More than the contents of perception

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem The Philosophy Department More than the contents of perception Is perceptual experience distinct from cognition, or to what extent are both intertwined? Seminar paper for “The Content of Perceptual Experience” (15824) Written by Ohad Nave for Preston Werner April 2018  Introduction: The perception-cognition divide - in experience? What do we see, hear or sense? Do we experience the world around us as structured and rich with meaning or do we perceive it thinly in basic sensorial properties that are grasped and interpreted non-perceptually? Questions of this kind are in the center of the debate about the contents of perceptual experience. This begs a very fundamental yet surprisingly difficult question. What is perceptual experience? How it is to be described? How do these aspects of our experience relate to cognitive processes of our mind? Where is the line drawn between these, or more generally: is there a clear line to be drawn at all? When I look at my keyboard as my fingers type this sentence, I am having a perceptual experience of it. I see black rectangular keys on a gray metallic background and I see hands over them. I am not only collecting this visual information of the scene as one could describe objectively, but rather the appearance of it is given to me subjectively in my experience. It looks a certain way to me. All the while I’m also having some internal stream of thought that is accompanied by ideas about what to write or imaginative distractions about what I could have been eating now instead. This is part of my cognitive or non-perceptual experience. It is also frequently experienced subjectively. What easily (but not inclusively) differentiates these two is that my perceptual experience has to do with the external surrounding shared by other subjects as it stimulates my senses. My thoughts and evaluations are on the other hand much less directly dependent on the world around me, they seem to be my own. This initial naïve intuition regarding the difference in the phenomenology of the two is an understandable source of justification for a hardly questioned and much broader distinction between perception and cognition that is probably shared by most philosophers, cognitive scientists and psychologists. It is basic in various debates about how perception can justify beliefs, cognitive penetration, the richness of perception and the existence of social perception. All of these debates commonly presuppose that there exists a border between perception and cognition which could be crossed in a variety of ways. Thus, supposedly, allowing what we merely perceive with our senses to be charged with, affected by or construct the plentitude of knowledge and meaning that makes us experts in living within this world. In this paper, I would like to try and aim towards that common ground in the field of the philosophy of perception and question it. That common ground, again, is that cognition and perception are not only distinct functionally and conceptually but are also distinct in the way they are experienced. Placing the question within the realm of phenomenology, of subjectively lived experience, requires us to do a more careful job than distinguishing these two faculties of our mind in their neuronal, functional, causal or theoretical properties. We must take in account our own experience of the world and examine if they can be clearly distinguished or how it is that they coincide so that the notion of perceptual experience could be clearly entertained. This taking into account is far from simple and demands broad considerations that are both methodological and transcendental, and as I will suggest, ultimately take us away from a representational view of sensory perception towards a different conception of the experience of perception. As the phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes in his seminal book ‘Phenomenology of Perception’ (1945/1966, p. 67), “Nothing is more difficult than to know precisely what we see”. Indeed, phenomenological philosophy tries to deal with this difficulty by insightfully revealing not only aspects of the structure of our perceptual experience that go beyond its contents, but also a deeper dimension of the consequences that such a view entails. I will first present the philosophical debate about the contents of perceptual experience and examine the common assumptions about the perception-cognition divide. I will take a close look on analyzed interactions between perception and cognition and examine an attempt to demarcate these faculties in clear terms. After that, I will challenge the prominent views of perceptual experience based on Merleau-Ponty’s critique of perceiving sensations. This will be shown to undermine a strong representational agenda by widening our scope to the structural dimension of perceptual experience. A more complex enactive account of perception will be introduced that highlights the perceiver’s involvement in the perceived world. The temporality of perceptual experience will then be taken into consideration. Lastly I will briefly present what I believe to be missing in the discussion of perceptual experience. That is, some conception of attention that continuously directs one’s conscious experience towards specific parts within it in accordance with one’s goals and motives. Common understanding of perceptual experience How perceptual experience is usually understood in recent philosophical debates? Our mental experience is defined by its phenomenal character, its phenomenology. “By being aware of the external qualities,” philosopher Michael Tye writes, “you are aware of what it is like for you” (Tye 2000, p. 47). This is, in short, the transparency thesis which allows to equate the contents of perceptual experience with its phenomenology. What it is like to experience seeing something is thus often said to be determined by the various properties of the thing that is seen. Some philosophers use the term sensory phenomenology and others call it the presentational component of experience (Fish, 2013). Both are used to aim towards a basic level of experience that is perceptual in that it is tied with stimuli of exteroceptive sensory modalities and yet separate from other aspects of our mental life that might relate to what is perceived but are beyond its actual experienced phenomenology. This is one of the foundations that the debate about the contents of perceptual experience is built upon. By talking about phenomenal content philosophers refer to the part of a perceptual state’s representational content that supervenes on its phenomenal character (Briscoe, 2015). Or at least that’s one way to describe it, while opinions vary regarding the relations between representations and phenomenal character, and whether phenomenal content completely exhausts the phenomenology of perception. It is not very important in this part of our discussion, but later in the paper this issue will be considered again in a different light. What, then, is represented within the contents of perceptual experience, in its sensory phenomenology, is the subject of a major debate. The answers generally vary from a sense-data view of perception in which there’s nothing represented in perception which is considered more like a raw feel; through thin theories which allow only representations of basic modal-specific properties (like color, shape, luminance, timbre, pitch and others); to rich theories that include in perception representation of objects and their kinds, emotions, animacy, causation and other high level properties. Whether high level properties are part of the phenomenal content of perception is controversial in part because they relate to memory and cognition. A paradigmatic example formulated by Siegel (2006) claims that the ability to represent a tree as a pine tree is acquired once a person is trained in recognizing it. This means that the tree phenomenally appears differently after the viewer has learnt to spot it by virtue of knowledge that she had acquired about its appearance. Critics of Siegel’s claim are in abundance, though, and many of them claim that the phenomenal difference is not in the tree’s appearance but in some other non-perceptual phenomenology. The property of animacy, in a similar manner, could be considered by some as visually apparent, as an experienced outcome of habitual or innate interpretation of an object’s movement that is based on an implicit understanding of how a sentient thing behaves. Similarly, emotions are sometimes said to be perceived based on a continuous learning process of identifying them or reacting to them in various situations throughout our lives. What is common in these examples is that information originating outside the current input of the sense modality processes can supposedly contribute and change the sensory attributes that are experienced. This brings us back to the question of cognition-perception divide and its relevance in the analysis of perceptual experience. The question is, as Shea (2013, p. 10) asks, “How much is perceiving just a matter of receptivity to the outside world, and how much is it a constructive process based on what we antecedently represent?” There are various ways to conceptualize this interaction between the stimuli that act upon our senses and the pre-existing information that helps interpret it. Many researchers go along the line that I have presented so far, by pointing towards the existence of cognitive penetration that affects our perceptual experience. Paradigmatically, beliefs, desires or fears can penetrate and alter our perceptual experience, as well as affect, imagination, attention, sensory-motor dispositions or implicit information acquired with experience (Siegel, 2015). These processes are claimed to either change the low level properties that are experienced, or allow the representation of different high level properties (Macpherson, 2012). Others, though, contend that “there is no interesting connection between high-level properties being sensorily presented and cognitive penetration” (Briscoe & Chomanski, 2015). In line with such a view, Toribio (2015) attempts to show that perceptual experience can be seen as rich in high level properties while maintaining its informational encapsulation and disregarding the relevance of cognitive penetrability. The disagreement is beyond the scope of this paper, but it hides an underlying consensus regarding the cognition-perception divide Interestingly, some philosophers strive to solve the various issues that arise from the distinction of cognition and perception, by trying to explain one with the other: Conceptually structured perception (Shieber, 2010) and on the other hand, the perceptual basis of concepts (Prinz, 2004). This is fundamentally different than the majority of writers, in that it aims to erase the categorical distinction. - that it exists and can be marked. Where does perception end? Toribio (2015, p. 10-11) makes the distinction explicit in her argument by suggesting a criterion that could distinguish perceptual experience (“a genuine visual event”) from non-perceptual experience (like demonstrative thoughts): The irresistibility of the stimulus. According to the criterion, a mental event has sensory phenomenology “if we cannot help but experience its properties, even in the face of conflicting background knowledge.” O’Challagan (2011) similarly describes the sensible features that are perceived as independent from the perceiver and, he adds, as distinctly vivid. Beck (2017) shares Toribio’s view by speaking of the stimulus dependency of perception, and he goes on to address the challenge that such a view faces when dealing with demonstrative thoughts. Demonstrative thoughts, or perceptual judgements, are one crucial aspect of the issue that can highlight the sensitivities that many analytical theories encounter when trying to parse experience. They can be experienced as perceptual in that they relate to the stimulus intentionally and driven by it, but they exhibit some further interpretation that exceeds it. The term ‘perceptual judgements’ is more adequate, I believe, because a “thought” suggests a conscious mental event, more like an explicit belief that has its own phenomenology which is more clearly non-perceptual, whereas a judgement can also be considered as a more subtle form of mental activity that is experienced less explicitly or even unconsciously. These semantic or theoretical considerations about our mental building blocks are relevant because the terminology is based on assumptions that are not necessarily established properly in relation to experience and eventually they closely relate to the distinctions that are here put in question. These groups of mental constructs can perhaps be of great analytical use, but their existence as distinct mental phenomena is essentially what is here challenged. It is exactly for this reason that such intermediate manifestations of cognition (similar to the term ‘seeming’) can help examine the essence of the distinction between perceptual experience and cognition. It would perhaps seem limiting to our understanding of perception to see them as non-perceptual, though they clearly go beyond the information merely acquired by the senses. A very simple perceptual judgement, for example, could be put in words like this: “That thing is a brown, big and strange trash can”. Now let’s break it down and examine it in light of our discussion. The thing’s appearance as brown is simply represented perceptually and thus constitutive of its phenomenal content, making the judgement based directly on what is already phenomenally apparent. The feature “big”, however, though clearly visual, implies some sort of comparative relation to other objects around it, or of its kind. Could it then still be considered part of the content of this perceptual experience, being rather stimulus dependent and irresistibly perceived as such, or is it a cognitive inference based on my memory of the size of similar looking objects? The feature “strange”, similarly to affective features, stretches the former question further because “strange”, though based on visual appearance, seems to arise from a subjective evaluation rather than a visual property of the object represented. Lastly, the object’s kind “trash can”, which partially matches Siegel’s pine tree example, is contentiously claimed by high level theorists to be represented in perception, though it is a matter of debate what exactly allows that. The feature of “trash can” could be perceptually experienced only by the low level features of its appearance, which would imply that its kind property itself is not necessarily manifest in perceptual experience. Alternatively it could be inferred due to its context (the sidewalk of a city street), or its function (after a person throws something into what thus far only appeared as a box). Still these processes, though being clearly cognitive, are nonetheless not an explicit belief that is experienced in a different manner. They directly relate to what is perceived so they are stimulus dependent and to an extent irresistible in their immediacy. Many would argue that these evaluations contribute to our perceptual experience of things in the world, yet they are not insulated from background information. Furthermore, many times they are much more implicit then a propositionally formed belief. When one sees a tree top through the window, can it be said that she perceives a tree, or merely the few apparent leaves and branches that allow an inference of the rest of the tree? What of all this is part of perceptual experience? This analysis is short and rather elementary. Surely answers to these questions can be elaborated greatly depending on one’s theoretical views, but it serves to hint at the very least towards an ambiguity that is not simply cleared with the criteria for perception introduced above Beck goes a long way to explain how these judgements are different than percepts. His idea is that the constituents of a percept are all stimulus dependent whereas for a perceptually grounded demonstrative thought, only part of its constituents are stimulus dependent. Although this view is interesting theoretically, it is still unclear how useful it is in relating to the phenomenology of lived experience.. The case of perceptual judgements points exactly towards an assumed border between perception and cognition. If our perceptual experience is to be considered conservatively as exclusive of the interpretational component that comes with it, then perhaps perception is understood as rather basic and flat. This is in line with a conception of sensory phenomenology, merely an experience of represented appearances. If we do allow that perception involves some interpretation, at what point and level do we stop, and for what reason? Other examples of borderline cases of perception could provide further evidence of a lack of any clear experienced distinction while highlighting the continuous close interaction with cognition. Identifying your boss by his angry voice, or simply listening to a person speak, both involve knowledge that allows one to interpret the stimulus in a way that greatly enriches its grasp beyond its basic sensorial features (like parsing phrases, ongoing expectations, word completion or semantic comprehension), and yet is not absolutely clear what part if not all of it is perceptual according to the criteria introduced (O’Challagan, 2011) In his paper, O’Callaghan admits the attempt to clearly distinguish sensory perception from other mental phenomena is “vexed”. However, he goes on by accepting some form of such distinction, and strips linguistic-related phenomena like meaning from a low-level encapsulated view of auditory sensory perception.. Listening to music is also an interesting study case as it involves rhythmic and melodical expectations that dictate the way it is experienced. Perception of a (musically or semantically) meaningful situation in these cases involves an act of apprehension - some form of processing of the stimulus. In visual experiences, a separate mental cognitive construct like perceptual judgement can be said to be responsible for such interpretation, but this explanatory tool perhaps seems to be weaker in a dynamical act of non-conceptual perception that involves listening. This is illucidated further by the musical artist and philosopher Pierre Schaeffer who suggested that there are 4 different modes of listening: (1) Comprendre, which is directed towards comprehension mediated by audible signs that designate something beyond them (like language or sign systems); (2) Écouter, the natural attitude, where sounds are “heard immediately as indices of objects and events in the world”; (3) Entendre is the mode of listening to a sound’s morphological attributes without reference to its spatial location, source, or cause (like listening to music); and finally, (4) Ouïr, which is the most primordial mode of listening which is understood as the foundation of the other modes. This last mode could be understood as the basic sensory perception of low level qualities as discussed so far. Interestingly, Schaeffer believes this foundation remains hidden in our everyday attentiveness to the source and meaning of sounds (Kane, 2007, p. 26-28) This is in line with Merleau-Ponty’s and Heidegger’s understanding of pure sensations that will be discussed later. . It seems rather agreeable that these different modes of listening are phenomenologically different, as one can supposedly change his experience to each of them. But, are they all entirely perceptual or is the difference in phenomenology found elsewhere? Some thin theorists could argue that many of these examples mark high level properties which are not perceptual. In their view, these representations latch on the only truly perceptual features that are phenomenally basic, and allow an inference of the presence of high-level properties due to the cognitive element provided by perceptual judgments. This conservative view of perception as very basic sensations will be soon criticized in respect to the phenomenological account of perception of Merleau-Ponty. Shea (2013, p. 14) explains the lack of cognitive-perceptual border by relating its origin in unwarranted views about the structure of neural processing: “Some psychological processes are indeed paradigmatically perceptual, but there is no clear dividing line between the perceptual and the cognitive, nor a clear continuum that plays any deep theoretical role in experimental psychology. Instead, the rough-and-ready distinction used in psychology is based on a loose assumption that the processing of incoming information takes place hierarchically. […] On no view can that hierarchy be strictly delineated. “ Shea then goes on to suggest a different framing of the question in cognitive psychological terms without an appeal to categorical distinctions. He talks of a dynamical balance between aspects in our experience that are more sensory stimulus-driven and others that have to do with information already found in the system. This is in line with an understanding of perception, as a range of processes that deal more with bottom-up information that tracks current input of the immediate and constantly changing environment, and cognition, as top-down processing of information which is stored in the system as memory, context and expectations. However, these processes are not distinct but are highly interrelated on many different levels. Such interaction between incoming and pre-existing information, Shea argues, is common in many psychological processes, and not only in perception and so he offers a recalibration of the current philosophical debate. Instead of treating perception as a distinctive theoretically important category, examine it along with other psychological processes by virtue of the extent in which it is driven by bottom-up information, and the extent in which it is driven by top-down information (Ibid.). How does this cognitive-psychological critique relate to the phenomenological question at hand? The way these processes relate to subjective experience still remains fairly enigmatic. Nevertheless, this conception seem to support the claim that it is futile to limit perceptual experience to its sensory basis and at most examine specific cognitive influences upon it, when in fact it might turn out to be a general feature of many aspects of our mental life to be highly intertwined with other aspects. Equating perceptual experience with “sensory phenomenology” could then be misguided and a deepening of our understanding of what it is like to perceive might be crucial. Perception is not the perceived - criticism of thin representational views Let’s ask it again: what is perceptual experience? What is it like to perceive the world, and what in the world is there to perceive? The description of the phenomenology of perception, I would like to argue, should go far beyond the views discussed so far in that it should essentially involve our engagement with the world and as part of the world. We are more than a static conscious subject passively making sense of incoming information. Rather, we are actively taking part in a world that is full of specific interests to us. Our environment dynamically presents itself as full of potential for us to change our perspective on it, reach it and act upon it or be affected by it. These potentials are not only part of our experience but are, as such a view claims, part of our perceptual experience. This understanding of perceptual experience goes beyond that of the narrow conception of sensory phenomenal content and yet is far from being new. Many thinkers contributed to it as prominent as William James, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, J. J. Gibson and more recently Harry Heft, Hubert Dreyfus and others. I will discuss some of their insights here though I will try to do it rather briefly by leading towards a cognitively enriched view of perceptual experience. The framework of such a view, I shall suggest, undermines a representational content conception of phenomenology by pointing towards the deep and consistent involvement of cognition in our experience of the world. The first place to begin is to revisit the term introduced earlier as sensory phenomenology by presenting Merleau-Ponty’s critique of sensations as the basic units of perceptual experience. Low level features of experience like a shape, a shade of color or luminance can be understood as what he coins simple sensations that are claimed to be initially (structurally or chronologically) perceived to construct increasingly higher order and more complex forms (or representations) in the phenomenal content of perception. He claims that this view (which resembles the representational stance of thin or rich theories of the contents of perception) fails to capture the underlying structure of perceptual experience and is thus misguided. In contrast, Merleau-Ponty argues that the basic level of perceptual experience is the gestalt, the meaningful whole of figure against ground. He further explains his critique: The pure impression is […] not only undiscoverable, but also imperceptible and so inconceivable as an instant of perception. If it is introduced, it is because instead of attending to the experience of perception, we overlook it in favor of the object perceived. (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/1996, p. 4) We forget our phenomenology, the world as it appears directly to perception, as a consequence of perception’s own tendency to forget itself in favor of the perceived that it discloses, or put shortly “We make perception out of things perceived.” (Ibid., 1945/1996, p. 5). This can be understood as a rather critical claim in our discussion: the contents of perception is not equivalent to its phenomenology. Perception in his view is the spontaneous organization of a whole with context and relational properties that are essentially in-separate from the particulars. This makes room for meaning to be enveloped in the most rudimentary instants of perceptual experience, as well as constantly varying degrees of indeterminacy. Both will be explored next. Both challenge the conception of content as exhausting perceptual experience. To make things clearer first, we can go back to my first example of hands typing over a keyboard. One of the things Merleau-Ponty would mention when describing such experience, is that the view has my hands as the central figure and the keyboard as a background underneath them. The focus of these objects may potentially alternate according to my attentional shifts of eyesight. The outline of my hands though adjacent to the keyboard, “belong” to my hands, and the keyboard is not broken up by it but continues to form an entire rectangular shape that continues behind them, even if it’s not apparent. The objects themselves are seen as 3 dimensional objects in that they have an unseen profile that is yet perceived as existent in its potential manifestation in consciousness. Both these objects form only the focal center of an indeterminate background, to which I can potentially turn my gaze and perceive more clearly. This description could continue much further by addressing the uniqueness of my hands being part of my sensed and controlled lived body, a rather permanent object of perception that also influences it; or the duality in the appearance of the shape of the keyboard seen as a rectangle while also appearing trapeze shaped due to my perspective. Another interesting direction is the intentional structure of these appearances as they are phenomenally given to me, the subject, while perceived as external and ‘not-me’ (in a different manner than, say, my tactile sensations when touching the keyboard). Such description sticks to the contents of what is perceived but goes beyond it to the structured way in which they are presented. It does not seek to be merely a pictorial description focused on the sensory features of the contents, the amount of details in what is represented. Rather, it aims for a more overreaching description of the relational features and meaningful situation that is perceived in relation to the perceiver. Meaningful not only in the personal sense that is conceptual meaning, but also in its basic formation as a structured situated scene with enclosed relational properties between its parts themselves and with the perceiver. This could amount to a structural analysis of phenomenology that puts more emphasis in explaining what it is like for me, as a specific subject in a given situation, to be perceiving such situation. “Consciousness, from our natal day, is of a teeming multiplicity of objects and relations, and what we call simple sensations are the results of discriminative attention, pushed often to a very high degree.” says William James (1890/1981, p. 219, as quoted in Heft, 2003). In spite it is usually seen as the primary datum of perception, simple distinct features are actually more precisely described as the result of an abstraction of the multi-dimensional and meaningful perceptual scene that is immediately experienced. Much closer to us than all sensations are the things themselves. We hear the door shut in the house and never hear acoustical sensations of even mere sounds. In order to hear a bare sound we have to listen away from things, divert our ear from them - listen abstractly. (Heidegger, 1971/1927, p. 151-152) These low-level ‘representations’ that are the result of a conceptual or reflective narrowing of attention to specific particulars, are then wrongfully understood as objects of experience itself, as the properties that comprise the phenomenal content of perception. Even further, they not only comprise the experience but are understood by many as exhaustive of it. The framework of representational content thus purports to allow a full description of phenomenology. This is what James referred to as the psychologist’s fallacy - the psychologist confuses “his own standpoint with that of the mental fact about which he is making his report” (James, 1890/1981, p. 195, as quoted by Heft, 2003). Heft translates this notion to the language of our own discussion: It is more accurate to say that, when we experience a mental representation, we are experiencing the product of our analysis of perceiving processes, rather than experiencing a constituent of perceiving. Instead, the evidence from immediate experience indicates that the objects of perceiving, that is, percepts, are in the world. (Heft, 2003, p. 154) This is a rather strong claim against the representationalist’s enterprise, which could surely be elaborated or attacked on several fronts. That discussion, however, exceeds the less ambitious argument that I would like to put forward in this paper. It is not this fundamental theoretical disagreement that is my focus, but rather the more substantial attempt to better understand and more accurately describe the phenomenology of our mind. Such attempt will be challenging nonetheless for the representationlist’s view, as it takes representations, that is, the perceived world, to have a highly composite structure that involves non-perceptual processing. I will now present the Ecological Psychology’s concept of ‘affordances’ as a meaningful bridge between us and the experience world, alongside the Enactive view of cognition and its active dynamical analysis of experience. Engaged perception “Perceiving is … a keeping-in-touch with the world, an experiencing of things” (J. J. Gibson, 1979, p. 239). What does it mean that perception essentially involves our engagement with the world? Rather than using the metaphor of a moving picture to which we are passive observers, in reality, the world invites us to take part in it and indeed we use our bodies to do so. What is perceived is presented as full of potential, and it is our usage of it that allows us to experience the world in the way we do. This potential has various dimensions to it, some of which can be considered as immediate, pre-reflective and stimulus-dependent as any other sensed feature rendering them perceptual. They are, however, not sensed in a straight-forward way. What is important in regard to our discussion is that perception is essentially experienced in relation to one’s context, one’s skillful knowledge and one’s abilities, which are enabled by cognitive, sensorimotor and memory processing. If we accept such a richly integrative view of perception, then these processes can no longer be seen as extra-perceptual but as inseparate factors in charge of its phenomenology. The easiest way to start pointing towards deeper aspects of perceptual experience is by addressing the fact that it is always perspectival from a dynamically changing position in a 3-dimensional space. A simpler way to go about it is to talk about an appearance of an object from such dynamic perspective. In a given moment, any object is always perceived in partial form that is apparent from the location of the perceiver. I can only fully see the top of the table and at most 3 of its legs, but never its other side or bottom. Sometimes things hide parts of other things, like my hands over my keyboard. This entails an absent profile that is yet expected and can be reached if one moves to look from a different angle, or, in our example, expect at some point that the hands will stop blocking the view of the complete profile of keyboard. In the phenomenological tradition, this absence is not simply considered void but rather a positive feature of things around us: that they are experienced whole and thus in more than their appearance in any given moment Interestingly, Husserl’s account of perception refers to this process as apprehension which can be understood as a necessary cognitive fulfillment of perception without which perception lacks any meaning. An unseen surface of an object is apprehended as a potential percept that can be revealed. Merleau-Ponty talks about the same situation as a positive purely perceptual phenomena. Though both generally regard such intended absence as essential in perceptual experience, their disagreement reveals yet another subtlety arising from the vague border between perception and cognition. (Shim, 2011). Such a Husserlian view tries to explain how an object in the real world, though perceived in many different and varying angles, usually only partially available sensorily and rarely seen in exactly the same way, can be intended as one and the same. If it is so that in perception one typically intends more than what is sensorily available at any given time, then that “surplus” must be extra-sensory (Ibid.). This claim accords with the difference I’ve earlier put forward between perceptual experience and sensory phenomenology, and whether these can or cannot be simply equated. The point is that normally experiencing a perceived object necessarily depends on our implicit and well-grounded expectation of its non-present profiles or other variables like its color and form under different circumstances. Perceiving depends on the way our sensorimotor capabilities can potentially bring these to fuller presence. To see my hands over the keyboard includes also the potential direct perception of their other sides, which are subject to be revealed consequently to changes in the scene or in my bodily perspective to it. Gibson (1979) has similarly addressed the dynamical and potential aspects of perception in coining the term ‘affordance’. In ecological psychology, the reality of affordances is fundamental. They are encountered most immediately, and it is by using affordances that an ecological analysis of perception begins (Heft, 2003). The term affordance refers to the perceived and actual properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be interacted with. When I walk on a shaky wooden bridge, I see the planks as a thing that can be stepped upon. Specifically, they can appear stable, slippery or perhaps brittle. The handrail appears graspable, and if it’s made of rope, I’d see it as affording some motion as opposed to being firmly fixed. Examples are in abundance: Knobs are for turning. Slots are for inserting things into. Balls are for throwing or bouncing. This analysis loads perception with the heavy weight of meaning and functionality that goes even beyond what most high level theorists have in mind, but it is seen not as a late addition to perceptual experience but rather as its very immediate basics. Like the enactive view of cognition, it takes perception to be a process that guides action more than anything else, so the experience of perception is dependent on one’s acquired implicit practical knowledge and skillful mastery of the relation between sensory experience and movement (Heft, 2003, p. 169, Varela et al. 1991, p. 173). How much further can these affordances reach is subject to debate. One avenue of such discussion takes in account sociocultural meanings that go beyond the functional ones. Does it include not only what one can do, but also what one ought to do? I see this door affords opening, but if it is the female toilet that it opens to, then it is a door ought not to be open. As Heft writes, while maintaining the question unanswered, “Recognition that affordances are typically multidimensional and embedded in an intentional structure of action will keep our analysis anchored in the domains of motivation and value and hence closer to lived reality” (Heft, 2003, p. 159). Affective and motivational qualities are intrinsic to affordances. What, then, are the implications for a view that takes them as part of perceptual experience? If it can be shown that lawful structures of such afforded perceptual information are available over time in the immediate perceptual flow of experience, then perceptual experience can no longer be seen as separate from the vast meaningfulness of the perceived world (Heft, 2003, p. 166). “Awareness of affordances typically is an intertwining of knowing, feeling, and acting” (Ibid. p.155). This renders the prevalent distinction between cognition and perception to be misplaced, but it also goes an extra step. Perception is already enriched with meaning in a way that makes knowledge and intentional action constitutive of it. Temporality of perceptual experience What is rather substantial in the views presented now is that it calls into consideration the dynamics of the perceiver-world interaction and the manner in which they are co-constitutive of one another. This brings in an appreciation of the temporal structure of perception. A framework for such a dynamic phenomenological view was presented by Laasik (2015) in a parallel way to a representational view of experience, where accuracy conditions of a representation are replaced by what he refers to as fulfillment conditions: “The fulfillment-conditional view begins with experience and considers what it takes for alterity, or objectivity, to emerge within experience. It accounts for our experience of sensuous objectivity, and indeed the material world in terms of the contrast and interplay between presence and absence, where absence is basically conceived as presence yet to be attained” (Laasik, 2015, p. 202) Unlike a representational view which evaluates the accuracy of perceptual experience in respect to an independent objective world, this view puts emphasis on the active part of the perceiver’s constant attempt to collect more information and reach higher levels of determinacy of whatever is happening around her within her own experience. This is why the concepts of absence and presence, or indeterminacy and determinacy, are important in this description of perceptual experience. They correspond to the fact that we are engaged in actions for the purpose of revealing more of what can be better perceived. The outcome of this active process simultaneously guides our actions in accordance to what is revealed, matters to us, anticipated and can be further explored. This reciprocity is a continuous process in which we try to make present what is always only partially given in determinate clarity (Heft, 2003, p. 22). By involving motivation and motor aspects in this agentic description of perception, we may face a much broader understanding of what it is like to be perceiving. "The properties of the object and the intentions of the subject . . . are not only intermingled; they also constitute a new whole." When the eye and the ear follow an animal in flight, it is impossible to say "which started first" in the exchange of stimuli and responses. […] Thus the form of the excitant is created by the organism itself, by its proper manner of offering itself to actions from the outside. (Merleau-Ponty as quoted by Varela et al., 1991, p. 174) If we consider the dynamics of perceiving any constantly fluctuating stimulus as the world constantly provides, it is quite difficult to disregard the choice by the perceiver to which stimuli in the physical world it will be sensitive to. The experience of a horizon of possibilities as an intrinsic quality of perceptual experience reflects the prospectivity of perceiving. It is then essential to understand perceiving as forward looking and extending ahead in time (E. J. Gibson, 1994 \ Heft, 2003). Attention in perception I would like to propose, in accordance with the dynamic structure of perception, that attention and its phenomenology is a fundamental aspect of our experience of the world, which is for some reason usually overlooked. Overt shifts in our attention are usually disregarded in the literature as uninteresting cases of cognitive penetration. I think this is a mistake that is caused by not taking in account the temporality of perception and micro dynamics of attention that are constitutive of it. In my own view, perceptual experience is essentially structured and manifested through a constant flux of attention. It is beyond the scope of this paper to seriously explore the core functions and different aspects of the phenomenology of attention in relation to perception, but it may hopefully be enough to bring to mind its common sensical nature. This can be easily grasped and demonstrated in vision, even though presumably a similar structure also exists within other modalities and across one another as an encompassing phenomenological structure. Attention is pronounced in experience by having a focal point of interest, so that there is persistently a centrally attended area and a corresponding periphery that is experienced in a more indeterminate fashion. What is at any moment attended is highlighted and experienced in greater detail than the other parts of the current perceptual field. Although this could conceivably entail an experience of a narrow tunnel vision with a constantly changing center, in reality we generally feel our perceptual field to be widely present, stable and more homogenously available to us. It is the world out there, and it usually stays put. Our moments of perceiving of it, specifically when thought of discretely, usually don’t. This peculiar aspect of our phenomenology is crucial, I believe, in the analysis of our perceptual phenomenology. Merleau-Ponty’s account of attention is key here. Attention, he says, is a ceaseless process which allows “the active constitution of a new object that develops and thematizes what was until then only offered as an indeterminate horizon” (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/1996, p. 33). What is even more crucial in his analysis is the appreciation of its function through a duration of time. “The first operation of attention is, then, to create for itself a field, either perceptual or mental, which can be ‘surveyed’, in which movements of the exploratory organs or elaborations of thought are possible, but in which consciousness does not correspondingly lose what it has gained and, moreover, lose itself in the changes it brings about” (Ibid.). The general sense of perceiving the world in such a way that is preserved through time, is made possible, I would like to suggest, by the micro-dynamical nature of our attention which, moment by moment, adds perceptual bricks in the continuous building of a world picture. Perceptual experience should then be understood not as the bricks but as the full picture. In a constant attempt to collect relevant information about the world, one incessantly turns one’s attention in the right direction, along with aligning one’s sense organs to allow whatever it is to become available. Each moment of perception, reveals Merleau-Ponty criticizes the idea that attention merely reveals what is already there, and stresses how consciousness of something is a process of its constitution. a specific angle, a state of an object or a relation, which is added to the world picture and allow it to be further processed, while attention moves on to bring forward other relevant angles. The result of these quick changes is a joining together of parts of the field, to constitute a whole, a perceptual scene, the surrounding environment. Within this scene there are parts which have more determined features that were attended, and parts whose specific detailing remains vaguer and can be further explored. In most situations, the attended parts are the relevant ones for the perceiver’s situation, goals or habits. Alternatively, they are simply more alluring in their own right (contrast edges and movement are prominent examples in vision). Taking a situation which I’ve just recently been through when driving my car, could perhaps clarify this. When driving in a dark road, I was continuously scanning what is in front of me on the road. Visual attention kept changing its focus, but remained constantly directed forward. I had disregarded certain aspects of the road’s appearance (like the apparent reflection of the street lights on the asphalt) and rather looked for unusual objects on my way. Then dogs appeared on the side of the road and started running after my car. My attention, along with my eyesight, started shifting back and forth from the front view of the road to the side mirrors in both of which dogs appeared to be running right after my car while barking. These shifts of attention changed my visual field every second, and yet throughout all this I had a very stable sense of the road in front of me, and the distance between me and the dogs. My immediate abrupt changes in eyesight, only seemed to highlight aspects of an ongoing scene that was at all times present. My sensory phenomenology one could say, changed considerably, but my perceptual experience as a whole remained much more stable than these sensory shifts. What can we make of this rather exciting situation and yet mundane example of perceptual experience? The details of these two points of interests were continually present in experience even when they were not attended or perceived directly - nothing has disappeared, at most it became more indeterminate, but quickly regained its clarity with every other look. The dynamic act of perception, in quick recurring shifts of attention, gathered informational cues that allowed this. I kept looking in similar directions to find what I had already expected (the road or the dogs), and check for meaningful perceivable differences in the focal points of interest. My attention, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, has created a field to be surveyed, without experience losing itself in the changes that were brought about. The retention of the earlier perceived information in my experience was something that clearly goes beyond my sensory phenomenology, and is still a crucial part of my act of perception. Also, importantly, this process was directed in respect to what was of interest to me as an agent, and in respect to what was already perceived and understood. This rather preliminary analysis renders perceptual experience, when considered dynamically through time, to be more than its constituent contents, and more than its constituent ‘moments of perception’. What it was like to perceive that situation - my phenomenology of perception - was constituted by what I had seen a moment earlier, the dogs running after me, and what I expected and looked for again and again in the road in front of me. Attention in this view is indistinguishable from perceptual experience, and yet is also inseparate from one’s conscious sense of agency over it. Executive function, cognition, an integration of knowledge and goals, are all combined in this understanding of the experience of perception. Therefore, the distinction between cognition and perception seems here to be more easily understood theoretically, rather than phenomenologically. That is, unless one attempts to claim that our experience is much thinner than it seems to be. This, unfortunately, is a rather popular philosophical choice. Seriously taking into account the function of attention necessarily brings forward the temporal structure of perceptual experience and consciousness in general. Consciousness does not consist of sharply separable, substantial components, exerting mechanical causality on each other. Rather, as Husserl states, it is a “network of interdependent moments… founded on intentional intertwining, motivation and mutual implication, in a way that has no analogue in the physical” (Husserl, 1977/1925). Conclusion This paper examined the distinctness of perceptual experience from cognition through questioning the common conceptualization of perception merely as representations of sensory information. The involvement of cognitively-based interpretations of what is perceived was shown to be common in a way that undermines a simple categorical separation between perception and cognition. The phenomenological tradition account of perception was introduced mainly through Merleau-Ponty to challenge the common conceptualization by integrating structural aspects of perceptual experience. Among others, the perceiver’s engagement with the perceived world has been deemed fundamental. Thus, an appreciation of the dynamics of perception likely entails its phenomenology to extend beyond what is currently present in each moment. I’ve went on to suggest that attention must then take part in the analysis of the dynamics of perceptual experience in a way that integrates not only cognition but also one’s bodily motor capabilities and one’s goals. Through this paper, different conceptions of perception and experience were introduced and compared. Few attempts were made to evoke intuitions as to the complexity and depth of perceptual experience but these were made non-systematically. A methodological discussion would be in place to examine proper ways to advance this discussion carefully and find more stable common grounds for the debate. However, in light of the highly challenging object of enquiry, the phenomenology of the mind, it might also be necessary to accept discrepancies that are the result of an inevitable gap between researchers’ different theoretical frameworks, and to a deeper extent, researchers’ different mental worlds. Perhaps it is needed to take in account in this field of research, not only the interpretational aspects within perceptual experience, as suggested here, but also the interpretational process that is inseparable from an analysis of one’s own experience. Still, though, a thriving towards finer observations and more established conceptualizations is inevitable.  References Beck, J. (2017). Marking the Perception–Cognition Boundary: The Criterion of Stimulus-Dependence. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 1-16. Briscoe, R. (2015). Cognitive penetration and the reach of phenomenal content. Brogaard, B., & Chomanski, B. (2015). Cognitive Penetrability and High‐Level Properties in Perception: Unrelated Phenomena?. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 96(4), 469-486. Fish, W. (2013). High-level properties and visual experience. Philosophical studies, 162(1), 43-55. Husserl E . (1977) Phenomenological Psychology. Lectures from 1925 Heidegger, M. (1977). “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in D. F. 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