Perception

The term perception is vaguely defined within psychology. My proposal presented below is based mainly on a few textbooks [Ciccarelli, Goldstein, Gross, Lilienfeld, Schacter]:

Perception (sensory experience): the brain receives signals from a sense organ (i.e. a sensory impression). The brain compares these with memories and retains what is considered important, useable, new or changed.

The brain generally ignore unimportant sensory impressions, as shown by the simple "blind spot" test [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_spot]. When light from a visible object hits the "blind spot" it is not registered, but we are never aware of this empty area of the visual field.

A perception is assembled, synthesized, by several components such as temporal length, motion, intensity, and danger. The brain creates an experience of what is perceived being a unit. Perception thus creates a concept in the brain through proximity in time.

Simultaneous perception through multiple senses—multimodal perception—for example, a large animal that looks like, smells like, and sounds like what we have stored in memory as characteristics of a horse, results in a strong conviction of the reliability of the perception.

Aristotle about perception

Within philosophy it is very common to find misconceptions and erroneous citations.

One of Aristotle’s two books, which he together called Analytica, was later renamed Prior Analytics [Ross – Aristotle’s Prior and Posterior Analytics, Oxford 1957, p. 6]. This has led to the erroneous view that he believed knowledge could be created a priori.

Aristotle uses the term "universal" for a concept (a generalization):

Thus from perception there comes memory ... and from memory ... experience ... . And from experience ... there comes a principle of skill or of understanding ... .

Thus it is clear that it is necessary for us to become familiar with the primitives by induction; for perception too instils the universal in this way.

Aristotle - Posterior Analytics 2, 100a5.

Aristotle thus asserted that the fundamental starting points in reasoning (which he called primitives) are based on perception.

Observation

On this website the term observation means “focused perception”, where the focus arises from, for example, prior experience, news value, or some need.

Ultimate

That knowledge is ultimately created through perception means that knowledge is created through perception, through reasoning that starts from perception, or through reasoning that starts from conclusions of earlier reasoning (and thus ultimately from perception).