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Consciousness and Perception: The Point of Experience and the Meaning of the World We Inhabit

Sérgio Basbaum Roclaw

Revista Eletrônica Informação e Cognição (Cessada) December 31, 1969 DOI: 10.36311/1807-8281.2006.v5n1.732 (opens in new tab)

Study at a glance

AI-extracted from the abstract
Characteristics Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed
Citations 1
Key points Argues that consciousness may be culturally shaped and that treating conscious experience as one universal abstraction is a "romanticism of science." Proposes understanding conscious experience through perception, combining Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception, Classen and Howes' anthropology of the senses, and Flusser's hermeneutical view of language as reality.

Abstract

I suggest that consciousness may be culturally shaped, and thus it may be a romanticism of science to attempt explaining conscious experiences as if there could be one and only general abstraction of the whole human living conscious experience ? in spite of history, culture, language, etc. My starting point is perception ? its relation to conscious experience and, most of all, the meaning with which, through the mediation of perceptual processes, the world presents itself to each of us. I figure it out mainly by a combination of three different approaches to human experience: i) Maurice Merleau- Ponty´s works on perception; ii) Constance Classen and David Howes' Anthropology of the senses; iii) Vilém Flusser’s hermeneutical conception of language as reality.