some perception of gravity?

How does a seed know when it’s warm enough to sprout?

I think I can see what you’re possibly thinking if I picture a ball flying through the air and how it gets from one Planck slice to another is just how the universe unfolds and therefore the ball isn’t perceiving anything just like the flower is reacting along it’s natural path in a mindless way, but then we have to realize that we are the same and there is no such thing as perception… only the process of unfolding natural occurrences.

It almost seems like you’re heading to the conclusion that there are no things or events. Because if a flower follows the sun due natural dumb processes, then I don’t see myself as being much different and the universe is just one big event… the universe is the atom… the indivisible whole… and we are just as much a part of the dumb process as the flower.

Maybe just for the sake of argument we could pretend there are lines in the sand and say the flower somehow perceives the sun then acts accordingly even though we know in the back of our minds that perception itself is just an illusion and construct of imagination. Otherwise, I think, there wouldn’t be anything to talk about.

What do you think?

Well, if it will makes everyone happy, I’m down with it.

Earlier today, I reacted to a deer through the kitchen window. :slight_smile:

The chemical-mechanical reaction on one side of the plant are different than on the other side - due to the Sunshine. That inherently causes the flower to bend toward the Sun. There is no “awareness of the Sun” other than one side getting warmer and more light while the other side did not. The flower mechanically (due to chemical responses) bends toward the Sunshine. It did not have to be the actual Sun. Anything with the right amount of the right type of light will (and often does) create the same response. And that exact same response can be created from scratch with man-made photo-sensitive cells. There is no magic to it, and no consciousness involved. Plants are complex mechanisms. That is all they are.

Merely by a complex bio-mechanical reaction, evolved to be what you currently see. Science certainly is not wrong about EVERYthing.

Perhaps the mistake you are making is the assumption that the universe works, or must work, according to rules. In other words, that the universe is one giant pattern – an eternally repeating sequence of events. This means that there must be a “why?” behind every event. But what if there isn’t?

How does thinking work? Do we start with an unproven premise and then seek evidence for it or do we start with what is evident (our observations) and then make conclusions (which is to say assumptions) based on it?

We are attracted to patterns. Does that mean everything is a pattern?
We are attracted to patterns because patterns allow us to predict the future.
We don’t like their absence because that makes it difficult for us to predict the future.

Life, and everything within the universe, can go on without the ability to predict.
Intelligence is just a tool that allows us to predict the future so that we can better prepare for it.

Intelligence is useful only to the extent that it works with what is real, which is to say, with our observations.
Its goal is to recognize patterns within the observed – if there are any.
It becomes degenerate when it starts substituting what is real (observations) with what isn’t (imaginations) in order to create the appearance of patterns so that we can pretend that we can predict the future and prepare for it in order to avoid negative consequences.
Then it becomes merely about comfort.

It’s difficult to define the concept of perception in terms of information philosophy.
It’s easier to define the concept of reaction.
Reaction is a word denoting any event that appears regularly after some other event.
For example, light bulb emitting light is a reaction to a light switch being pressed.
Perception is a form of reaction, that is true, but it is a specific type of reaction, which means that not every reaction is a form of perception, that is sufficiently complex to make it difficult for us to describe it in exact terms.

Right… it’s a dumb mechanical process. So what about the last bit of my post? How are we any different? Isn’t then perception an illusion? I don’t think we can have our cake and eat it too because if the flower has no perception, then perception doesn’t exist and it’s just a construct of our imagination. That is, unless you see yourself as distinct from the universe as an outside observer, but I’m not guessing that you do.

If you are constrained by this universe and do not exist on the outside, then you are just another “bio-mechanical” process chugging along and therefore there is no perception; only reaction. There is no philosophy; just bio-processes heading along their determined paths. Everything we experience is an illusion somehow generated by the determinate process.

But, I’m not sure I could agree with determinism because randomness does exist.

It took a while, but hidden variable theory was eventually disproved by John Bell, who showed that there are lots of experiments that cannot have unmeasured results. Thus the results cannot be determined ahead of time, so there are no hidden variables, and the results are truly random. That is, if it is physically and mathematically impossible to predict the results, then the results are truly, fundamentally random. askamathematician.com/2009/1 … andomness/

Therefore, not everything is a determined process that could be rewound and replayed with the same outcome. If we start the big bang over with the same initial conditions, we will get a different result. If we start it over and over sufficient times, we may get an approach to a central limit so that one outcome is more likely than another, but that is far from being determined.

IMO, I think being alive entails some degree of randomness and inherent unpredictability. So although the flower is following its bio-mechanical processes to track the sun, it isn’t quite so mechanical as to be determined and perfectly predictable… and that is what we call life. And that means computers, as we understand them to be as of now which are nothing more than an array of switches, will never be alive no matter how powerful they become. They will never be conscious. So if computers aren’t conscious because they are perfectly predictable, then we have to wonder what the antithesis is to that. Is all life conscious??? So it would seem.

What would be the point of existence if everything could be known? If determinism is true and we’re just flowing along a stream through time, how could we be aware of it? And if we are, then why is a flower not? Determinism has always been unsettling to me.

That’s one heck of a tangent, but it was fun. Talk to you guys tomorrow!

The difference is not merely the degree of complexity involved, but specifically how that complexity allows a mammal to reconstruct an internal image of the outside environment (much like a person inside a van watching the outside through cameras). The mammal’s “perception” (his camera’s image) is not 100% accurate, but it is close enough for him to function. The flower has no such bio-mechanism at all. The flower cannot form an internal image of the Sun such as to think to itself, “there it is”. Bio-mechanical mechanisms with the capacity to “remotely recognize” objects, are what people have always called “conscious” (aware of the objects surrounding them). That is the difference. A flower could never tell that a bee was buzzing near until the bee actually landed on the flower. And even then, the flower has no comprehension of what a bee is or looks like. The flower merely gives what is taken and takes what is given until it can do so no longer.

That is the difference.

Randomness in the sense of unpredictability, is merely a measure of awareness and information. To the flower, all is random, totally unpredictable.

Randomness is absence of pattern. You can be extremely aware and still see no patterns (because there are none.)

Perception requires consciousness.
Otherwise we wouldn’t have to talk about perception but merely about interactivity of matter.
To equate perception with merely interactivity is a materialistic worldview.

Life, to be alive is not merely being matter, it distinguishes itself. One aspect of it in physical terms is its different behaviour in entropic terms. Life is resisting the increase of entropy, Non-alive matter is not. Or in other words, life is ordering, so a decrease of the level of entropy.

Perhaps best to think of mind, consciousness and perception on a sliding scale, along a spectrum. To say that perception requires consciousness seems entirely correct until you think about it. Surely we want to draw a line between inanimate objects and living things, but the lines between those living things can get blurred. I think we commonly assume that a frog has something like consciousness if not as fully developed as ours. Frogs get to think themselves superior to the flies they eat.

Perceptions could still be mechanical/chemical and allow us to believe that we are more conscious than worms are. Sunflowers possess something a lot like a very rudimentary ability to perceive. Is this just an analog for what we think about as perception or a related ability?

Is it important?

Is it just a limitation of the glossary being used?

We have chemical, mechanical, even electrical connections to the world. Maybe other creatures have a different sense. Well, in fact they do. Maybe we have more senses than we commonly list in order to talk about perception, including our own.

This is not ontology or some other epistemological pursuit. It’s the search for vocabulary.

To call perceptions illusions is literal nonsense. It’s a category error.

When I said that perception requires consciousness then that is not meant as a ranking but to differentiate it from the not-alive matter.
But thinking about it, I rank activity, action to be a precursor to thinking. “First was the action, not the word” to paraphrase Goethe.

From the other end, I think that a consciousness which would lose entirely its connection to reality by not perceiving anything but its own thoughts would slowly but surely deteriorate, become non-functional, lose itself. It would happen due to having no standard, no selective pressures, to guide its regeneration and development and thus an entropy of sanity and awareness would occur, I believe.

So I think that perception is very high on the list in terms of what came first in the area of development of conscious nervous systems.

As for consciousness, it comes on many levels, but basically I attribute the most basic consciousness to all living things in varying degrees of complexity. With higher mammals self-awareness becomes even self-consciousness. A part of consciousness separating itself and observing itself, at least parts of it.

Yeah. I think James has it wrong.

Also, when we say perception I was thinking at first about external senses but the internal senses of body function and regulation are rooted I believe in the most archaic area of our nervous system.

Serendipper - yes. If a flower can’t be said to perceive its source of nourishment when it moves toward it, we can not be said to perceive primary stimuli either. Our perception is still the exact same type of unconscious processes, it serves only to identify what we move towards and away from. Consciousness is a thin and rather arbitrary layer on top of the instincts, and it is still in the process of justifying itself through natural selection.

Nietzsche noted that consciousness may die out as an inefficient property of being. With the way people here talk about consciousness without having it, it doesn’t seem all that effective to lack it, either.

In fact we are perfectly equal to flowers on this level - our consciousness has very little to do with our instinctive responses.
Most of our perceptions and responses to these perceptions are unconscious. It is rather baffling to notice people aren’t aware of this in the 21t century.

People overestimate the importance of their consciousness. In fact, most people are not more conscious than a flower at all - you see how mindlessly they ignore that which they can’t deal with. As you notice with his selective responses, James is a prime example of flower-perception. He turns his head toward that which nurtures him, and away from what challenges him, and he does this with perfect consistency, and is not aware of it. That does not relate to consciousness, and I honestly don’t see most humans as being conscious.

It it simply a fact that most people respond automatically to what they perceive, and never to things that challenge their assumptions - they never arrive at a conscious process.

But I made a further point, about valuing being prior even to perception. Valuing as an automatic selecting of input in terms of what can be registered.
People imagine it is a very sophisticated and conscious process, valuing - but it is rather the basic mechanism on which all else rests.

So valuing is a term denoting selection, but denoting it in such a way as to indicate also the ground on which the principe of selection is possible.

If I have it wrong, the entire English education system has it wrong. And you need to get to rewriting all of their dictionaries for them.