General 1 — Miya Perry

Let’s start off with something you’ll have heard many times before: that your experience of the world is self-created. You can know that you are experiencing sensations and interpreting them as a tree or a house or a chicken, but you have no way of knowing what the things you’re seeing and hearing and touching actually are, or indeed whether the sights or sounds or feelings actually correspond to anything outside of you at all. The experience of a chicken is an imposed interpretation on a field of sense data. Introductory cognitive science classes like to demonstrate this fact by drawing attention to the ways that interpretations can change or break—for example, simple optical illusions like the Necker Cube provide very mild examples of the way a set of sensations can be multiply interpretable. The examination of processing disorders like aphasia can tell us interesting things about how our conceptual constructions are composed by showing us what happens when different parts of a pers

Let’s start off with something you’ll have heard many times before: that your experience of the world is self-created. You can know that you are experiencing sensations and interpreting them as a tree or a house or a chicken, but you have no way of knowing what the things you’re seeing and hearing and touching actually are, or indeed whether the sights or sounds or feelings actually correspond to anything outside of you at all. The experience of a chicken is an imposed interpretation on a field of sense data. Introductory cognitive science classes like to demonstrate this fact by drawing atten