What I see must be real, because if perception doesn’t match up with the world, one-for-one, I don’t catch the ball.  Although it’s true that light photons flowing into my eyes are not the same thing as my son and the ball, still, the photons come in directly from the source on a one-for-one, real time basis, and to this extent, perception is identical with reality. 

Perception is identical with the perceived because they come together as one, unified experience.  To understand this, imagine a straight line where each end runs into the middle into the other end.  In my example, me, my son and the football all run together in a continuum of seer-seeing-the-seen.  The straight-line analogy comes from William James, who says “Our sensations are not small inner duplicates of things, they are the things themselves in so far as the things are presented to us” (from his essay, The Notion of Consciousness).  Elsewhere James said, speaking of the paper on which he writes, “The paper is in the mind and the mind is around the paper, because paper and mind are only two names that are given later to the one experience…. To know immediately, then, or intuitively, is for mental content and object to be identical” (from his essay, The Knowing of Things Together).

All positions on the straight-line bleed together, which means my experience of the perceived object includes me-- all of me, including my eyes and ears, body, feelings, interests, purposes, ideas, and a collective unconscious that’s older than humanity.  The same is true for Mr. Amoeba, who experiences a different world of books than me because he’s a different me, including the undeniable fact of his illiteracy. 

Perception includes all of me.  I'm running to catch a football.  How do I know where the football is going so that I can get there on time?  Gerd Gigerenzer, in his book Gut Feelings, says I bring a “gaze heuristic” to catching a ball, that is, I run and adjust my speed so that the angle of my gaze remains constant on the ball, which leads me right to it.  If my gaze-angle isn’t constant, that means the ball will fall in front of or behind me, so I run just fast enough to keep my gaze-angle constant.  I instinctively pay attention to the angle of the ball, and so do my dogs, which explains why we can’t track a frisbee that’s directly overhead: we can’t find a gaze-angle when staring up at the flat underside of a frisbee. 

My perception of the ball is inseparable from my gaze heuristic.  “For concrete sensation never appears as ‘pure’ sensation, but is always mixed up with presentations, feelings, and thoughts,” said Carl Jung in Psychological Types.  Perception has feeling, and the football hums a snappy tune as it spins to target.  Sometimes when I’m feeling a little down, I look up at a sombre sky.  Sky and emotional state are one, which is good, because otherwise P.G. Wodehouse would’ve been out of business.  We’d never have such lines as, “Mike nodded. A sombre nod. The nod Napoleon might have given if somebody had met him in 1812 and said, So, you're back from Moscow, eh?” (from Mike and Psmith).

It’s a miracle.  The living being wants to get good things and avoid bad things, so he sends his Sauron's Eye into the buzz of perception.  Gigonormous amounts of data from light waves and soundwaves and everything else stream to the perceiver, it’s “a big blooming buzzing confusion” per William James (from Principles), and the perceiver makes sense of it.  He brings all of himself to the buzz, including senses, desires, interests and purposes, and he pays attention to what’s relevant to him.  In an instant, without effort, a living being makes sense of the buzz of perception and gives it meaning.  Perception is a creation of meaning.

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Next part: Making Sense