I am doing some writing in the area of philosophical understandings of perception. Specifically I am interested in how we perceive abstract art. I would be grateful if anyone has any references of the general area of the philosophy of perception or the application of this to art perception.
Analysis of Passive Synthesis has been translated:
Husserl, Edmund. 2001. Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic. Translation by Anthony J. Steinbock. Springer, 2001.
Michel Henry has written a very interesting book about Kandinsky from a phenomenological perspective. It is available in English as well:
Michel Henry. Seeing the Invisible. Translated by Scott Davidson. Bloomsbury Academic, 2009.
I'll take the liberty of plugging the article I wrote about Henry's aesthetics in relation to Husserl: Jeremy H. Smith. Michel Henry's Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience and Husserlian Intentionality. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 14.2 (2006): 191-219. http://philpapers.org/rec/SMIMHP
Hello again, Paul. Do you read Castillian (formerly known as Spanish)? This book appeared on ResearchGate today:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263314687_COLOR_Entre_la_realidad_y_la_metafisica?ev=contentfeed
I haven't seen the book, but the information on the jacket prompted me to put it on my "to buy" list.
Book COLOR: Entre la realidad y la metafisica
Dear Paul, there are three books by M. Merleau-Ponty that might be helpful to you because they explicitly deal with: a) Philosophy of perception, and b) art perception. These are:
Eye and Mind, Engl. translation in Evanston Northwester U. P.
The visible and the invisible, same publishing house, and
Phenomenology of perception, N.Y., Routledge
Besides, you can also take a look at "Ways of Seeing", by J. Berger (influenced by a certain phenomenological approach).
Good call, Carlos. There is a new, improved edition of Merleau-Ponty's *Phenomenology of perception* in English, which recently arrived at my door from Amazon. I haven't read it all, but I realize it's a classic and a quick skim showed me that it will be useful.
MERLEAU-PONTY, Maurice
2012 Phenomenology of perception, Donald A. Landes, translator, London/New York, Routledge.
There are also digital versions freely available on the web: the original in French, plus English and Castilian translations:
MERLEAU-PONTY, Maurice
1945 Phénoménologie de la perception, Paris, Éditions Gallimard, 1945 (http://www.fichier-pdf.fr/2012/12/12/merleau-ponty-phenomenologie-de-la-perception/merleau-ponty-phenomenologie-de-la-perception.pdf, access: May 13, 2014).
1962 Phenomenology of perception, Colin Smith, translator, London/Henley/New Jersey, Routledge & Kegan Paul/The Humanities Press, 1962 (https://ia600306.us.archive.org/11/items/phenomenologyofp00merl/phenomenologyofp00merl.pdf, access: May 13, 2014).
1993 Fenomenología de la percepción, Jem Cabanes, translator, Barcelona, Planeta-De Agostini, 1993 (http://filosinsentido.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/merleau-ponty-maurice-fenomenologia-de-la-percepcion.pdf, access: May 13, 2014).
I recommend you to read:
- Crane, T. "The Problem of Perception";
- Siegel, S. "The Contents of Perception";
- BonJour, L. "The Epistemological Problems of Perception!.
All of them in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: http://plato.stanford.edu/index.html
You can find a lot of references in this papers.
Hi David, unfortunately I do not read Castillian. Thank you for the recommendation though.
Dear Jose, Thank you for these. Siegel's book is very interesting.
Two suggestions that may take you too far afield: Heidegger's article, The Origin of The Work of Art (which radically changed my own thinking about what we mean by "aesthetic" and what we are doing when we "perceive" it) and Robert Audi's Moral Perception. The latter has obvious connections to aesthetic perception but is also good because Robert is careful in talking about what perception is. Heidegger's work on Paul Klee might be of interest as well. (If you do go the Heidegger route and want an excellent secondary source, try Julian Young, Heidegger's Philosophy of Art and also Thomson's Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity.) Of course all the standard philosophers known for their work on aesthetics, e.g., Adorno, Danto, etc., have written on what aesthetic perception is. For recent work you might see Joseph Margolis or, for something more straightforward, Stecker's Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art.
Jack and Mark, Thank you both for these recommendations. I would like to ask you a question: If you were attempting to assemble a perceptual ontology, perhaps a mereology of the human perceptual process, where would you begin?
My last question is to all of you watching or contributing to this question.
I could offer you a (very short) synopsis of the history of perception but it is in French. Let me know if you read French.
Andrei Gorea
It's hard for me to answer that question because it is hard for me to imagine myself doing it. Not my cup of tea. And I don't imagine what I have to say here will be very helpful. Assuming we are not talking cognitive science, there's a nice collection of well known current and historical articles on vision in a Blackwell Reader entitled Perception. Since my own knowledge in the area is limited I'd probably start with something like that, sort of reading around the subject for awhile, before turning to the underlying epistemologal issue of perception as a source of knowledge, i.e., the relationship of perception to propositional content, and then I'd see where that work led me when the "knowledge" I was after was not propositional but the mode of thought (and I'd say the mode of truth) that aesthetic perception can be. So, basically, I'd turn to ordinary epistemology as a baseline from which I could at least start to develop my own mereology of aesthetic perception in comparison, if that is what you are asking. Of course, now that I've written that out it sounds like a mistake to me to assume that there is a sufficient analogy between the various modes of perception to justify working that way. Oh well. There are parts of Husserl, I believe, in which he works backwards from the phenomenology of aesthetic percpetion to parse the experience in a way that might be closer to what you are after, but I'm not familiar with it.
If the ordinary perception/aesthetic perception comparison does interest you, Audi could help with the epistemology, but of course there are many others. He's just the one I know best. Something which might take you a little further towards the aesthetic is the work that has been done on children's perception of words and the relationship of that perception to meaning. There is an aesthetic element to that and the work might provide a bridge between ordinary epistemology and asesthetic perception. Hope all this is at least interesting to you if not particularly helpful.
Sorry, I do not have time to translate. Would you try Google translate?
Here it is. As I said, just a synopsis for my Master 1 course a while ago. Please let me know if it was useful.
Andrei
Dear Paul,
In order to read something about ontology of perception I suggest to you to read something which perhaps is not easy to understand and it is not directly related with percepcion, but with "modes of presentation" (in general), and because of this with "modes of presentation" of perceptual experiences.
The article is:
Zalta, E. N. (2001): “Fregean Senses, Modes of Presentation, and Concepts, in Philosophical Perspectives, 15, Methaphysics, pp. 335-350.
The only problem is that if you want to understand better what is below of this proposal, you will need to read something as:
Zalta, E. N. (1983): Abstract Objects: An Introduction to Axiomatic Metaphysics. Dordrecht, D. Reidel.
Zalta, E. N. (1988): Intensional Logic and the Metaphysics of Intentionality. Cambridge, MA and London, The MIT Press.
It is analytical philosophy.
Best wishes, José L.
Dear Paul,
I am not quite sure what would make an understanding of perception philosophical. I guess you are wanting to steer away from rods and cones and neurotransmitters and deal with more general issues but it is not clear to me where the divide lies between philosophy and psychology or indeed neurobiology. Th Institute of Philosophy in London is a good venue for such things because it it run by both philosophers and a neuroscientist and involves collaborations where it makes no difference if you are a psychologist or a philosopher of mind - everyone is dealing with the same issues. In philosophy there are threads deriving from the continental school and phenomenologists that are very popular but I would avoid because if you test with empirical neuropsychology they turn out to be wrong. I would go for people like Ken Aizawa and Fred Adams - who cross the disciplinary divide regularly, or Purves and Lotto, who delve into the broader issues of 'Why we see what we do' which is the title of an excellent book of theirs.
But your question about abstract art piqued my interest. At a seminar last year we had a talk from someone whose name I cannot recall that seemed to me deeply original. He was providing evidence for the idea that if we see something that looks as if it is a sign made by another human the rules of perception of space change completely. Rather as we seem to instinctively know that vocal sounds are signs with meaning, the idea is that our brains are programmed to shift to a more abstract frame level if we see an image that tells us it is man made. A simple example is a cartoon. We are quite happy to accept gross distortions if we know this is a sign figure. We don't mind there being no shadowing, etc. If we think we are looking at a photograph it doesn't work.
My own experience with art made me think hard about this. I think you are an artist so you will understand. My lifelong problem is to paint wildlife in watercolour in such a way as to create an 'idea' of a creature in a moment, not a scene. 80% of the paper must remain white, with the idea emerging from the whiteness. As soon as the background has paint on it i think it takes on 'sign-space'. That can work, but only in certain ways. There is no equivalent in oil because the canvas is painted with primer. I also think that the apparent luminosity of watercolour has something to do with the paper being conceived somehow as the light coming through the stained glass of the transparent paint. If there is no white paper then the illusion is broken.
I have not thought much about oil-based abstract expressionism recently but I guess that what this philosopher whose name I cannot recall would be suggesting is that Jasper Johns, Pollock, Rothko, Lichtenstein, Warhol etc. each in their way may have been manipulating the 'lie that tells the truth' that is sign-image rather than real world image. I think he was suggesting that this innate capacity for reading things as sign-spaces must go back to early human evolution and image forming tens of thousands of years ago - Lascaux, Altamira etc. Without the guy's name I am not sure I am actually much help but this is stuff being published in the last five years -centred on the perception of space in art - a Google might track it down.
I look forward to reading Paul's (and others') thoughts on Jonathan's question ("...what would make an understanding of perception philosophical").
I would like to rephrase and ask what it is about a _question_ regarding perception that would make the question philosophical. Let us, for instance, consider the question "what is involved in an initial encounter with an unfamiliar piece of art?" This question -- as Jonathan rightly said -- could be picked up by workers in many different disciplines. My own understanding is that when a philosopher is concerned with perception, her/his concern is contexualized within a set of other concerns. And it is those _other concerns_ that shapes her/his approach to perception differently from, say, a neuroscientist. That is why a philosopher and a neuroscientist can have a discussion that begins with (apparently) the exact same question, but after a while recognize that they aren't really interested in having that discussion. I have had this experience whenever I am drawn to an article's title, but half-way through the body of the text realize that the content of the article doesn't _really_ concern me. For those of us trained in the sciences, relating to the concerns expressed in philosophical texts (motives) is a task that is often completely separate from understanding the text.
One philosophical way of dealing with perception would be to clearify the sentences by which we express our perceptions - this would be in the line of Ludwig Wittgensteins "Remarks on Colour" or "Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology".
It's merit would be to fine-tune our judgement of different explanations of perception.
Example: Wilfried Sellars has coined the phrase of the "myth of the given" (which is a critique of the assumtion of pure sense-data as part of our perception).
Now, when looking at abstract art, say a painting from Rothko - is our way of perceiving tuned down to its most "fundamental" mode? Or is it tuned up to a very specific, highly artificial mode?
In which theoretical circumstances would we be inclined towards the first or the second?
Paul,
The file attached is a small contribution of my own.
Nothing on abstract art, though - sorry.
Chris
Data On creativity
As an interesting aside.
If we were to plot components of the environment on a scale of plasticity - totally invariant components at one end and completely plastic components at the other, we might gain some insight.
On this scale we might consider the limpet that enhances its' own chances of survival by wearing away the rock upon which it lives in order to obtain a very tight fit. In this case, the animal is utilizing plasticity to create a safer habitat.
There seems to be an interesting leap that occur when intelligent creatures realize that they can similarly sculpt reality in order to enhance cognitive states - aesthetics, art.
It seems to me that the most plastic components associated with our own cognitive existence are things like paint, clay - perhaps even film could be considered plastic in this way.
I think that a central idea that is often missed by people thinking about art is that it is a process whereby we structure reality specifically to be experienced!
Chris
Thomas, thank you for these suggestions. I would really appreciate more suggestions.
Thomas, I should have said that I know some of the references you have given me and some are new.
Thomas, do you know if
Edmund Husserl -Analysen zur passiven Synthesis
is available in English?
Analysis of Passive Synthesis has been translated:
Husserl, Edmund. 2001. Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic. Translation by Anthony J. Steinbock. Springer, 2001.
Michel Henry has written a very interesting book about Kandinsky from a phenomenological perspective. It is available in English as well:
Michel Henry. Seeing the Invisible. Translated by Scott Davidson. Bloomsbury Academic, 2009.
I'll take the liberty of plugging the article I wrote about Henry's aesthetics in relation to Husserl: Jeremy H. Smith. Michel Henry's Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience and Husserlian Intentionality. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 14.2 (2006): 191-219. http://philpapers.org/rec/SMIMHP
Dear Paul,
you could read with interest Michel Henry's book translated into English : Seing the invisible .
Henry's interesting contribution about perception distinguishes the perception of something in the world through intentionality, and the manifestation of some affect in life.
As an artist I got a lot from M. Merleau-Ponty's The Primacy of Perception. (you are probably aware)
I think you are aware of my presentations on this site from other questions you have posed but you might like to look closely at these two?
Manifesting dark light and setting out a Vision-Space painting http://youtu.be/RJj7OdCzifM
Setting out a Vision-Space painting: An up-date http://youtu.be/HcmGkn5LMk4
The second of these suggests a link to abstract art towards the end. If you ignore 'what' is appearing within phenomenal field and concentrate on the processes that deliver the content, then I think we can start to understand the relationship between perception and abstract art?
I have tried reading Merleau-Ponty because he is popular and people seem to find him insightful. I could not get a grip of this insight when I tried. Can someone give a specific example of how he resolves a particular problem insightfully? So far people have just said how good he is. I have a lingering sense that maybe I am missing a trick but what trick is it?
Hi Jonathan,
It's a matter of ontology for me. The experiential ontology. Vision is prior to science. Reality occurs to us and not our instrumentation. The Primacy of Perception. The issue is then: where are the new age perceptual technologies that deploy a meaningful manifestation of this approach, the 'added value'? This is a gap that I think Vision-Space starts to articulate? I am ex Slade school (UCL) by the way.
Hi John, I agree that a lot comes down to ones ontology. Can you explain what you mean by vision is prior to science? In what sense prior ands what do you understand by the words vision and science?
Jonathan, I have a very similar reaction to Merleau-Ponty. I am told he is influential and important. I too feel as if I am missing something here and need a little help.
These are the core issues that M.M-P deals with. There was at the time no 'evidence' for his views beyond the philosophy and the art work.
I come at this as an artist and not from the philosophy of course. This is a para for the article attached. If it doesn't load then its the Experiential Ontology paper on my site.
Phenomenology – the experiential ontology:
As a fusion of vision science and visual art around the definition of perceptual structure, Vision-Space is rooted in phenomenology. Heidegger proposed that our sense of being precedes any notions of how or in what manner any particular being or beings exist, it is pre-conceptual, non-propositional, and hence pre-scientific. Prof. Jan Koenderink articulates that the main problem seems to be that most people (especially scientists) get their ontology mixed up. Vision is prior to science. Our understanding, experiential reality, is necessarily rooted in phenomenology rather than in physics but through our penetration of perceptual structure we are eventually required to reconsider theoretical positions within in the domain of physics. Phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty states in The Primacy of Perception that; “Science manipulates things and gives up living in them. It makes its own limited models of things; operating upon these indices or variables to effect whatever transformations are permitted by their definition, it comes face to face with the real world only at rare intervals.”
There are other publication on my page that look at Vision-Space (VS) and the physics. None of it 'proven' but VS works and I can see it (the processes and data-sets) taking place with the phenomenon of vision.
Dear John,
For me the primacy of perception is embedded in the birth of science with Descartes and Leibniz. The primacy of 'Cogito ergo sum' in avoiding total scepticism articulates 'vision is prior to science'. And from Leibniz we have : 'L'état passager qui enveloppe et représente une multitude dans l'unité ou dans la substance simple n'est autre chose que ce qu'on appelle la Perception...' In other words the dynamic basis of the universe is nothing other than its perception by simple substances. So in what way does M-P take us further if he does? What would be 'added value'?
Our last posts crossed, John. I remain tantalised by what M-P has to offer.
You quote “Science manipulates things and gives up living in them. It makes its own limited models of things; operating upon these indices or variables to effect whatever transformations are permitted by their definition, it comes face to face with the real world only at rare intervals.” But to my mind this is the way philosophers want to see science because they have have become increasingly jealous of science. Science kicks ass, and gets all the bucks. Philosophy departments are being closed down. The scientists I know are much deeper into phenomenal space than philosophers. They live their world in at least as rich a way. They have no definition of 'what is permitted' other than what can make predictions the truth of which can be evaluated. When peering down a microscope I was at least as interested in the wonderful colours as in what they might mean in terms of cell behaviour. (I admit that my first degree was in Art History but that was a bit of a red herring.) The difference between phenomenal space and the space metric of physics was emphasised by Newton and science has recognised it as long as there has been such a discipline I think.
I hereby call the bluff of all Merleau-Pontyists to give an example of what he said new!! (In good humour - I am pretty sure there is something to learn.)
Sense and Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century Musical Thought
Author(s): Georgia J. Cowart
Source: Acta Musicologica, Vol. 56, Fasc. 2 (Jul. - Dec., 1984), pp. 251-266
Published by: International Musicological Society
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/933002
Die Grenzen der musikalischen Perzeption unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der
elektronischen Musik
Author(s): Fritz Winckel
Source: Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, 15. Jahrg., H. 4. (1958), pp. 307-324
Published by: Franz Steiner Verlag
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/930236
A. Gurwitsch.Théorie du champ de la conscience. You can find this book:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/49101270/A-Gurwitsch-Theorie-du-champ-de-la-conscience
Giovanni Piana, Elementi di una dottrina dell'esperienza (especially in the first chapter). Free Downloadable in
http://www.filosofia.unimi.it/piana/index.php/filosofia-dellesperienza
or printed in
http://www.lulu.com/shop/giovanni-piana/elementi-di-una-dottrina-dellesperienza/paperback/product-20939058.html
kind regards
Giovanni Piana
Hi Jonathan,
Well the view you articulate is a common one. Actually M.M-P was equally critical of philosophy as a tool in this respect as it is also largely conceptual (reliant on language). It can't be 'experiential'. It was art and its pre-conceptual capabilities that he understood as being at the coal face. I would read The Primacy of Perception.
There are actually very significant issues with our current ICT's based on the scientific ontology. It's just that all the issues are not being linked together as being demonstrative of a deficit relating to the absence of perceptual structure. Our instrumentation records sound, projects pictures but this is known to science as having little to do with either audition or vision. You would need to look at the Vision-Space (VS) presentations but the rise in autism rates and ASD related conditions in the west matches the curve for increased immersion in our virtual worlds.
I have spent a lifetime working to understand what the deficit is between 'realism' and optical record and vision - vision is entirely non-photographically rendered. How much vision science is reliant on subjects being presented with 2D media or artificial lighting conditions? What do the results of such experimentation MEAN! The ontology prevents progress beyond the assumptions that drive the system?
In developing VS I had no knowledge of M.M-P work. Only in the last year or so have I read some of his work and its clear that he understood 'the situation' way in advance of most scientists. He stood out on a limb and wrote it up and stuck it out there.
The experiential ontology has delivered the 1st perceptual technology; VS. TRIZ patent analysis establishes this as paradigm shifting technology with implications across 12 industries with over 200 commercial applications. Seriously disruptive. This will be just the beginning? We have handles on the 'perceivers share' telling us important things about our relationship with the real at all scales. These insights take us to a level of understanding that science could not take us to strictly following the scientific ontology. M.M-P predicted this technology and its ramifications. Hats off?
The issue is (and the message is) for science that the technology has arrived and nothing will remain the same. Science will have to work with these insights. The prediction is now that these insights will 'run' science.
The challenge is to science now?
'All knowledge has its origins in perception' L. Da Vinci.
Dear John,
You are making me think that Vision-Space is an interesting venture but I still haven’t heard anything new from M-P!
The ‘scientific ontology’ you talk about is a conflation of the view of the ordinary man in the street and the philosopher. I would agree that there are plenty of third-rate scientists around who also hold to it but the people who drive science forward are not ‘materialists’ in the popular sense. Remember that in his famous letter to Henry Oldenburg Newton says’ but as to what light IS, and how the phantasms of colours arise in the mind, that is not so easie’. In other words he is saying ‘I claim no ontology and I realize that how images occur in the mind has nothing to do with my optics’. That remains the scientific position. If you come to the Censes seminars at Institute of Philosophy in London you will find very good (enlightened!) philosophers and a first rank vision scientist talking entirely on your wavelength. If you come to lunch in the UCL Senior Common Room you might well come across Semir Zeki, with whom I share a passion for Bonnard, and whose outstanding work on mechanisms of perception would seem entirely in tune with your premises.
In other words I suspect you are doing some great science with V-S.
I do agree that some of the also-ran vision scientists pay too much attention to 2-D images but they usually get pulled up short in question time at IP.
You say that you developed V-S with no knowledge of M-P and I think this illustrates the fact that if he had any insights they are probably accessible to anyone who thinks deeply about the problem. My difficulty is that he then goes off at a tangent that is counterproductive. There is a widespread view that people like Kant had great new insights into how we relate to the world but my own conclusion is that Descartes, Newton and Leibniz, and in particular Leibniz were already way ahead of Kant, who, as Solomon Maimon pointed out, really just cobbled together the less insightful aspects of the seventeenth century into a dog’s breakfast of confusion. My impression is that Hegel, Heidegger, Husserl, Gibson, and M-P all fall into much the same category.
The truth is deeper and harder to reach but more transparent once you get there. It is entirely ‘scientific’ but it places experience at the core.
Good answer! However….
M.M-P was the first as far (as I am aware) to understand the artist's relationship with the real and place that to the foreground. When I read his work he was describing this process and it's NOT registering in science. He was aware of the discrepancy. To understand this in terms of VS theory you will need to read the VS articles. Please do I would value your views. IF vision-Space theory is valid (or partially valid) and the technology can be properly evaluated then I would suggest that there is something that you have missed in M.M-P.
There are of course many scientists that move beyond the materialistic stance and VS is indebted to Prof Jan Koenderink and Ans Van Doorn for their work on visual perception and direct contribution. But it's these scientist that came up with the phrase that vision is prior to science! If you want to study vision - study it (as the phenomenon). There isn't a substitute for that. The position doesn't translate of migrate.
So while we may wish to extend science into the experiential realm, that's fine but the scientific ontology is forfeit as it stands. I truly believe that VS is a new form of illusionary space based on perceptual structure. It's a renaissance moment that requires multidisciplinary participation to fully realise. This is why I am on this site! The VS technology is already operational because key scientists realise the ontological issues and approach vision on a psychophysical basis to develop the computational input.
M.M-P stamped out the case for VS, perceptual technologies the value of artists in moving the whole agenda forwards.
The main hurdle to further research in VP are the scientific funding forums. They 'weed out' the applications! It's suppression. The project proposals are deemed 'unscientific'. They want to see the evaluation data to support the project aims before the money is made available. So, we have to develop the concept, do the research, produce the software and the stimuli, evaluate that and the apply for the research funding to start the process! Oh, and then the applications have to state that the work hasn't yet been done! This is BECAUSE the scientific ontology still can't countenance the position. Despite M.M-P describing it all those years ago.
I don't think there is anything more interesting and vital than this debate? I would like VS to play a part in this. I think it holds the basis for constructive debate, targeted research and new technologies.
Bold, fighting words, John. But you still haven't told me anything that M-P said new. This 'scientific ontology' is a mirage, I can assure you, but that does not mean that there aren't new and better ways to think about perception. I would just like a clue to what they might be. I will explore the V-S stuff. And the scientific funding system is not turning you down because of this ontological myth. It is turning you down because your idea is original. It happens to people like me with perfectly standard scientific biomedical ideas if they are the slightest bit original. I have to do the experiments before applying for funding for some more experiments that the ones I have done have already shown will work. It is the game. The need is to play the ball not the men, to find the chink in the system's armour. One way forward might be to engage interest from the Censes people at IP- they include artists, philosophers, scientists, dancers, musicians and anyone who has something to contribute in their talking shop.
I suggest reading the paper mentioned below, or others on the same topic by the same author, in which the role of perception is not thought as a tool for knowing the world, but for driving the behaviour: veridical perception would not exist. The idea is not new, but proposed here in convincing way (at least for me). The author is a scientist, not a philosopher by profession, but one can make good philosophy withut being a professional philosopher.
The interface theory of perception: natural selection drives true perception to swift extinction. Donald D. Hoffman [2009]
A chapter for the book "Object Categorization: Computer and Human Vision Perspectives," edited by Sven Dickinson, Michael Tarr, Ales Leonardis and Bernt Schiele. Cambridge University Press, 2009, pages 148-265.
Dear Osvaldo,
Hoffman has cropped up on another thread on mathematical modelling of consciousness. He is interesting. I think his idea that veridical perception does not exist is right but it has been pretty standard both in philosophy and science for several hundred years maybe. Berkeley had some fascinating things to say about how perception is built up. I think Hoffman is to some extent attacking the straw man of the contemporary popular view.
And I think there is also a sense in which Hoffman's thesis is misleading. It seems fairly obvious that to survive we do want our perception to reflect our environment accurately. But I think Leibniz has the explanation of the confusion here. What we want in perception is an accurate account of WHAT IS REALLY GOING ON, not of 'what things are like'. Our perception mechanisms paint phantasms of things for us in order to give us a veridical picture of the DYNAMIC RELATIONS of our world, not of the 'objects' around us because there are no such things as objects in reality. It is the game of chess that matters to us, not whether the pieces are made of ivory or wood. As Leibniz emphasises in his Reflections on True Metaphysics our world can only be a purely dynamic world. Our brains are programmed not to think of it that way, but if we do think of it that way all the mysteries of metaphysics dissolve into the transparency of a limpid pool.
Hi Osvaldo. The 'what' and 'where' pathways? It matters little to the 'where' pathway what is 'out there' in an objective sense. It's primarily searching or screening for anomalies within a spatial field…spatial movement with respect to 'what' is being concentrated on or 'what' is doing the concentrating (us!). Peripheral vision being an holistic type of attentional awareness that's operational in 'time now' and that we can't account for at present. These anomalies can be promoted to conscious attention of the 'what' pathway - via saccadic eye movement. The 'what' pathway is associated more with conscious intent in the world and how we manipulate the world. They are both (where and what) 'aware' states however running in parallel and mediated to support our immersion in the world. One 'implicit' and the other 'explicit'? As always I make this sound like all this is firmly established! It's just Vision-Space theory.
As far as I can make out reality is something we generate and mediate. Reality doesn't occur to a stone. That is not the same thing as saying that the stone is not real. The issue for the theorists you mention is that our visual system is fired up by electromagnetic radiation as is our brain and mind and we understand precious little about them, even what the retina is actually doing! Our visual system has evolved over a very long time scale providing us with an exceptional sense that's way in advance of our 'virtual' image making devices that have been put together very recently. I wouldn't swap my sense of vision with our current technologies for a second. It's actually high time we took some time to study the phenomenon of vision as it occurs to us and work out what's actually involved in an act of observation. We could then develop 'perceptual technologies'? www.pacentre.org
Both Heidegger and Hegel point out that self has two aspects – one is ‘the they’ which is the self that is the other; the other is what Heidegger calls Dasein. Perceiving according to Hegel reconciles these two aspects.
Looking now more specifically, Hegel points out that apprehending builds up a basic visual memory circuit which he calls the Here of all heres. Heidegger’s the they is truncated out of this. Dasein handles visual saccades through what Heidegger calls a caretaker. Perception is the harmonization of the initial object particularization with saccades as guided by Dasein and generated by the caretaker.
Perceiving uses pattern matching based in recognition. The process of recognition itself integrates into knowing; object binding is confirmed by reflection which is a truncation of knowing. The bound object becomes the foreground of perceiving in which Hegel’s Here of all heres (based on what has been apprehended since childhood) is the background. The deep background is the apophantic-hermeneutic parser which is controlled by Dasein and which reaches into the caretaker.
Hegel points out that perceiving is prone to deceptions. That is because it depends upon pattern-matching. I would imagine that perceiving of abstract modern art would access this pattern-matching in order to trick the mind into seeing things that are not there.
You can access a book-length line-by-line analysis of Hegel’s ‘Phenomenology of Mind’ as it describes the mind’s self-programming through initial self-certainty of apprehending into perceiving into understanding and finally into self-consciousness. The commentary is illustrated by circuit diagrams that are consistent also with Heidegger’s analysis in ‘Being and Time.’ It’s posted here on ResearchGate (rgdoi.net/10.13140/2.1.2350.4003) and can be downloaded – you’ll want to look in particular at the chapter on perceiving. What it says will make more sense if you analyze the sequential ways in which the various circuits interact and self-develop; you will see in particular that perceiving is an intermediate and somewhat vulnerable stage which could easily be exploited by abstract modern art. Good luck.
Paul, I've just written a short talk on Kandinsky which would profit, I am sure, from your work. Have you published anything on the perception of abstract art? Thanks, Jack
Jack, yes I have, see my book Fine Art and Perceptual Neuroscience: Field of Vision and the Painted Grid, Explorations in Cognitive Psychology Series, Psychology Press from last year. There I develop a model for understanding the perception and distortion of vision as related to abstract art. I also have two further books on this subject under contract.
I think the best general source is Rudolph Arnheim's "Art and Visual Perception." You might also try Ernst Gombrich, "The Sense of Order" (1979)--see Wikipedia for other seminal articles by Gombrich.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Gombrich
Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky have writtern about these issues in their famous article "Transparency" and although penned for an architectural audience, it has general points worth noting.
As contemporary references, I recommand the works of :
1) Jérôme Pelletier and Luca Ticini
2) Leder Helmut and Gernot Gerger
They are great studies including philosoophy and cognitive sciences.
I hope this will help you.
hi paul
read Aldous Huxley's ''The doors of perception'' , here are the supporting publications:
http://csp.org/docs/CDPexcerpts.pdf
http://www.drugtext.org/pdf/Psychedelics/culture-and-the-individual.pdf
This very relevant book on history of perception theories clarifies many topics which were and are still paramount in vision science
Nicholas Pastore. Selective History of Theories of Visual Perception 1650–1950. Oxford University Press, 1971
Very much a focus on vision and visual processes. The original question did not specify vision. There's no reason why abstract art in particular cannot have haptic (touch) aspects in particular, but also auditory elements etc. Would anyone care to reflect more on that?
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