Perception: An Illusory Clarification of a Dualist Perspective
The fact that we regularly incur perceptual illusions allows for several inferences to be made about both the nature of the mind as well as what we perceive to be reality. The word in itself is actually misleading; derived from the Latin capere, meaning "to take", the prefix per meaning "completely", this would suggest that perception is in fact our complete take when in actuality, this is not the case. I believe that the existence of perceptive illusions shows that the mind-body relationship is dualist, and that the trustworthiness of the senses alone cannot be complete. I believe this postulation, though not easily proven, is reinforced though an analysis of several views of cognitive psychologists, theoretical physicists, as well as various philosophers.
It is a readily-held belief among many cognitive psychologists that, as we move about in the world, we create our own internal model of how the world works. In essence, "we sense the objective world, but our sensations map to percepts, and these percepts are provisional, in the same sense that scientific hypotheses are provisional" ("Perception"). This meaning that our sense organs perceive various forms of perceptive energy which is then categorized by the brain. My argument for the existence of a dualist mind-body relationship, stemming from the study of cognitive psychology, comes with a phenomenon known as top-down processing. This is the idea that, rather than information coming in from the sensory organs and being processed by the brain, "the flow of information progress[es] flows from the top down as it start[s] with an existing knowledge." (Braisby & Gelatly, 2005:77).
Richard Gregory (1980 ...