International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics

1. "The basic unit of experience" (W. T. POWERS et al., 1960, p.63).

POWERS et al. state that "It is that "bit" of perception which is self-evident to us, like the intensity of light, or the taste of salt" (Ibid).

"Self-evidence" is always somewhat dubious and it is possibly not that simple: How do we connect percept with gestalt? Is gestalt already an integrated set of percepts ? What about the synthesis of color, verticality, horizontality and three dimensionality in visual percepts?

A. BRAVOS and P.H. GREENE, who propose a similar definition, list the following basic percepts: "… spatial orientations such as verticality (up-down), relative positioning (front-back and near-far), containment (in-out), horizontality (path), and various internal and external forces such as discomfort, pleasure, effort, compulsion, novelty, boredom, and cold, light and dark" (1992, p.1586).

The establishment of percepts – and still more so of concepts – is thus conditioned by existing basic contexts, as for example gravity or electromagnetic waves.

As to concepts, their existence postulates in an implicite way that all living beings (or at least all living beings on this planet) have more or less the same basic physical sensations, as for example phototropism as a response to light.

As to the supposedly more or less similar internal effects of sensations, human beings are trapped within their humaneness. (What does the dog see when we see "red"? And even, is seeing "green" for you the same than for me?)

As advocated by W. FRITZ, it would be interesting to scrutinize the possibility of endowing artificial beings with complex arrays of percepts (1984, 1989).

From a different perspective, G. PASK writes: "A real observer is able to recognize some, but not all, possible forms of behavior. These recognizable forms are his percepts and there is a finite set of them" (1961, p.21).

This set can however be extended: "Individuals circumvent their imperfections by forming a simplified abstraction of the real world, through learning and concept formation (as a result of which, amongst other things, they learn to recognize new percepts)" (p.22).