Philosophy of the Arts

Perception

Farmed out perception: reciprocity

We perceive a chair as that thing out there, which allows us to sit on it, or to pick it up and move it a bit, etc. It is us who add the practical structuring, but it is the chair which adds the affordances, i.e. the actual or anticipated (or remembered) affordance: things the members of our body can do with the thing.

Re-membering

Remembering could be viewed literally as putting the membered perceptions back into their embodied coherence.

Dreams

One reason why we have difficulty re-membering our dreams: their were never any membered perceptions of the scene dreamed to begin with. Other reasons for said difficulty: dreams consist of brain stimulations that have initially nothing to do with bodily stimulations: the same, or similar, brain modules are stirred during sleep as are activated in real-life, which should account for the fact that we “think” we are perceiving events, when there are none; also: dream consistency has a highly literary aspect: we are in this room and merely associating it with an event from the past transports us there. The associations are lived out in the dream, hence Freud’s interest in them.

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