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Originally Posted by Joe Durnavich
There may be some utility in labeling my view of perception as "direct," but my views don't fit into any of the traditional categories. The Wikipedia article on direct realism starts: "Direct realism is a theory of perception that claims that the senses provide us with direct awareness of the external world. In contrast, indirect realism and representationalism claim that we are directly aware only of internal representations of the external world. Idealism, on the other hand, asserts that no world exists apart from mind-dependent ideas.
These all have the inherent model of:
world ---> senses ---> my perception or awareness
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Well,
Wikipedia's not the ideal first stop for these things. The essence of direct realism is that we perceive the outer world directly, undistorted by subjective entities generated in our heads. "The senses" are just the most obvious way we might achieve that perception, but their function isn't particularly clear in direct realism.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Joe Durnavich
I disagree that there are such things as "senses" that stand apart and "provide me with awareness." What might those be in regards to vision: the eyes? V1? V2? V4?
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All of it. From retina to cortex.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Joe Durnavich
Take a tennis player returning a serve. That's the "substrate" here. To talk of vision is simply to talk of how available optical information was taken advantage of to successfully return the serve. She has to keep her eyes on the ball and continually position her body to be at the proper location by time the ball reaches her. She has to swing her racket at a particular angle and at a particular speed. There are all sorts of feedback loops comprised of her, the racket, the ball, and the light at work here. They are "guidance systems" that guide on optical information. (By "information" here, I mean "differences" however those may exist in the environment.)
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And yet you earlier seemed quite happy with the idea of training some neural network inside the head to recognize Halle Berry. So from the above, do I take it that you model the whole neural content of the tennis player's head as some elaborate neural network, responding in complex ways to the "optical information" in the world?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Joe Durnavich
Consider the dynamics in our tennis player serve-return example. Quadrillions of "states" occurred. None of them are inherently more relevant than the others. There is no one "brain state" that will explain the matter to us.
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No-one claims such a thing.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Joe Durnavich
In the wider, dynamic context, on the other hand, we may discover that repetitive practice conditions her to track the ball with the fovea of her eyes so that (1) she does not have to subtract out irrelevant background information, and (2) so that the retino-neuro-muscular system has a clean signal to track on in guiding the body to where the ball is going to be. In the dynamic view, that our vision is so gappy and incomplete is suddenly seen as an advantage, as a strategy nature employs to make the most of the resources available.
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Your "clean system" neglects the position of her opponent, the net, and the lines of the court, all of which are vital considerations. "Gappy and incomplete" become problematic, again.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Joe Durnavich
It's in the dynamic view where we seem to get our first foothold on the topic of perception.
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We've had our first, second and subsequent footholds on perception for many years.
Grant Hutchison