Perception and Reality

Sentiment arises from observation and reasoning, as these powers enable us to perceive or imagine the link between actions and consequences and evaluate whether the outcomes of an action were positive/praiseworthy or negative/deplorable.   It is from the aggregation of these judgments, in various circumstances, that form our impression that the object of perception - person, thing, location, or action - is to be regarded as good or bad.

The notion that there is a "moral sense" that exceeds our observation and reasoning has often been suggested, and is entirely absurd.   This is merely a shortcut or pretense for a person whose perception or thinking are flawed and superficial, who has not been attentive or diligent and is embarrassed to admit as much.  It suits their ego much better to claim supernatural powers than to admit to a lack of discipline and rationale.

Human perception, however, is often limited: what we perceive is merely color and shape, and this is always within the context of time and perspective.  That we recognize some subset of colors and shapes to be known objects is a mental process that imposes reasoning, memory, and experience upon this raw sensory data.   A certain combination of colors and shapes is a horse, another combination of colors and shapes is a carriage - so the fact that we speak of seeing a horse and carriage or even recognize the two are different things in spite of their tangency is a matter of interpretation of the colors and shapes that have been directly perceived, comparison to patterns in memory, and the assignment of identity.   That si to say we do not perceive objects, but define objects in what we see.

Our mental processes further interpret our perceptions, as we consider the horse to be a three-dimensional object - though we see only one side of the animal, our imagination suggests there is another side we cannot see - and thus when we consider a horse, we combine the half of the beast that our vision indicates with the other half we imagine to exist.  

This is not merely extrapolation on the assumption of symmetry, as no matter the angle at which the horse is perceived, we conceive its missing components based on the mental framework by which perceptions are translated to conception.   It is also the reason that our minds are so easily subjected to creating an illusion of completeness based on a representation that may in fact be incomplete.

Thus what we accept to be truth and reality is always some blend of the testimony of our senses and the fancy of our imagination: we may see the expression on a man's face and imagine him to be pained, only to learn that he was merely lost in thought.   But if we imagined him to be pained, we felt sympathy for his emotion and had already begun to imagine further to consider the cause of his pain.   This all occurs very quickly in many instances, without careful deliberation.   It can be somewhat difficult to overcome.

This lends itself neatly to a somewhat minimalistic approach to communication, in which the presentation of certain perceptible elements can suffice to communicate a broader and deeper sense of a reality in which the mental models of the observer can be leveraged to complete the concept that is described only in a few superficial details.   But also consider that we may do so unintentionally.