How Concepts Dominate Our Perceptions

Pure perception is incomprehensible to us.  What we commonly call perception is really the interpretaton of a meningless phenomenon into a specific and use "cognition."  Fundamentally, a perception is simply a sensory encounter with some object or occurrence, and is without association or emotional charge.

Two major conceptual contributors that dominate all of our experience: "interpretaton" and "meaning."  Since perception as itself is meaningless, what we perceive is useless without interpretation.  The mere fact of seeing an object, hearing a sound, or feeling a sensation means nothing unless we know what is is and how it relates to us.   To make sense of what we perceive, we automatically associate, classify, and interpret the meaningless data that is available.   First everything perceived  is quickly interpreted so as to determine what it is- a flower, a dog, a chair, soft, fast, a person.  Having conceptually identified what something is, we then immediately relate it to ourselves.

No matter what we perceived, once we interpreted it in some basic way, we will go on to assess its value or threat to us by associating it with an array of past experiences and beliefs, and so supply it with meaning.  This meaning renders the thing ugly, expensive, mine, hers, sacred, too big, useful, friendly, hostile, dangerous etc etc.  Once meaning is attached, our minds will immediately infuse the thing with some "emotional" charge, subtle or gross, to indicate in a feeling-sense how we should relate to it.  This charge is based on the value or threat that a thing or notion has relative to us, and so this feeling-reaction contains information suggesting particular hahavior-should we run away or feed it a biscuit ?  Such feeling-charge manifests as attraction, fear, disinterest, annoyance, desire, boredom, importance, repulsion, and so on, as well as many such feelings far too subtle to warrant a name.  This application of interpretation,  meaning, and emotional-charge occurs so fast and automatically that we do not distinguish any of these as separate activities within our whole experience.

This mechanism is a remarkable feature of the human  mind-a rapid means of converting all perceptions into a self-relating form which  enables us to take the necessary actions to insure our safety and survival.  It's wise to remember, however, that everything we think we "know" is an interpretation.  Every bit of information we take in is influenced and altered by our particular set of beliefs, assumptions, and associations.  These alterations are conceptual "add-ons" that strongly influence our experience of whatever is perceived.  What we reat to is not the object itself but rather the interpretation and meaning that we ourselves appy to the object.

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.    - William Shakespeare

The same process that we apply to objects of perception also works the same way on our own thoguths, emotions, and sensations.   Our ideas and beliefs and, in a way, our entire history are applied to everything that comes into our awareness-whether it's people and objects, or our own thoughts and feelings.

What we know as reality is influenced by the concepts with which we interpret it.  From "tree" to "hot" to "disgusting,"  what something means to us predetermines how we will perceive it.  Yet this relationship between concept and reality is so seamless it is undertectable.

Unless we make the distinction between our additions and what is there, we can't become conscious of what's actually there.  Our whole experience of self and life is conceptually dominated.  This means that we are not simply experiencing life and who we are; we are also constantly "imagining" life and who we are.  Since it does not seem like it's our imagination we're perceiving, we don't know the difference between what we are adding and what is there.

Simply put:  any perception we have is only understood through concept.  This is a very dominant aspect of experience.  Seeing an object doesn't give us much until we recognize it as a chair that we can sit on, or a dog that might bite our leg, or a rotten apple that is best thrown away.  Along with every perception is an automatic mental association with many concepts.