PHILOSOPHY - Epistemology: Paradoxes of Perception #1 (Argument from Illusion) [HD]

In this Wireless Philosophy video, Dr Eugen Fischer (University of East Anglia) presents the ‘argument from illusion’. This argument appears to refute our common-sense conception of perception (seeing, hearing, etc.). Together with parallel arguments, it raises the problem of perception that has been a lynch-pin of Western philosophy, since the mid-18th century.

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[aledirksen]

with memory in play, the brain combines the sense datum to construct the real object. we remember how to coin looks as it changes and we soon learn how it looks like and behaves from every angle and distance so that we understand all possible states it would be in as we learn the nature of the coin and how the sense datum changes based on how we change any one of our senses.

[jeanbordes]

Extraordinary video about How strange and amazing our perception is of the objective World. Hume is one of the greatest philosopher of all Times

[כולנוביחד]

Whom Can We Trust If No One Is Trustworthy?
One of my favorite quips from Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is when Tom is defined as “a glittering hero…the pet of the old, the envy of the young, ” and there were “some that believed that he would be President, yet, if he escaped hanging.” With these few words, Twain captured the essence of leadership in our world. Those who get to the top are the fiercest, most determined, and most ruthless. Today, the latter quality has become so intense that we can no longer believe our leaders, and certainly not trust them to have our best interest in mind.
I am not accusing any leader in particular, or even leaders as a whole. It is simply that in an egoistic world, where people vie to topple one another on their way to the top, the one at the top is clearly the one who trampled over and knocked down more people than anyone else. Concisely, to get to the top in an egoistic world you have to be the biggest egoist.
So how do we know whom to trust? We don’t know and we cannot know. All we know is that we are in the dark.
In a culture of unhinged selfishness, any conspiracy theory seems reasonable, while truth is nowhere to be found. When every person who says or writes something is trying to promote some hidden agenda, you have no way of knowing who is right, what really happened, or if anything happened at all.
The only way to get some clarity in the news and goodwill from our leaders is to say “Enough!” to our current system and build something entirely independent. The guiding principle of such a system should be “information only, ” no commentary. Commentary means that information has already been skewed. Information means saying only what happened, as much as possible, not why, and not who is to blame and who we should praise.
Concurrently, we must begin a comprehensive process of self-teaching. We have to know not only what is happening, but why we skew and distort everything. In other words, we have to know about human nature and how it inherently presents matters according to its own subjective view, which caters to one’s own interest. To “clear” ourselves from that deformity, we must learn how to rise above our personal interest and develop an equally favorable attitude toward others. This is our only guarantee that our interpretation of things will be even and correct.
Once we achieve such an attitude, we will discover that the bad things we see in our world reflect our own, internal wickedness. Our ill-will toward others creates a world where ill-will governs, and so the world is filled with wickedness and cruelty. Therefore, all we need in order to create positive leadership—and to generally eliminate ill-will from the world—is to generate goodwill within us. When we nurture goodwill toward others, we will fill the world with goodwill. As a result, the world will fill with kindness and compassion. By changing ourselves, we will create a world that is opposite from the world we have created through our desires to govern, patronize, and often destroy other people.

[FraterOculus]

Fantastic fucking video, the best on the problem of perception I've seen, Hume sounds like he puts it well. We can see nothing, we can never know the object in itself, only a more or less skewed version... we are all schizophrenics!

[MrUtak]

If you guys want more of this, I suggest reading about the Kosslyn and Pylyshyn debate on mental imagery.

[TheGschwartz]

Objects don't appear different than they are, rather they are a collection of all possible appearances. but cam only be experienced one appearance at a time depending upon our position in time and space. There is no stable object, altough it may have some stable or consistent qualities.

[TanTran-pxsl]

You try to give the video more brightness it will be great if you do

[polarbear]

we can never truly know if what we percieve is sense data or not . i mean the coin could actually be a hallucination and exist that way even without our perception. everything could be an illusion and we might never know

[Lavl-dqtk]

sense data changes for example when we move, but image (the object itself) stays the same inside our mind

[ronmaessen]

There are several good paradoxes in this playlist, but I think there are a lot more interesting paradoxes than are sometimes treated in this playlist: Zeno's paradoxes, The unexpected hanging paradox, russels paradox, Paradoxes concerning infinite time or space. I hope (some of) these will be added in the future.

[ExistenceUniversity]

These are not "paradoxes" nor "illusions", you perceive reality and identity as it is. A coin is round from one angle, elliptical from another, and a straight line from the third. This is not an illusion, this is the identity of a coin. A straw in water interacts with light different than a straw in air. You are not fooled by your senses because you claim "that straw is bent in the water!" You fooled yourself by interpreting what is actually a perception of a straw and water interacting with light. Your conceptual idea was wrong because you questioned your correct perception. There is no illusion, you see it as it is in reality. A camera "sees" the same distortion because thats the physically change in direction of light interacting with the identity of air vs water on a straw.

[cgm]

Coins will still be perceived as round even though the "sense datum", the image on our retina is oval. Tables the same size will still appear as the same size even though one is further away and thus cast a smaller image in our eyes. In fact the images on our retinas are not very good or very clear. Our perceptual system does a wonderful job of correcting such distortions so our perception of the world has a high degree of fidelity with what actually is. It's not perfect but it's still amazing, just look how well we navigate rooms full of tables, chairs and other moving people or how unconfused we are about the size and shape of a spinning coin.

[aelkg]

Thank you for this video! If possible, it would be interesting to get the references for Hume's arguments!

[mrjoony]

Pretty obvious. And one must also know that one is not cut off from the real coin. We dont see an image of the real coin. There is no coin. There is just something which has to be there so there can be an image of it. This something is reality and is not categorized. 1 big reality that we perseive and the image is all subjectiveness that can be perceived. That also means that reality doesnt stop where our perception stops. Our image is only a "part" of it and therefore we will never know anything about objective reality other than that it is something, because every experiment or investigation is an image and subjective as well.

[bishal]

These all paradoxes are actually a part of idealism.

[PeterBethanis]

What if I call a coin a glass and a glass a coin, what am I looking at then?  What if I don't call it anything... what is it then?  Most human meaning is grounded in language not perception.

[bjrnhagen]

The problem here is that Hume didn't differentiated between sensation and perception. He was a sensationalist. For instance, if a blind person for some reason had been cured of his blindness, he would receive the reality on a sensational level i.e. dots, dashes, and surfaces arranged as a 2 dimensional pattern. He wouldn't see objects, which is to be on a perceptual level. People with normal sight on the other hand, are not able to receive the reality on a sensational level, because they are on a perceptual level i.e. they see objects. Think about an animated rotating cube for instance, the former blind person would just receive a constant change of surfaces, whereas, a person with normal sight cannot see anything but a rotating cube.

Hume derives his epistemology from the level of sensations(dots, dashes, and surfaces). For instance, to take a different experiment with a pencil, if you lead the pencil halfway behind a solid object, let's say a piece of paper, for a person on a sensational level would then "see" a half pencil. This experiment is as good as the pencil in the water experiment, though not as sophisticated. The answer is that light doesn't travel through paper, whereas, when the pencil is in the water, light bends in water. In both of these experiments, for a person on a perceptual level, there's no confusion about the pencil. For a person on a sensational level however, like Hume :P, would have no clue what's going on.

Epistemology must be derived from a perceptual level. On a perceptual level, we don't see that train tracks comes together in the horizon, we don't see a oval coin from the side, we don't see that the table gets smaller. Only on a sensational level would we "see" these effects. Though on a sensational level we are not able to see anything, and thus not able to conclude anything either. It is from a perceptual level we advance further up to a conceptual level.

[Clavicula]

holly shit, you guys discovered relativity

[CStJohn-buge]

"What can that elliptical patch be? It cannot be the coin, because the coin is not elliptical. So clearly you're aware of something other than the coin."

What I find confusing is the bias present in the phenomenal judgement taking place here. Is there any objective way to say what the coin is? Is the coin really circular? It seems that holding it perpendicular to my face isn't any special way of holding the coin such that I can grasp what it really, in fact, is. The same can be said of the pencil. I find it dubious to state that the pencil is in fact straight simply because I'm only viewing it in air as opposed to air and water - with a variable index of refraction.

Now, these are of course phenomenal judgments based solely on vision. I can hold the coin, feel that it is circular; likewise with the pencil, since I can feel it straight as I run my finger along its length. These sense data together can be aggregate and maybe I can then get a sense of what the coin and pencil actually are before I get contradictory sense data from my eyes. However, there is seemingly no "ground state" of perception where I can compare how an object really is and how my perception of it may be faulty.

Any and all replies are welcome. I would like to come to a state of better understanding. :)

[keithcheng]

People who believe what they can sense to be real will have their mind blown once they learn about quantum phenomenon...