"That's just the public perception..."

I always quite like it when politicians say that. As though they, being of a higher calling, have some special other route to truth. Are they all Plato's acolytes? What special inside track do they have? can we all be privy to it, or do we have to receive this higher truth through the political priest class? How do we know they actually have this privileged knowledge? Do we just take it on trust? Have they demoted the knowing of mere facts to the status of 2nd class prosaic quiz-answering, whereas "real" knowing does not have such feet of clay? Can we on the outside ever take a peek inside? Do we have to give up all worldly, grubby obsessions with "facts", cleanse ourselves before we can appreciate This Place?
Hmm, it's not pyramid sales, is it? (sorry: "multi-level marketing")
Just checking.

Sense, sensibility and perception

I think a standard sort of definition would be "knowing the world about us through the medium of sense presentations" (Cassell's dictionary)
Again, this is a 'perception-as-reception' paradigm, but it also draws the distinction between sense presentations and 'knowledge'.William James said words to the effect of "we don't perceive sense data, we perceive things, out there, in the world"
This approach has perception as mediated . It also raises the interesting question: could there be more contents in that "knowledge" than there was in the senses? - if so, where does it come from?
Well, of course there is - not because of some spooky extra-sensory perception (or at least, all perception is miraculous without having to invent some other invisible demos)but because knowledge is cumulative - not necessarily in a series of atomistic snapshots, how the world is in one moment followed by how it is in the next. various thinkers have had a go at this, and it depends where you're coming to the problem from.
Helmholz (spelling varies, oddly)being a physical scientist, had the idea of "unconscious inferences" - sort of supplementary knowledge drawn from experience, memory and learning, that could be used to pad out the evidence of the senses. later scientists, whilst resting heavily on the physical characteristics of sense organs and their performance, always had to bring in (sometimes as something of an afterthought) things like "cognitive factors" - but these were more by way of making psychophysical explanations work by having a sort of dustbin concept where all the problems could be dumped, than by the attempt to tackle those cognitive mechanisms/factors head on.
And really, whilst senses are marvellous enough - they are not where perception is to be found - it's actually in there in the dustbin of 'cognitive factors'

So, what is perception?

Bit of a trick, that heading... if I could answer that, then the rest of the universe should be child's play!
Still, One has to try.
It's how we know about the world we live in; more especially, the environment that surrounds one. "Sense presentations" seem to be important - but not sufficient to explain everything we know; hence, Helmholz's "unconscious inferences" - the cognitive "top down" synthetic additions that one brings to the sense-evidence that one gets from the immediate environment.
Nevertheless, it's reasonably conventional to think in terms of the reception of sense data caused by our exposure to the environment, plus those cognitive 'thinking about it' bits, to help them make sense. Once we've got the hang of things, we can behave appropriately (appropriately to survival, that is).
Is that too simple? of course it is!
First of all, what is it that arrives in "sense presentations"? - it's not enough to just say "the whole thing..." - we know that, but what are the bits, the components on which we operate (along with those unconscious inferences) to understand what is being presented to us?
Notice that there is this implicit assumption that reception is important, as though perception is just like when we point a camera and microphone (and olfactory sensor, and...) at the world and simply pick up the signals that come from the environment. Is that quite right?

Perceiving Perception

So, to perceive what is, it would be handy to try work out what perception is. without wishing to come over all holistic, it's rather difficult to entirely disconnect the study of perception from consideration of what perception is of. We're used to the idea the the world around us is made of atoms, but you can't see them or feel them. Our perception has a certain scale - not too big, nor too minute, not too fast or indeed, too small; the scale of our perception is the scale of our feasible interactions. our perception of the world is the perception of our world. Hence, we can't perceive "objectively" and "completely accurately". Doesn't stop us trying, though - and really, the history of tool using is the history of a long, slow effort to extend our perception-and-interaction. We just cannot accept that what's presented to us in our immediate surroundings is all there is, "we'll not let it lie..."

What IS?

The question of what is, irrespective of my opinion, has been around for thousands of years. From Plato onwards, there has been a tradition of trying to look beneath the surface appearance of things, the shadows of one's own perceptual processes that seem to obscure the "pure" truth underneath.
It's the question that drives religion, science, art - even perception itself.
All these have as a foundation the rejection of the idea of just accepting what appears in front of one in favour of discerning some explanation that one can't directly see (or hear, or touch or smell or...).
Whether the universe is made up of spirits, beauty, matter/energy distributed through space/time or agents that benefit/threaten me, - all or none of the above - have we moved nearer an explanation, and anyway, why do we need one?
It almost seems as if we're hooked on "explanation" - we can't just accept the territory, we have to have a map.It's what perception is - at least, the kind of perception that mobile organisms have.
Oddly, we have to use perception to try to perceive past perception.
Doomed to fail, or doomed to succeed?

On waking in the Land of Blog

Perception here is a weird process; like being in an anechoic chamber, yet one where echoes come back, just every now and then