Perception is a term that refers to how huma perceive their reality and their view of the world around them. consciousness refers to the human ability to be aware of and responsive to their surroundings. Th two concepts are different as consciousness focusing on all the possibilities a with perception entailing locking one’s mind to a single possibility. Perception and consciousness are significant to humans in the understand of objects around them as well as their environment. The paper focuses on perception and consciousness, and how they enable us to interact with objects around us as well as the environment.
Niiniluoto, Sintonen & Woleznski (2004, p. 58) define perception as a response to the world. It entails how people interpret stimuli and sensations. It is a perception responsible for the five human senses: sight, touch, taste, smell, and hearing. This kind of perception is known as outer perception or exteroception. Secondly, there is also the sense of awareness of the state of our bodies, such as the position and movement of our limbs, which is similar to the perception though it is not dependent on the five senses. This perception is also known as inner perception or, in special cases, proprioception. Humans’ third kind of awareness is distinct from the other two, and its object is our mental states. This kind of perception is also referred to as self-perception as the object of awareness is mental.
Cognitive processes explain the top-down theories of perception. They rely on the human’s already existing knowledge and their prior expectations of influence, such as understanding and beliefs. People can be aware of these and, in other circumstances, not be conscious of this awareness. Several factors contribute to a person’s understanding of these influences on perceptions. For example, the context and the circumstances of a situation may influence perception. A person reading a book on a topic such as a geography and encountering unfamiliar words is likely to assume that those words are related to geography. Motivation is a significant concept in the interpretation of a person’s perceptions. For example, an extremely tired person being shown random images is likely to perceive the images with sleep in the context. The sensation is the perception using a sense organ, with the pure perception being the simple reaction originating from a sense organ. From this perspective, perception can be considered the integration of pure sensation with unconscious inference (Hoffman, Singh & Prakash, 2015).
Fazekas & Overgaard (2018) assert that consciousness can be described as a mysterious concept as there are no clear explanatory links connecting it to material processes and thus accounting for subjective conscious experiences in terms of particular features of underlying brains state and neural interactions appear to be an intractable problem for scientific endeavors. It is not easy to doubt our perception, as it is our window to the world. However, it is also a conceptual prison.
Human consciousness can be subdivided into the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious levels. The conscious level consists of all the things humans are aware of, including things we know about overserves and our surroundings. The preconscious consists of what we could pay conscious attention to if we so desired and when memories are stored for easy retrieval. It may also be considered to include unconscious thoughts at a particular time. Still, they are not repressed and are therefore available for recall and easily capable of becoming conscious. The unconscious consists of the things that are outside of conscious awareness, including thoughts, memories and urges that humans may not be aware of their existence (Koch, 2004).
Consciousness exists beyond the rules that humans derive from their perceptions of the physical world. The evolution of the human perception system does not give us any reason to believe that humans perceive the physical world as it exists. Perhaps it becomes necessary to reverse direction and start with consciousness itself as the fundamental element of reality from which the physical world originates. One aspect of consciousness experience is that it is impossible to have any experience if there is no one to go through the experiences. Thus, perception, decision, and action can be considered the three channels of information, mapping from an input to an output (Sternberg, 2016).
Consciousness is a fundamental property of one intelligent energy. Humans use their energy on earth is based on the catalysts of the void of mind of the logos of our solar system. Mind develops consciousness so that it has infinite potential. The seven catalysts of mind are balanced with those of the body and the spirit in an ongoing way for humans to have the ability to e to be at a point of choice. Humans become aware of their unique consciousness as they develop consciousness. The way humans use the catalysts of the mind, body, and spirit becomes the choice of their path.
Consciousness entails both the feeling of awareness and the content of awareness, some of which may be under the focus of attention. It can be regarded as awareness of what is going on in one’s environment and having a sense of self. Different states and layers of consciousness have been defined with neural imaging, such as structural and functional. During each of these stages, there are different levels of information processed differently at each stage.
There exists a strong correlation between an individual and their environment, with the environment being the basis of all perceptions. Our cultural environment creates the perception of people. Culture impacts various factors of perception, such as sensations, interpretations, and organization (Chen et al., 2014). Human perception is usually biased and lacks the ability to differentiate between objects that look similar. Through the perceptual system undergoes evolution in its ability to capture the different aspects of the world, the perceived object may not always correspond to the object that exist beyond the human mind.
How humans interpret information becomes their reality and forms a foundation for their behaviors, actions, and beliefs. A reality to one person may be different from another person. Each individual’s perception is their reality. People see what they want to see and believe what they have seen. They will naturally see things that require simple explanations to understand the context of the response to the stimuli. Perceptional illusions also suggest that sometimes our senses are not always what we perceive. Humans take the available sensory information and transform it to develop a mental representation already familiar with it from their perspective (Sternberg, 2016). Bottom-up and top-down theories are the two major categories of theories that help us understand perception. Bottom-up theories explain perception as originating from a stimulus of the visual appearance of something. The stimuli are data-driven.
Perception and consciousness are intertwined, and they help humans explain how better our understanding of neuro-processing and how to apply them in our daily lives. All behaviors are is related to perception and consciousness. The better they are understood, the better humans can communicate with others and understand each other and their environment. Different theories have been formulated attempting to explain perception and consciousness to improve understanding of each concept. Each theory explains the concept from its unique perspective to yield a different understanding. The science behind each of these concepts can give us better insight into how they affect each other and behaviors and attitudes among humans.
References
Chen, S. X., Lam, B. C. P., Buchtel, E. E., & Bond, M. H. (2014). The conscientiousness paradox: Cultural mindset shapes cultural mindset and competence perception. European Journal of Personality, 28(5), 425-436. doi:10.1002/per.1923
Hoffman, D. D., Singh, M. & Prakash, C. (2015). The interface theory of perception. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 22(6), pp1480-1506.
Koch, C. (2004). The quest for consciousness: A neurobiological approach. Englewood, US-CO: Roberts & Company Publishers.
Niiniluoto, I., Sintonen, M., & Woleznski, J. (2004). Handbook of Epistemology. Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Sternberg, R. J. (2016-01-01). Cognitive Psychology, 7th Edition. [VitalSource]. Retrieved from https://online.vitalsource.com/#/books/9781473754676/
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