the religious point of view- god and the world

Explain and illustrate the claim that all perception is experiencing-as.

John Hick argued that perception is not simply registering what is right there in front of us, but rather, that we 'see-as' or 'see-in'. To illustrate this, he uses the example of the Necker cube, an optical illusion of which shows that one set of lines can be seen a number of different ways, thus making it hard to tell which side of it faces which way. In this example, we see the lines 'as' a cube facing one way or another, we are not merely seeing a cube, we are seeing it 'as' it is. Another example is how we see patterns in natural objects - for example, seeing particular shapes in clouds - we see shapes 'in' the clouds, thus we are not just perceiving a cloud neutrally.

However, it could be argued that this kind of perception first requires concepts to be recognised - for example, someone from a completely different culture may not see a book 'as' a book, as maybe they have never acquired the concept of book, thus see it differently; perhaps as a clump of paper. This also applied to sounds (e.g. hearing a bird song) and smells (e.g. smelling coffee) - we first need concepts of these example to recognise what we are perceiving.