Peikoff - Sense Perception And Volition - The Perceptual Level As The Given Flashcards
(18 cards)
So far LP has been considering sensory awareness as an adult phenomenon.
Chronologically, however, there are …?
2 stages in man’s development of such awareness:
Stage 1 = Sensation.
Stage 2 = Perception.
==> This is a distinction with important philosophical implications.
The first stage of consciousness is that of …?
Sensation.
What is a sensation?
A sensation is an IRREDUCIBLE state of awareness produced by the action of a stimulus on a sense organ.
Irreducible means?
Incapable of being analyzed into simpler conscious units.
By its nature, a sensation lasts only …?
As long as the stimulus.
The most primitive conscious organisms appear to possess only the capacity of …?
Sensation.
==> The conscious life of such organisms is the experience of isolated, fleeting data, bombarded by a flux of stimuli.
==> These creatures confront a kaleidoscopic succession of NEW WORLDS, each swept away by the next as the stimuli involved fade or change.
==> Since such consciousness do NOT retain their mental contents, they can hardly detect RELATIONSHIPS among them.
***William James’ apt description “blooming, buzzing confusion”.
Human infants start their lives in this state and remain in it for perhaps a matter of months. But no one reading these words suffers such a state now.
When you the reader look, say, at a table-not THINK of it, but merely turn your eyes toward it and LOOK …?
You enjoy a different form of awareness from that of the infant.
==> You do not encounter an isolated, ephemeral color patch or a play of fleeting sensations, but an enduring thing, an object, an ENTITY.
**This is true even though the STIMULUS reaching your eyes is the VERY ONE that WOULD REACH AN INFANT’S.
The reason you see an entity is that …?
You have experienced many kinds of sensations from similar objects in the past, and your brain has retained and INTEGRATED THEM.
==> It has put them together to form an INDIVISIBLE WHOLE.
As a result of this integration, a complex past mental content of yours is implicit and operative in your present visual awareness.
In the act of looking at a table now, …?
You are aware of its solidity-of the fact that, unlike brown water, it will bar your path if you try to walk through it.
Of its texture … etc.
All this sensory info (and much more) is tied to and cued by your present visual sensation.
==> The result is your ABILITY, when you look out, to see not merely a patch of brown, but a table.
Such an ability exemplifies the 2nd stage of consciousness: the PERCEPTUAL level.
A perception …?
Is a group of sensations automatically retained and integrated by the brain of a living organism, which gives it the ability to be aware, not of single stimuli, but of ENTITIES, of things.
The important philosophic point of this discussion can be stated simply:
Direct experience means the PERCEPTUAL LEVEL OF CONSCIOUSNESS.
What we are given when we use our senses, leaving aside all conceptual knowledge, is the AWARENESS OF ENTITIES-NOTHING MORE, BUT NOTHING LESS.
We do not and cannot experience the world as infants do.
We come to learn that an infant type of experience exists only because we have made a long series of scientific discoveries.
Starting from the perceptual fact, we formed a conceptual vocabulary.
==> Then step by step, we acquired substantial knowledge, and became able imaginatively to project our initial state and to conclude that the world must once have appeared to us as a CHAOS.
==> That chaos, however, is not given to us as adults or philosophers.
***IT IS A SOPHISTICATED INFERENCE FROM WHAT IS GIVEN: THE PERCEPTUAL LEVEL.
The proper order of philosophy, therefore, is not the chronological order of our actual development:
Chronologically, the sensation stage comes first, then the perceptual, and then the conceptual.
Epistemologically ==> THE PERCEPTUAL LEVEL COMES FIRST.
If one seeks to prove any item of human knowledge, on any subject, he must …?
Begin with the facts of PERCEPTION.
==> These facts constitute the BASE OF COGNITION.
==> They are the self-evident and the incontestable, by reference to which we VALIDATE ALL LATER KNOWLEDGE, including the knowledge that, decades earlier, when we first emerged from the womb, we experienced a brief sensation stage.
There are philosophers (David Hume is the most famous) who deny the perceptual level.
Such men …?
Give the sensation stage epistemological primacy.
Then, they seek to determine whether the fact of entities (and causality) can be established by inference from it.
==> This is a DEAD END. FROM DISINTEGRATED SENSATIONS, NOTHING CAN BE INFERRED.
==> A consciousness that experienced only sensations would be like the mind of an infant ==> It could neither perceive objects nor form concepts. (Which is one reason Hume ended as a paralyzed skeptic)
Hume’s dead end, however, is self-imposed. ENTITIES DO NOT REQUIRE INFERENTIAL VALIDATION.
THE GIVEN IS THE PERCEPTUAL LEVEL.
This last statement does not necessarily means that …?
The entities we perceive are metaphysical primaries. As we have seen, that is a question for science.
It means that the grasp of entities is an EPISTEMOLOGICAL PRIMARY, which is PRESUPPOSED BY ALL OTHER KNOWLEDGE, including the knowledge of any ultimate ingredients of matter that scientists may one day discover.
The integration of sensations into percepts, as I have indicated, is performed by the brain AUTOMATICALLY.
Philosophy, therefore, …?
Has NOT advice to offer in this regard.
There can be NO ADVICE WHERE MAN HAS NO POWER TO CHOOSE HIS COURSE OF BEHAVIOR.
In regard to a more complex kind of integration, which we do NOT perform automatically, philosophy does have advice to offer-volumes of it.
THE INTEGRATION OF PERCEPTS INTO CONCEPTS.
This brings us to the threshold of the conceptual level of consciousness and to the 2nd issue in the anteroom of epistemology: VOLITION.
