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On page 53 of OPAR, “perception” is defined as “a group of sensations automatically retained and integrated by the brain of a living organism, which gives it the ability to be aware, not of a single stimuli, but of entities, of things”. But doesn’t perception often require that you focus your attention in order to become fully aware of entities? For example, my wife and I will cycle by some feature such as a beautiful flower bed. She will notice it in some detail and later ask me what I thought about it.I will admit that, even though I had been facing in the same direction, I had not noticed it at all! I was simply not paying attention to what was right in my field of vision. Doesn’t this mean that some perceptions of entities require that you focus ie that it is not always automatic?
My understanding is that the focus is not telling you that the flower is an entity. It is revealing to you an attribute or aspect of the flower.
Does perception require focusing your attention to become fully aware of entities? I believe it requires focusing your eyes, which does require some effort, and perhaps not a great deal less than the effort required to focus your mind. The difference between your experience and your wife’s experience seems to be that she is focusing her gaze on the objects and thus perceiving them, and further, she is conceptualizing what she perceives, thinking about it. You, as you say, are looking in the same direction, but you are not focusing your gaze on the same things and, having not seen the thing, you don’t think about it. Try an experiment: Glance out your window at an object, perhaps a tree or even just part of a tree, but do not conceptualize at all. Do not register conceptually any details about it. Simply glance at it, look away, and in your mind’s eye, visualize what you have just seen. I’ll bet that, at least for most objects, you can do this without trouble.
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