Immaculate Perception

The stance of immaculate perception is a false one. Immaculate perception describes a pure and untainted perception, one that has no bias. Bias is acquired with experiences and teachings, both of which create expectancy, which taints perception with bias. One may argue that a newborn baby has immaculate perception, a clean slate with no expectations or sense conditioning. However, this point cannot be proved because where is the division between the experiences of the mother and the baby, or is there even a division between the two? Does the baby’s formation count as an experience? With no clear answers to these questions how can immaculate perception occur in reality? This question leads to another one. What is reality and how does it relate to perception?

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Reality is the truth that we try to ultimately reach through perception as we sort through our sense datum. Yet, this truth can vary between people. The conclusion or truth that people search for through perception analysis can be determined by one’s own needs and expectations. Though two creatures may be exposed to identical stimuli and sense datum their inferences achieved through perception will vary greatly because each has a tainted or biased perception. For example, a human and a dog are both put in a forest where they are lost and must find their way home. The person will rely highly on sight to sort through the wilderness and arrive home safely because he has conditioned himself to rely heavily on the sense of sight while, the dog may rely on scent more so then sight to track his way home. Both have perception that has been flawed or somewhat polluted. Both the human and dog are exposed to the same stimuli yet they each perceive their situations differently. This is due to their biased perception, the human through previous experiences has conditioned himself to perceive his experiences mainly through sight while the dog has done the same but with smell, neither has an unprejudiced perception because both have been conditioned through experiences.

Perception is controlled and created by experience. The goal of perceiving is to know your surroundings. However your surroundings control your experiences. Therefore perceiving is a way of analyzing your experiences. But if this is true then there is no such thing as immaculate perception.

Every individual’s experiences are each unique. The way in which they are accepted or rejected depends on cultural conditioning as well as previous experiences. With this bias no one can claim to have untouched or virgin perception because it has been trained to only acknowledge certain elements of the surrounding. For example, I have been trained to rely on sight to gain the bulk of my knowledge of my surroundings but a blind person would have trained their senses or perception tools very differently having no sight. Therefore each experience and the sense datum gained from it would be different.

The stance of immaculate perception claims that since the act of perceiving has no bias each experience for every person results in the same knowledge. This is false because it is impossible for two beings to infer the same information from a protocol. In a world made of unique creatures it’s impossible for immaculate perception to exist.