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).)
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).)