This week I read chapter 3 of Alien Phenomenology.

I re-read the first 12 pages and highlighted key points/ideas, wrote annotations on the side including definitions (in red) and questions. I have so many questions already.

I also jotted down those key ideas into my notebook to refer back to later. I’ll also write in my questions.

I found this chapter much more interesting than chapter 2. I like the concept of having two completely different perceptions of an experience. “The subject nature of our experience makes the unit operation of one of it’s perceptions amount always to a caricature in which the one is drawn in the distorted impression of the other” -> obviously having two sides means one is going to be distorted to the other and vise-versa.

The examples of the bat (“imagining what it’s like to be a bat is not the same as being a bat”pp.63) and the camera (“the camera doesn’t see like a human eye…. the camera’s experience of perception differs from our understanding of the camera’s experience of perception”pp.72) were extremely helpful in understanding the concept. A really simple way of explaining a complex theory.