Pink Monkey Farm: The Blog

Accuracy of perception: a pernicious myth?

I’m reading a very short note in this months Scientific American (so short it doesn’t warrant a counterpart on their website, so no link. Sorry). In treats of people with body dysmorphic disorder, in which sufferers perceive themselves as flawed based on very little evidence. Functional MRI has demonstrated that neural processing is different in this group compared to controls (more left side processing, suggesting an analytical mode of observation, I guess). Troublingly, the paragraph ends with the bland optimism of the following:

These findings could one day help to retrain brains to perceive faces more accurately.

It seems to me that there is a big problem lurking here: the notion that one person perceives more accurately than another.

To be sure, one might wish that these people did not have such an unpleasant experience when viewing their faces, bodies, etc. But the suggestion that one person’s perception is more accurate than another’s is potentially problematic. On a conventional account, if two people see a spider, and one of them is arachnophobic, we say that they both see the same thing, but that there is emotional content to that experience.  There are two disparate experiences going on.  We can never insist that our experienced world is more real than that of another.  We must needs acknowledge variation in the experiential world I have called the P-world.   IT does not dissect irreducably with words.  Words represent the best means we have of reaching consensus, but we must needs back off somewhat and acknowledge the phenomenal reality.