the distinction is useful, but not as clear as it seems at first. Many interpretations happen without conscious direction. We can sometimes consciously correct a low level interpretation, as in your note on the door. I imagine in that case, you could no longer see it as a note after you realized what was happening. In other cases of optical illusion, we can understand that we are making a mistake, but that understanding doesn’t make our perception change.
An extreme example is color blindness. This suggests that the perception of color is itself an interpretation. The stimuli are the same, but the mechanism used for sensing them does not allow the usual discriminations. Should we say ipersons with that condition have different sensations or different interpretations? Maybe that is a bad example.
Another would be the man who mistook his wife for a hat, of the book with the title. Due to something going wrong in his brain, he had perpetual hallucinations. This seems to indicate that he had ordinary sensations, but was unable to interpret them even in the simplest and unconscious way.
So what is my point? I’m not really sure. Maybe, if there is a sharp and important distinction that provided your post with a subject, we might need to be more careful about saying what sorts of things are being distinguished, because the distinction between perception and interpretation is subtle and perhaps insufficient for this purpose.
At the level of neurobiology ALL sensations are interpretive. Our neural systems turn the impulses from our senses into an integrated certainty of reality around us.
Occasionally we become consciously aware of the process through misinterpretation, as with the note on your front door, but mostly the construction of our realities happens at the level of machine code.
A symptom of the prevailing scientific paradigm about the unique marvels of human consciousness is that we have become blind to the basic constructive function of neural systems. We consider that “thinking” is a key function of the brain with sensation as a mere input. More correctly sensing and immediate reaction are core. Thinking is an after-the-fact sideshow.
(If anyone is interested in the neurophysiology of human behaviour I explain it in my book How to Understand Everything (apologies for the pompous title).)
I don't think "interpretive" is the right word for what you're describing. You can have new types of experience that are not immediately interpreted (in the sense of fitting into a world-model).
So for example, I might hear a sound I've never heard before and ask, "What was that?" -- the raw sensation has not yet been interpreted, merely experienced.
Once we have interpretations ("Oh, that's the sound an elephant makes"), then the sensation and the interpretation become more tightly integrated.
I have a quibble with your statement "There is a difference between your sensations and your interpretations of them."
Our neural systems are ALWAYS interpreting. When we experience sensations that are completely novel, let us say the ground vibrating along with a high pitched whine, we'd immediately experience a feeling of panic until we had made sense of what was causing it and its implications for our survival.
When you experience a sound you'd "never heard before" it would inevitably be like other sounds that we'd previously heard and we'd be able to describe is as being *like* other familiar sounds (a screech, a whistle, banging for instance). This level of "interpretation" is a layer above the in-the-moment sensing that is a core functionality of our neural systems.
If you want to include the "feelings of anxiety generated by a loud bang" into "interpretation," then we still have the distinction between the raw sensation and the implicit, sub-conscious world models.
So, if you start panicking after hearing a loud bang, because there were gunshots nearby, then the implicit world-model is "correct."
If you panic, but it was was merely fireworks, then the implicit world-model is incorrect.
As I say in the article, the "sensation" cannot be wrong (the loud BANG and the anxiety that follows) in the same way as the interpretation (the implicit beliefs of fireworks vs gunshots).
I think you're putting too much into the category of "interpretation." You're blending both "subconscious generation of feelings" and "high-level world-models" into the same category, which makes distinctions fuzzier.
There are low-level systems and high-level systems, voluntary and involuntary movements. There's a hierarchy, and you seem to be overweighting the low-level. Thinking is not a "sideshow" just because we have instincts, too.
You say, "When you experience a sound you'd "never heard before" it would inevitably be like other sounds that we'd previously heard and we'd be able to describe is as being *like* other familiar sounds"
That's not correct. Children/babies are actually encountering a novel sounds that don't "sound like" anything they've heard before.
the distinction is useful, but not as clear as it seems at first. Many interpretations happen without conscious direction. We can sometimes consciously correct a low level interpretation, as in your note on the door. I imagine in that case, you could no longer see it as a note after you realized what was happening. In other cases of optical illusion, we can understand that we are making a mistake, but that understanding doesn’t make our perception change.
An extreme example is color blindness. This suggests that the perception of color is itself an interpretation. The stimuli are the same, but the mechanism used for sensing them does not allow the usual discriminations. Should we say ipersons with that condition have different sensations or different interpretations? Maybe that is a bad example.
Another would be the man who mistook his wife for a hat, of the book with the title. Due to something going wrong in his brain, he had perpetual hallucinations. This seems to indicate that he had ordinary sensations, but was unable to interpret them even in the simplest and unconscious way.
So what is my point? I’m not really sure. Maybe, if there is a sharp and important distinction that provided your post with a subject, we might need to be more careful about saying what sorts of things are being distinguished, because the distinction between perception and interpretation is subtle and perhaps insufficient for this purpose.
At the level of neurobiology ALL sensations are interpretive. Our neural systems turn the impulses from our senses into an integrated certainty of reality around us.
Occasionally we become consciously aware of the process through misinterpretation, as with the note on your front door, but mostly the construction of our realities happens at the level of machine code.
A symptom of the prevailing scientific paradigm about the unique marvels of human consciousness is that we have become blind to the basic constructive function of neural systems. We consider that “thinking” is a key function of the brain with sensation as a mere input. More correctly sensing and immediate reaction are core. Thinking is an after-the-fact sideshow.
(If anyone is interested in the neurophysiology of human behaviour I explain it in my book How to Understand Everything (apologies for the pompous title).)
I don't think "interpretive" is the right word for what you're describing. You can have new types of experience that are not immediately interpreted (in the sense of fitting into a world-model).
So for example, I might hear a sound I've never heard before and ask, "What was that?" -- the raw sensation has not yet been interpreted, merely experienced.
Once we have interpretations ("Oh, that's the sound an elephant makes"), then the sensation and the interpretation become more tightly integrated.
I have a quibble with your statement "There is a difference between your sensations and your interpretations of them."
Our neural systems are ALWAYS interpreting. When we experience sensations that are completely novel, let us say the ground vibrating along with a high pitched whine, we'd immediately experience a feeling of panic until we had made sense of what was causing it and its implications for our survival.
When you experience a sound you'd "never heard before" it would inevitably be like other sounds that we'd previously heard and we'd be able to describe is as being *like* other familiar sounds (a screech, a whistle, banging for instance). This level of "interpretation" is a layer above the in-the-moment sensing that is a core functionality of our neural systems.
If you want to include the "feelings of anxiety generated by a loud bang" into "interpretation," then we still have the distinction between the raw sensation and the implicit, sub-conscious world models.
So, if you start panicking after hearing a loud bang, because there were gunshots nearby, then the implicit world-model is "correct."
If you panic, but it was was merely fireworks, then the implicit world-model is incorrect.
As I say in the article, the "sensation" cannot be wrong (the loud BANG and the anxiety that follows) in the same way as the interpretation (the implicit beliefs of fireworks vs gunshots).
I think you're putting too much into the category of "interpretation." You're blending both "subconscious generation of feelings" and "high-level world-models" into the same category, which makes distinctions fuzzier.
There are low-level systems and high-level systems, voluntary and involuntary movements. There's a hierarchy, and you seem to be overweighting the low-level. Thinking is not a "sideshow" just because we have instincts, too.
You say, "When you experience a sound you'd "never heard before" it would inevitably be like other sounds that we'd previously heard and we'd be able to describe is as being *like* other familiar sounds"
That's not correct. Children/babies are actually encountering a novel sounds that don't "sound like" anything they've heard before.