How do we experience, make sense of the world through our senses?: Philosophy Forums

How do we experience, make sense of the world through our senses?

Nihilism
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Posted 07/02/09 - 05:42 AM: Subject: How do we experience, make sense of the world through our senses?	#1
Please help I'd like some views please as I am study A level philosophy and want a good lot of knowledge and evidence to weigh out! please help
To criticize is only to establish that a concept vanishes when it is thrust into a new milieu, losing some of its components, or acquiring others that transform it. But those who criticize without creating, those who are content to defend the vanished concept without being able to give it the forces it needs to return to life, are the plague of philosophy. All those debaters and communicators are inspired by resentment. They speak only for themselves when they set empty generalizations against one another. Philosophy has a horror of discussions. It always has something else to do.

brussel4
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Posted 07/02/09 - 06:14 AM:	#2
This is a very good and complex question. It seems to me that the problem with approaching this question is a problem of access. How can we have access to how we make sense of the world through our senses. Any attempt to formulate how we "experience" presupposes a metaphysic of experience. In other words, "experience" is already a conceptual content for us and therefore is not the understanding of experience that we are trying to access. Now it seems to me that you can analyze the structures of the conceptual content and categorize the similarities and distinctions, get insight into their relations to your senses, grasp what constitutes their unity, but it seems hard to say "how" we make sense of the world, only that we do.

Aetixintro
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Posted 07/02/09 - 06:14 AM:	#3
Check out Phenomenology! Perhaps Merleau-Ponty can be a beginning for you.
Efficacy of "for since it is at present manifest to me that even bodies are not properly known by the senses nor by the faculty of imagination, but by the understanding alone" - Descartes, Meditation II I'm always wanting more, Anything I haven't got, Everything, I want it all, I just can't stop - The Cure, Want

wuliheron
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Posted 07/02/09 - 12:23 PM:	#4
How we experience the world through our senses could be answered physiologically, but making sense of what we experience is a whole 'nother set of problems altogether. You might find the work of Antonio Demasio interesting. His point of view is that it is our emotions that both shape how we make sense of our experience and, in turn, are shaped by our experience. The brain has a complex series of positive and negative feedback systems such as this, and there is an interesting article in the latest scientific american that also touches on the subject. The Sci-Am article proposes that the left and right hemispheres of the brain evolved to work in distinctive ways that promote survival. The left is analytical allowing us to bring creative insights and reason to bear on our experiences, while the more intuitive right hemishere promotes survival in the immediate moment. From Demasio's point of view, what remains the same for each are our emotions which allow us to give meaning to what we experience and the impetus to survive.

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