Does perception exist outside of our own nervous system? Philosopher Alva Noë thinks so. We can visualize the back of a tomato, even if our eyes cannot see it. We aren’t offended by profane statements written in a language we aren’t fluent in. This is because our perception is based on more than our five senses; it relies on experience and context as well.
Alva Noë unpacks this puzzle with a few examples, from being able to visualize things we are not looking at, to a phenomenon called “change blindness.”
Ultimately, this information can be used to challenge our original understanding of perception, and can expand on the idea that the way one person assesses an object may not precisely match the assessment of another.
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