About the word "perception"

Solution 1:

There are all kinds of things that augment and refine our perceptions. The speedometer in a car leaps to mind: You have a decent idea of whether you're going slow, medium, fast, or ridiculous, but the speedometer augments your very general perception of your speed and lets you know exactly how fast you're really traveling.

Similarly, some people (or at least some peoples' knees) are sensitive to barometric pressure (picture the old farmer sitting on his porch: "My knee's gettin' sore again, Martha; storm must be a-comin'...") but having an actual barometer nearby allows you to quantify precisely what the pressure level is doing.

Going to a more sophisticated example, putting on a pair of goggles that has infra-red sensors on it, and that presents its infra-red information in human-viewable red levels has clearly augmented your natural visual perceptive ability.


As far as "out of perception", "have no feeling" and "have no sense", they are loosely interchangeable but with different overtones of meaning.

  • To have something be "out of perception" would generally mean that you cannot detect it by any of the 5 normal senses.
  • To "have no feeling" would most likely refer either to something that you are attempting to detect by touch, or to something that requires a level of emotional response which you are not able to generate. (Along those lines, to "have no feel" for something means that it requires a delicate or gentle touch for proper control, but you are only capable of large, coarse motions and cannot make the small adjustments that others can.)
  • To "have no sense" of something means not just that you can't detect it right now but that you are very bad at detecting it at any time. (Also, idiomatically, to "have no sense" is often used pejoratively to indicate that someone has just done something very stupid: "You wiped your hands on the 500-year-old tapestry? Have you no sense?!" )