Perception is not something that happens to us, or in us. It is something we do.
Perceiving how things are is a mode of exploring how things appear. How they appear is, however, an aspect of how they are. To explore appearance is thus to explore the environment, the world. To discover how things are, from how they appear, is to discover an order or pattern in their appearance. The process of perceiving, of finding out how things are, is a process of meeting the world; it is an activity of skillful exploration.
The world shows up for us, but it doesn't show up for free. We must show up, too, and bring along what knowledge and skills we've cultivated. As with a painting in a gallery, the world has no meaning-no presence to be experienced-apart from our ability to engagement with it.
Consciousness is the fact that we think and feel and that a world, the world shows up for us.
The world is a resource for us and we have access to the world because of the kind of bodies and skills that we have so that there's a sense in which the individual person doesn't have the burden of having to memorize everything he or she needs to know. The world helps us.
One reason I'm not worried about the possibility that we will soon make machines that are smarter than us, is that we haven't managed to make machines until now that are smart at all. Artificial intelligence isn't synthetic intelligence: It's pseudo-intelligence.
Science is conservative and one of the reasons science is conservative is science is trying to play it safe.
You're experiencing a bit of the world around you when you experience it's color.
I do think that at least when we're thinking about ourselves as living, conscious, human beings we are dynamic wholes.
If you let other people do some of the work that we ask ourselves to do, if you allow for the fact that we are ourselves dependent on and distributed over and in a way made up out of the world and processes around us then we can explain certain questions that we otherwise cannot explain and moreover we discover that we are not aliens in a strange world.
Consciousness... I think we should think of it as something we do.
Colors are things we experience.
