[chongli]

How do you define perception?

* A spark flies out randomly and contacts a fuel source

* A blind person reaches out randomly and finds a glass of water

What is the essential difference between these events?

[hharrison]

Either the blind person is responding to some low-energy distribution (scattered sound waves, perhaps, or past samplings of the energy distribution, i.e. memory) or the blind person isn't perceiving any more than the spark is (in this example).

In any case my post above implied a definition for perception: responding to low-energy distributions with an asymmetric high-energy response.