A short ramble about perception

Perception is a huge deal. Its also a curious topic in terms of representation and the bottom-up, top-down view of different facets of our ability to perceive things. Do we even experience things in a bottom up way? No, probably not. You don't notice all the things going on around you all the time: we automatically filter vast amounts of information. The ability of the mind to interpret specific enough things for us to do anything is remarkable even. Consider all of the sensory information that we are able to gather. All of it.

Naturally, cognitive processes like attention allow us to make sense out of what we want (or need) and then discard the rest (or perhaps not discard). Is this throttling or is it simply the construction of higher-level perception? Its natural to think that perhaps between low level perception and higher tiers that some sort of construction and perhaps a little interpretation takes place. Building blocks, or objects (in mind of course) are then passed along, parsed by each individual mechanism or interpreter before, somewhere down the line, they become some higher level concepts. Interestingly enough, a higher level interpretation of some sensory input will yield much more information about something than perhaps a lower one would. This is because of abstract representations that we are somehow able to juggle or even pick up from other sources.

I suppose I have to apologize first. So far this entry has just been a rant about a mixture of what I believe I understand about perception and the information contained in the beginning of the chapter. As before, perception and the representation of things we perceive is remarkable. The crafting of analogies is no small feat either, of course. In light of the transition from low level to high level, the ability to effortlessly craft an analogy brimming with meaning seems near magic. Its reflexive sometimes when we try to express something we've learned to someone else. Computers cant do all this yet, of course. But as Hofstadter has been showing us that there are some interesting models.