Context

Hume N Perception
Aug 25, 2017 · 4 min read

When I see a tree, only the parts of the tree that are unobscured send photons to my retina. In other words, I cannot see the back of a tree, or the branches that are obscured. However, if I just walked around the tree, I have a pretty good idea of what the back of the tree looks like. When I think of the tree while I am perceiving it, I don’t think of only the aspects of the tree I can see. It seems to me that I perceive the tree as a whole, even though only a small part is visible to me.

What is a context? When a person forms an episodic memory of an event, that event takes place in a context, or environment. The representation of the context is stored along with the event. The time, the walls or landmarks, the people who are there, how you arrived in that context and your purpose for being there, and everything else which you perceive as being part of the environment make up the context. We have a phrase in English, that someone can take something “out of context”. Does this use of the word ‘context’ have the same meaning as ‘environment’. If someone is relaying a funny story at a funeral, and one of the mourners overhears the joke and thinks it is about the deceased, the unfortunate eavesdropper would be offended, only because he took the story out of context. In this case, all the people are in the same place, the same environment, yet the storyteller and the eavesdropper had a different mental imagery of the story. The context is the environment plus the words spoken about the joke, and the mental imagery they summon. The concepts in the joke may be real objects that exist in disparate spatial and temporal locations, but they were mentally brought together for the joke, forming the context of the joke. We could take this a step further. The objects forming this verbal context could be imaginary, having never actually existed. How can we have a context which is composed of imaginary objects?

In order for us to match up the common usage of context with the technical definition of ‘a real, physical environment’, we need to blur the distinction between perception and imagination. When we look at the tree, rather than saying “We perceive part of the tree, our hippocampus pattern-completes the rest of the tree and enables us to form a detailed, realistic mental image of the tree, which is now ‘stored’ in working memory”, let’s just say that we perceive the tree. There are various degrees of perception. When we blink, the detailed imagery of the world around us doesn’t vanish, we have a constant perception of the world. But if we close our eyes for a while, that detailed mental imagery fades. It fades quickly if we are thinking about something else, more slowly if we are actively focusing our attention on the scene. Our perception of the scene rarely dissipates entirely; unless we have dementia we usually don’t forget where we are.

Let’s explore this concept of ‘degrees of perception’ a little more. Suppose we are traveling and find ourselves in a Swiss hostel in the mountains. We are exhausted and hardly explore the room we are staying in except to find the bed and fall asleep. The next morning our body wakes us up naturally, and we lay in bed without opening our eyes. First, we have no idea where we are. We have no perception of the room around us. Then the memory hits us, we were traveling, we managed to find our way to the hostel, collapsed in our room. The mental imagery of the room, which isn’t very detailed, hits us all at once. Even though it is lacking in detail, we become aware of our perception of the context, of the door to the room, the location of the windows, where the room is relative to the front door, etc. These perceptions are not due to sensory information; we could be laying in any bed anywhere in the world. Is it fair to call it a perception? Isn’t it more imagination than perception? When we open our eyes and look at the ceiling, our perception gains a little detail, but it doesn’t fundamentally change.

Imagination typically refers to the mental visualization of something that isn’t real, whereas perception refers to the mental visualization of something that is real. We perceive the back of the tree and we perceive the hostel we are in before we open our eyes. While we are dreaming, we imagine our grandparents’ house and imagine falling through the floor. When we stare hungrily into our fridge we imagine ourselves cooking and tasting foods. If we are walking through the park, out of the corner of our eye we can perceive a friend we haven’t seen in a while coming up to us. Unless it’s someone who just looks like our friend, then we say we imagined them. This example shows that the difference between imagination and perception lies only in the external truth of the imagery. Another example: if we are in the Matrix, the table in front of us is imagined. If we aren’t, then it is perceived.

Now that we have unified the internal experience of imagination and perception, we can return to what we mean by ‘context’. Context is the set of perceived components of an environment, real or imagined. When we observe something real, we form a mental representation of that thing. When we imagine something, we are also forming a mental representation, even though the object of our representation doesn’t exist in the real world. Whether all object of our perception exists or not doesn’t matter. These real or imagined objects form the context, and we create a representation of them that can be stored in long term memory.

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Hume N Perception

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perception, reasoning, induction, neural networks, artificial intelligence, categories, concepts, analogies, unsupervised learning, pattern completion

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