My fading sight

I got my first set of prescription glasses this week. It made me ponder about our sense of the world around us and the aging process....

Our perception of the world around us and indeed of ourselves, is severely limited by our sensory receptors. If my sight fades to blurry, then my world is no longer as sharp as it was before. The joy that I get from reading is reduced, as is my patience with study. However, if a sense is altogether removed, the interpretation of our world is altered. Eg. If we cannot smell, the temptation of freshly baked bread ceases to exist.

Our exeroception, sight, taste, hearing, touch, smell, is our only contact with the world around us. Indeed the inanimate objects in our life only exist through our perception, as George Berkeley said, "to be is to be perceived.” If we cannot hear, a tree falling in the woods makes no sound. If we never perceive the tree in any way, does it even exist, let alone fall? If the interpretation of my senses tells me that a person is a hat, for all intents and purposes that person is a hat to me.

I suppose the same is true about the animate objects in my life. Take a sea anemone as an example. If I stand watching it, it goes about it’s life, oblivious to my presence. If I touch it, my sudden unexpected existence causes it to quickly withdraw. If it doesn't sense me, I do not exist.

On a higher level, Adams perception of me is built only on his interpretation of the stimuli from his senses. The majority of which are thankfully favorable. It has been said that our senses fade as we ourselves fade, to ease the aging process. Perhaps our eyes fade as the wrinkles deepen and our hearing fades as the stories repeat... If we are lucky, our memories replace the first hand sensory information. If our memory fades with our senses, does our world cease to exist?


http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/An_Essay_Towards_a_New_Theory_of_Vision
Oliver Slacks, (1985) The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales