we would not perceive the at all, except by accident. As examples of perceiving by accident Aristotle mentions using the specific sense perception vision on its own to see that something is sweet, or to recognize a friend by their distinctive color. explains that "when I see Socrates, it is not insofar as he is Socrates that he is visible to my eye, but rather because he is coloured". So the normal five individual senses do sense the common perceptibles according to Aristotle (and Plato), but it is not something they necessarily interpret correctly on their own. Aristotle proposes that the reason for having several senses is in fact that it increases the chances that we can distinguish and recognize things correctly, and not just occasionally or by accident. Each sense is used to identify distinctions, such as sight identifying the difference between black and white, but, says Aristotle, all animals with perception must have "some one thing" that can distinguish black from sweet. The common sense is where this comparison happens, and this must occur by comparing impressions (or symbols or markers; ) of what the specialist senses have perceived. The common sense is therefore also where a type of consciousness originates, "for it makes us aware of having sensations at all." And it receives physical picture imprints from the imaginative faculty, which are then memories that can be recollected. The discussion was apparently intended to improve upon the account of Aristotle's friend and teacher Plato in his Socratic dialogue, the Theaetetus. But Plato's dialogue presented an argument that recognising is an active thinking process in the rational part of the human soul, making the senses instruments of the thinking part of man. Plato's Socrates says this kind of thinking is not a kind of sense at all. Aristotle, trying to give a more general account of the souls of all animals, not just humans, moved the act of perception out of the rational thinking soul into this , which is something like a sense, and something like thinking, but not rational. The passage is difficult to interpret and there is little consensus about the details. has argued that this may be because Aristotle did not use the term as a standardized technical term at all. For example, in some passages in his works, Aristotle seems to use the term to refer to the individual sense perceptions simply being