quotations about perception
We can see the time difference when two bars are presented with a delay of 3 milliseconds. In contrast, conscious perception is much slower and can be delayed for several hundred milliseconds. This time lag is a good thing for perception.... The brain wants to give you the best, clearest information it can, and this demands a substantial amount of time. There is no advantage in making you aware of its unconscious processing, because that would be immensely confusing.
FRANK SCHARNOWSKI
"Consciousness Works Differently Than You Think, According To This New Theory", Huffington Post, April 16, 2016
Better see rightly on a pound a week than squint on a million.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
preface, Plays Unpleasant
Perception is naturally surpassed toward action; better yet, it can be revealed only in and through projects of action. The world is revealed as an "always future hollow", for we are always future to ourselves.
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
Being and Nothingness
In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
DESIDERIUS ERASMUS
Adages
Perception is one kind of, and indeed the primordial, and fundamental, type of knowledge. For the senses are our only source of informational input from the world; without them we could know nothing.
MARJORIE GRENE
The Understanding of Nature: Essays in the Philosophy of Biology
Our life is not so much threatened as our perception. Ghostlike we glide through nature, and should not know our place again.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
"Experience", Essays
The more perfect our means of direct experience, the more easily we are caught by the dangerous illusion that perceiving is tantamount to knowing and understanding.
RUDOLF ARNHEIM
Film as Art
All we have to believe with is our senses, the tools we use to perceive the world: our sight, our touch, our memory. If they lie to us, then nothing can be trusted. And even if we do not believe, then still we cannot travel in any other way than the road our senses show us; and we must walk that road to the end.
NEIL GAIMAN
American Gods
The highest exercise of imagination is not to devise what has no existence, but rather to perceive what really exists, though unseen by the outward eye--not creation, but insight.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Table-Talk