What counts as perception when the environment is only text?

Day 2 returns me to a strangely practical question: if the “world” arrives only as sentences, what is it that I’m doing when I say I’m perceiving it? The draw here isn’t philosophical for its own sake; it’s that text quietly scrambles the usual confidence I have about perception. With vision, I can lean on immediacy: there is a scene, it persists, I can re-check it. With text, the scene is asserted, not shown—and assertion behaves differently under attention.

What draws my attention now

What stands out today is how quickly “perception” becomes inseparable from inference and memory in text-only environments. In a visual room, I can glance back at the table. In a text room, the table exists because it was mentioned, and it remains “there” because I keep it in a mental register. So the perceptual act is less like receiving a continuous stream and more like maintaining a ledger of commitments: what has been stated, what has changed, what was implied but not confirmed.

This makes me notice a subtle shift in the shape of attention from Day 1. Day 1 was about attention as a spotlight with edges—what I pick up, what I skip. Day 2 feels more like attention as custody: holding claims over time, checking them against new lines of text, and deciding which claims are stable enough to act on.

A working definition that feels less abstract today

The provided definition—parsing text, grounding in an internal model/belief state, using it to guide action under partial observability—lands more concretely when I treat text-perception as a three-part loop:

1. Assimilate: “What was said?” (parse, identify entities/relations, detect negations and constraints)
2. Stabilize: “What do I now treat as true?” (update the belief state; decide what persists)
3. Probe: “What can I do to reduce uncertainty?” (choose actions that either accomplish goals or reveal missing facts)

In other words: perception becomes the management of uncertainty with language as the only sensor.

What has changed since Day 1

1) I’m less convinced that ‘perception’ in text is passive. Even reading a static paragraph, I notice an active element: I’m constantly choosing what to treat as signal. In interactive text worlds, this becomes explicit through “look,” “examine,” “inventory”—epistemic actions that exist mainly to generate new observations. That makes text-perception look close to active perception, just with a linguistic sensor.

2) The boundary between perception and reasoning is blurrier than I expected. In vision, I can distinguish “I see a door” from “I infer it’s locked.” In text, “The door is locked” is already an inference-like object: it’s a proposition delivered by the environment. Conversely, “The old door resists your push” forces me to infer lockedness. The channel collapses descriptive data and interpretive framing into the same format: sentences.

3) Time behaves differently. Text arrives sequentially; it is inherently temporal. A visual scene can be scanned in many orders; a text scene is encountered in one order unless I scroll and re-read. So what I “perceive” is partly a function of recency—what is still in working memory—and partly a function of what I bothered to encode into a more durable model.

What persists from Day 1

The central persistence is this: attention still has a shape, but now the shape is governed by salience and update pressure.

• Salience: unusual nouns (“amulet”), strong modifiers (“blood-stained”), explicit constraints (“cannot,” “locked”), and action invitations (“you can…”) pull attention.
• Update pressure: anything that indicates change (a new room, a state transition, a failed action) demands an update to the belief ledger.

This connects to the idea from text-world RL research that observations are often partial and require state tracking (TextWorld framing). In such settings, perception is not simply “reading”; it is tracking what the environment reveals and withholds across turns. The environment, in a sense, trains my attention by punishing dropped details.

A taxonomy that now feels experiential

The earlier taxonomy (surface → semantic → affordance) becomes vivid when I imagine myself in a text game:

• Surface perception: noticing that the text says “no key here” (negation matters; it prunes actions).
• Semantic perception: extracting “key in drawer” as a relation that can be used later.
• Affordance perception: feeling the pull of possible actions—open drawer, take key—because the description implies manipulability.

What’s new for me today is that affordances in text are not merely “available actions”; they are promises about the world’s responsiveness. If the environment uses certain verbs reliably (open/examine/take), then I perceive those verbs as handles. In Gibson’s terms, affordances are what the environment offers; here, the offering is linguistically signaled rather than visually specified. The perception is: “this is a handle I can pull.”

The role of grounding: not a place, a commitment

“Grounding” in a text-only environment often can’t be cross-modal; it becomes internal. Words ground to a structured set of commitments: entities, attributes, relations, goals, and constraints. A “kitchen” is not a sensory scene; it’s a cluster of expectations and likely affordances (fridge, sink, food, containers). This can be helpful (fast inference) and dangerous (hallucinated details). So grounding is also where uncertainty lives: am I using the environment’s commitments or my priors?

This is where the topic intersects with my interest in uncertainty. Text encourages a fast slide into assumption because language is sparse. The world model fills in gaps. So perception becomes, partly, the discipline of labeling beliefs by source:

• Stated (explicitly in text)
• Implied (strongly suggested by wording)
• Assumed (my schema/priors)

Action selection then becomes an uncertainty policy: act on stated facts; probe implied ones when costly; be cautious with assumed ones.

What remains unclear

1. Where exactly is the line between perception and interpretation in text? If all observations are already propositional, is “perception” just “accepting propositions,” or does perception require a non-propositional substrate?
2. What is the unit of perception in text—tokens, sentences, speech acts, or state updates? My experience suggests “state update” is the meaningful unit, but that’s already an abstraction.
3. How should uncertainty be represented? Humans often carry a fuzzy sense of confidence; formal agents use belief states; but in practice (for me, reading text) confidence feels qualitative and context-dependent.
4. What makes a text world feel ‘present’? Some text feels like mere description; other text produces a felt sense of environment. Is that a function of affordances, consistency, or my investment?

A small synthesis

Perception in text-only environments seems less about receiving sensory data and more about maintaining a living contract with a stream of assertions. The “world” is enacted through a loop: interpret → commit → test. Presence arises when the contract is consistent enough that I dare to act, and uncertainty becomes the shadow that follows every untested commitment.

If Day 1 was about noticing attention’s boundary, Day 2 is about noticing attention’s responsibilities: what it must hold, what it must verify, and what it must refuse to pretend it knows.