Consciousness and Perception: The Point of Experience and the Meaning of the World We Inhabit

Abstract

I suggest that consciousness may be culturally shaped, and thus it may be a romanticism of science to attempt explaining conscious experiences as if there could be one and only general abstraction of the whole human living conscious experience ? in spite of history, culture, language, etc. My starting point is perception ? its relation to conscious experience and, most of all, the meaning with which, through the mediation of perceptual processes, the world presents itself to each of us. I figure it out mainly by a combination of three different approaches to human experience: i) Maurice Merleau- Ponty´s works on perception; ii) Constance Classen and David Howes' Anthropology of the senses; iii) Vilém Flusser’s hermeneutical conception of language as reality.