Mary and Susan are friends from school. Mary is more sociable and has a boyfriend. Susan does not. Once travelling in the metro, they see a young couple about their age kissing each other. Susan thinks „That’s disgusting! Isn’t there any better place for doing this?!“ Mary thinks: „They seem to enjoy themselves. I should try this as well.“
Why do the two girls think differently, why do they perceive different sides of a same situation - the aesthetic and the practical? As a definition says, perception is a process, by which we become aware through our five senses - seeing, hearing, touching, smelling and tasting. It is a mental act done on the base of mechanical sensations from the external world. As the mechanical sensations are identical for everyone the emphasis should be on the mind. Why are our minds different?
Mind includes thinking skills and memory. The two things cannot be totally separated, but in different occasions one dominates over the other. In cases like the story about the stick in the water that looks bent, but actually is not, the thinking skills are very important, since a person who is not very gifted with them will say: „Yes, it is bent of course, can’t you see!“ However, a person who has developed them will say: „Hang on a minute! It is not bent, the water just makes it look like that.“ The thinking skills in the perceiving are important in relation to questions with right and wrong answer since it can easily be determined who is right in the latter example. They are also concerned with things which happen in the present. Our memory is responsible for the past. All the perceptions which a person makes during his life go in there and form a memory. This influences the new perceptions by reminding us of previous experiences. Let us take two boys for example. One of them has burnt his hand in a fire so next time he will stay away from it; the other has been warmed by the same fire so next time he will look for it again. When they sense that there is a fire around the image of the fire wakes up in the boys’ minds to remind the first boy: „Stay away from it, it is dangerous!“ and the other: „Go for it, it is useful!“ These reminders form the new perceptions of the fire - as burning and as heating. They influence the reactions of the children. As the first stays away from the fire he feels cold and starts perceiving camping as something unpleasant. The other boy enjoys the time around the fire and perceives camping as something pleasant. Thus the first boy never goes camping again while the other becomes a regular participant in this sort of thing. This influences the future behaviour of the boys. This was an example how one perception leads to another and how the differences start to occur. The accumulation of the perceptions builds the memory and the mind in general. Connotations play an important role in perceiving as well. If a child has a T-shirt which his favourite rock-star has touched, it will mean a lot to him. However, when his mother sees it she will think that it is rubbish and she will throw it away, not understanding why the child keeps this rag. Nowhere is there written „This is my memory of...“, so she cannot know (unless the child tells her). It is a thing which the child keeps in his mind and which he adds to the T-shirt mentally. It is again his memory that influences the perception. Childhood is the most important period for the development of the mind of a person. Sometimes there are events sealed in the child’s mind, which influence his behaviour as an adult. The grown up may not remember the thing anymore, for it has happened too long ago, but the event still exists somewhere in his unconscious from where it rules the life of the person. Usually these memories are traumatic e.g. seeing a murder or watching the parents having sex when the child is very small. If the seen thing has not been commented upon, but hidden deeply in the mind, it develops into a trauma which gives reflections when the child grows up. In the first case the adult may start to get into a panic when s/he sees blood or to persuade her/himself that s/he has committed a murder. In the second case the adult is likely to be scared away from people of the opposite sex and from a life as a wife/husband and appears to be more devoted to work. The people who have not experienced negative events of this sort are not usually panicked by the sight of blood, do not inculcate themselves as murderers and appreciate family life. Again the same things are perceived differently. Immediately the questions occur: „Which perception expresses the sensed thing fully? Is there any perception, which expresses it fully?“ Here we move from one sphere to another - from psychology to philosophy. There were many philosophers worried about the question „What can we know about the world?“ Immanuel Kant, a famous German philosopher, had a theory about it which I agree with in general. He thought our minds are not passive receivers of information from the outside world. We perceive the world the way we do not because it is like this, but because it is the only way we can perceive it in. We mould the world into a form that we can understand. There are categories built into our minds which filter the information and transform it into something comprehensible for these same minds. These categories, according to Kant, are time, space, quantity, quality, relation, modality. Time is completely innate for us; space we have no choice over; quantity occurs in terms of one and many; quality - in terms of good and bad; relation is for joining things together and modality - whether something is possible or impossible. We have these six categories like glasses on our eyes, which change the real image into something which fits the categories. The thing in itself (das Ding an sich) and the thing for me are absolutely separated according to Kant. The first one we can never perceive the way it is; we can never know about it. The second is the one which appears to us and which we accept as the real thing. Everything in Kant’s theory seems reasonable to me. However I would not limit the number of categories to six since there are more then six factors that influence the human perception of objects. It is not only that we do not perceive the thing in itself but we all have different perceptions of it. If we all had the same glasses with the six categories we should perceive in the same way. These categories do not give us a variation of answers because they have true and false answers. The sensed thing is in some particular time, in some particular place. It is one or many - it does not depend on us to decide. The only exception is the quality (we can choose whether something is good or bad according to our values) which is not enough to explain all the differences in the perceptions of a particular object by different persons. There have to be mentioned things which are available only for the exact moment when the perceiver perceives the object. For example: is the perceiving done willingly or not; what is its purpose; what is the condition of the mind of the perceiver - mood, memory - previous experiences, the context of the object. I will give a simple example: when you are to be examined and you have to speak for 5 minutes on a certain topic it seems to you such a long time but when the previous speaker is talking it seems incredibly short. Another example: a single man sees a woman. Perceiving her as a possible companion, he thinks: „She is so beautiful“. Another woman sees this same woman and perceiving her as a competitor, she thinks: „Well, she is ugly“. The differences occur because of the context and purpose. Using the glasses, the image is once changed by Kant’s categories and again by the categories of the moment. The image is transformed. Therefore we can never know what the world is like independently of our perception of it.
Thus there is an effect of the perceiver on the perceived since every perception is done personally, privately, for every individual and we can never know what the world is like independently of our perception of it since the categories into which our minds are divided do not let us do that.
