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Alva Noë: The Puzzle of Perception



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We are conscious of both more and less than affects our nervous system says philosopher Alva Noë.

Transcript — Consider this. We are conscious of both more and less than affects our nervous system. Let me give you an example. I look at a tomato. It’s sitting there on the counter in front of me. It’s red and bulgy and three dimensional and I experience all that. I experience all that visually. I have a sense even visually of the back of the tomato, not that I can see the back of the tomato. It’s out of view and yet it’s part of my experience of the tomato that it has a back. It’s present in that sense to me, but note it doesn’t strike my retina. It’s present. It informs. It structures my visual experience without actually being an element that stimulates my nervous system or consider I look at writing on a text–or a better example is I walk into a room and there’s graffiti on the wall and imagine it’s graffiti that I find really offensive. I walk in. I look at it. I flush. My heart starts to race. I’m outraged. I’m taken aback. Of course if I didn’t know the language in which it was written I could have had exactly the same retinal events and the same events in my early visual system without any corresponding reaction.

So it’s an interesting puzzle. Much more shows up for us than just what projects into our nervous system. In fact, however, paradoxical it sounds if we think of what is visible as just what projects to the eyes we see much more than is visible and more over, just because something does enter our eyes, provide a stimulus to the nervous system that doesn’t mean we experience it. Psychologists have shown this in the laboratory with experiments that would have been called change blindness. You can be looking at something and as you’re looking at it it’s changing and under quite normal conditions people will to a surprisingly large degree fail to be able to describe or notice that a change has occurred. It’s a little bit like if I have a plate of French fries and you say to me, “Hey, what’s that over there behind your shoulder,” and I go like this and you take one of my fries and when I turn around I probably won’t notice that anything is missing. I didn’t have that kind of detailed internal representation of the plate such that I can compare how the plate looked before I turned away and how it looked when I turned back and notice a discrepancy, but that’s how our experience is in general. We find ourselves emplaced in an environment. The world is there. We don’t need a detailed internal representation because we can move our heads, flick our eyes, redirect our interest and get the information we need as we need it.

These phenomena, our ability to experience more than is in some sense there and also less than is in some sense there, I think in a very strong way, point us to the fact that what shows up for us is not so much a matter of what is happening inside of us, but how we are achieving or failing to achieve access to what’s going on around us.

Directed / Produced by Jonathan Fowler & Elizabeth Rodd

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40 thoughts on “Alva Noë: The Puzzle of Perception
  1. Yet if I were to tell you that you have no control over anything about you, would you agree? Lets see, you typed that message, why? Well neurons in your brain fired and you did it. Why did the neurons fire? Well you can't control the neurons, you can't just say turn on and they turn on can you? So your brain reacted towards stimuli, and made your body react accordingly. So in a way self control is an illusion your only in it for the ride. I have no idea what this has to do with your comment lol.

  2. From philosophy, religion, physics and more holds connotations of the same thread. Seek and you shall find, look or it is not there, lend not your focus to drain power. Being conscious energy capable of altering our wave lengths at will. The law of attraction, karma, harmonic resonance, whatever. Thoughts, just as a body hitting water like cement turns waves to partials. Each factor gives way to others to find a new alignment. Suppose we except this and that you project more than we see. Peace.

  3. I think most people are misunderstanding some basic tenets of what this guy's saying. It's not the facts that he's stating that are supposed to surprise us, indeed these facts are common to us all. I think the main mystery he is elaborating on is the fact that given a certain selection sensory data, our experience of the selection is not limited to what goes in. Our experience is shaped by more than just the input stimuli, even if we suspect that it shouldn't.

  4. The whole concept of perception is puzzled. You, the little guy talking in your head, the thing that makes decisions, does not see. You are blind, deaf, you have no perception of the outside world.

    First the eye gets the visuals then it is transmitter as raw data and then processed by your subconcioussnes. You dont see anything. What happens when you feel as seeing something, you actually see a model of the outside world that is loosely based by the raw data that has been processed.

  5. For example the human eye actuall makes quite shitty picture. The eye has multiple part, for example at the side of your vision you dont see colour, you dont see anything, just movement and difference in lightness. Your vision has a giant black whole in the center. Your smartphone makes hell of a lot better pictures than your eyes.

    However you have smth your phone does not: Processing ability. If you see that thing, random bits of red, your brain processes the info and sees it as a tomato

  6. The whole "reality" you feel is actually just a Matrix you brain created so it can do higher functions. This is why you don't see what you are looking for if you imagine the look of the object differently than it does look irl. (exmplains the problem with you searching the fridge for stuff your gf brought)

    Thats why you dont notice if something changes in your view without movement without you focusing on it. Because you only see the model your brain made.

  7. The practice of philosophy is simply thinking about thinking and in that we're all philosophize. However the job of the philosopher is to bring together all these different thoughts about thought and give them some kind of purpose. A real philosopher should not only show us how things are but how things should be – what is good, how should we govern ourselves etc. These things are truly important to who we are as humanity. This guy reduces philosophy to unsubstantiated and pointless facts.

  8. the puzzle is how we react to it or how we manage to interpret what we see, he uses the tomato example to who that there is a lot of things missing when we look at things and that our mind makes up for it

  9. Yet you took the time to let everyone know how you feel? Look, I'm doing the same thing… look at us & our worthless egos.

  10. Let me break down the importance to his point unknown to the world until recent research has shed light on why this does have meaning to you! When you see the tomato as he describes he makes the point of how there is much more that we are seeing or perceiving in one glance. This is what will no be known as a Moment of Awareness. Hear me out before you hang up!

  11. At this time it should be noted that any one unified moment of consciousness irrespective of it having been made up of containing only one atomic second or a million it would be experienced as lasting of the same duration. The only difference is the amount of substance contained in these moments.

  12. To explain the realities of our perception of time I need to touch on one of the most fundamental building blocks of our existence. By being constrained to experience only one moment in time, from the beginning to the end, would mean that our existence would also be constrained from any progress, maintaining the same status throughout. Once again there would have been no purpose in the creation of the universe.

  13. The building blocks for our existence started the moment the first Hydrogen Atom was created, meaning that this was the actual first steps allowing our eventual appearance of existence. The creation of a portrait cannot start before a cotton seed has been planted to create the canvas which undeniably and inevitably plays a major role in a portraits eventual creation.

  14. By taking it one step further by transparencing a series of “encapsulated perceived moments”, would give us a transparent view of the past, present and future but not necessarily in this order, enabling us to experience our conscious realities.

  15. ha, good way of putting it. sometimes I forget about why I like philosophy, and then I read some, and I remember how awesome it is. There's just so much stuff there, it's sort of an absolutely indefinite field of study (as most fields, too, are, but philosophy is presumably the one with the least amount of consensus)

  16. This guy takes forever to say nothing. 0:35 that's called memory. It's not "an interesting puzzle". He's just talking about extrapolation from past memories and not knowing about things we can't see or haven't yet seen… how can this not be apparent to anyone with a brain? why did this have to be a video? This is just pseudo-intellectual thin air. Two words: Stefan Molyneux, this so called "philosopher" doesn't hold a candle to Stefan Molyneux.

  17. He talks a lot and really says nothing.
    Well, he tries to define change blindness, which is an interesting phenomenon, and even that he´s describing less than accurately. He leaves out the important fact, that without turning our heads, while looking straight at, say, a picture, we might surprisingly often fail to see even big changes occurring in the picture.

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