•

some people think that the study of consciousness must be some kind of intellectual selfie

•

based on some kind of inner self-examination or introspection

•

but actually the starting point of phenomenology is to turn away from the selfie an towards the world

•

its in the structure of the world that we actually discover the structure of consciousness

•

phenomenology is not in your head

•

it's in the world we inhabit, the lived world

•

our first focus will be vision

•

the experience of seeing

•

the mask picture

•

does it include a pearl?

•

does it include a face?

•

are there two people in the picture?

•

observe carefully, see more

•

the is the first rule of phenomenology

•

phenomenology is a form of mindfulness

•

paying more attention to yourself and your world

•

the mask picture

•

looks like a face

•

yet it is actually a picture of two people kissing

•

it's possible to see both interpretations

•

ambiguous images are well-known

•

the duck-rabbit

•

the Necker cube

•

textbook perception

•

you may have thought as perception as the passive reception of a stable scene of unambiguous objects

•

the eye, like a camera, simply responds to the light reflecting from the objects before it and transmits its responses to the brain

•

the perceiving mind works like a video camera, entirely responsive to the stable, objective world, it's perception as reception, an essentially passive process

•

perception as reception leads to some expectations about the experience of seeing, suggesting that what we see is whatever emits or reflects light in the field of vision

•

we see just what is there to be seen

•

accordingly psychologists often describe the mind's cube reversals while looking at a Necker cube as spontaneous

•

the visual system fatigues after the viewing of one interpretation and spontaneously flips to the other

•

the first principle in phenomenology is the recognition that you can make the image reverse at will

•

in this case we play an active role in forming our own perceptions

•

consciousness is a form of action

•

perception is not simply something that happens to us

•

instead, it is something we do

•

we can talk about acts of perception on a par with walking, speaking, and so forth

•

seeing, and all the other senses, are part of an intentional act of constructing our worlds

•

the second recognition in phenomenology is

•

the duck-rabbit

•

the bunniness or the duckihood of the picture depends on how we choose to see it

•

constitution

•

active construction of perceived reality

•

"through our act of perception, we constitute the objects we perceive, our perceptual activity make the objects of perception what they are for us

•

phenomenology

•

the deliberate exploration of acts of perception and the constitution of the perceived world