Sense+Perception

Day 1. What is a 'sense'? How many senses we really have. Other animals' senses. Problems with how we interpret the few signals we do receive.

 * There are many limitations to what we understand, mainly to what we see and hear.
 * "Science may be described as the act of systematic oversimplification." -Karl Popper
 * Everyone has their own interpretations of light and sound because of the way our brains work.

====Day 2. How do senses work? Transducers. How we "see colors" and "taste spiciness". Where is the color?====
 * There are many assumption involved in sight and sound perception.
 * There is no sound unless there is someone there to hear it.
 * "There are not experiences because there are no experiencers." -James L. Christian

====Day 3. POVs (points of view). Subjectivity and objectivity. "What Really Happened?" Are some POVs better than others? Some more accurate? Is it better to have multiple POVs?====
 * Sense perception is about observing meaning, not recording data.
 * We only remember the facts that fit into the frame-work of our minds.
 * Our accounts of events are subjective because our minds only focus on what is meaningful.
 * Essay due on Tuesday, October 19th.

Day 4. The purpose of human senses: Recording data or organizing meaning? Perception as "attention dependent" and "gist-dependent", focused on //processing// data.
 * There are two different types of sound: //physical// sound, and //experienced// sound.
 * Our brains are built to observe things through our senses.
 * If we want to perceive a larger range of data, we need to focus our attention on the different aspects of what we are trying to observe.

====Day 5. The priority of meaning: Advantages (coherent, stable experiences) and disadvantages (change and inattention blindness, untrustworthy eyewitness accounts)==== ==
 * Common-sense realism is what we think exists, really does exist.
 * Scientific realism says that the universe is composed of what we scientifically proved it to be composed of.
 * Phenomenalism says that we can't know anything about anything, so why should we worry about.

====Day 6. Organizing principles of sense perception: parsimony, seeing things as they "should" be, seeing things in context, seeing wholes rather than parts, "closure" (naming the stimulus)====
 * There are three limitations to our perception of things: "(1) we may misinterpret what we see, (2) we may fail to notice something, (3) we may misremember what we have seen."
 * Our sense of touch takes priority over all of our other senses.
 * "Knowledge requires something less than knowledge."

====Day 7. Theories about the relation between sense perception and reality. Common-sense realism. Scientific realism. Phenomenalism.====