As indeed it is-- it's helpful for any discussion to have the occasional interjection of fact!

I wonder if say you cut a brain in half, waited a few years, then joined them back together. Far fetched now yes, but a lot of work is being done on trying to reconnect neurons and nerve fibers, with obvious implications for paralysis patients. This is just a thought experiment/rumination, pay it no heed if it has already bing discussed.

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But how will that help us solve the truly important questions in life?

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

As you do things today, take notice of your movements. Notice what others do as well. You will find yourself moving closer for a better look, squinting, maybe putting on glasses, tilting your head back to see through the lower lens of the bifocal, putting on sunglasses, turning on the lights, adjusting the brightness or contrast of your monitor. We don't think we see images, especially images created in the head. We think that what we see is in the environment.

Yes, the “both perspectives” is a key observation. That point is central to the thesis of the author I quoted, the quote that prompted our little sub-thread on perception. You can see a circular plate as circular even though from where you stand, the plate projects as an oval shape. You can then look at it as an artist does and suddenly see the plate is oval-shaped. In switching from one perspective to another, such that the plate looks round and then looks oval-shaped, the plate itself does not appear to change before your eyes. That would look like movement or shape-shifting in the plate, but you see nothing but a stable plate that you may be moving in relation to. Philosophical notions of “images,” image alteration, or “brain representations” just don't help us here.

The alternate theory the authors propose is that the information that the plate is both actually circular and that it is oval-shaped from given viewing angles is present in the ambient optic array, that is, the patterned radiation that converges on your position. They suggest that you are directly sensitive to this higher-order information. In seeing the plate one way and then another, you don't generate new images or representations, rather, you attend to or act on one set of information in the environment instead of another.

To understand the alternate view, replace “we need to have an invariant representation” with something like “the ambient information available from cars coming from the left and from cars coming from the right contains invariants that our actions need to be sensitive of and responsive to.” You may want to think that any theory of perception must have a representation in the brain, but since you are one physical system with the environment, any necessary representation can stay in the environment and you can connect to it through light waves, sound waves, etc.

In the spirit of the preceding discussion, you don't have to scale the person up. You can see that a distant person is a tall person (if you had to describe him to the police, say), yet you can also see him as tiny (if you were photographing him and didn't want him too small in the frame, say). The information for both perspectives is available in the environment. (The mechanics of this may involve the small field of view of your fovea and the extent of the scene that you scan with your eyes. It may also involve the way the optical stimulus changes as you move your eyes, head, or body.)

Let me add to this by pointing out how everything in your examples here consist of relating one thing you find in the environment (the sun) to other things you find the environment (a basketball). That's why I keep insisting that any theories of consciousness include the environment, our selves, and the way we live in the environment.

In another thread, I mentioned a blind person who painted pictures in reasonably accurate perspective:

What do the blind see?

There is some physiology behind this, however. The blood vessels near the skin's surface dilate or constrict to radiate or retain heat. Nerves, that I believe are normally involved in the sense of touch, are sensitive to changes in blood vessel size. In effect, we respond to heat inflows or outflows.

Excellent point. The things we find in the environment, and their relevance to our lives, is a sound basis for understanding perception. You are doing a wonderful job illustrating the authors' point that: "...the proper subject of perception is not the brain, but rather the whole embodied animal interacting with its environment."

If that is so, then what is the proper object? It sounds like the author is using "subject" in its subject/object meaning, rather than the "general topic" meaning of "subject", but if so the argument is logically flawed, for one cannot use the concept of a subject in that sense without also using the concept of an object. It seems to me the actual thing this author is doing is saying that there is no value in distinguishing a "subject" from an "object" of perception, a view I find highly unconvincing in light of the simple fact that we daily derive enormous advantage from that very perspective. If instead the author was merely pointing out that a subject/object dichotomy introduces limitations that we may not wish to always labor under, then it seems a valid enough claim but also not terribly surprising or enlightening by itself. The point is, all arguments of this nature should be made like "here is how you benefit from relaxing the subject/object dichotomy in this particular situation", not "this is the proper way to think about it, even though we don't usually."

It's the latter meaning, as in "here is a better approach to studying perception."

Here's the context leading up to it. The personal/subpersonal distinction distinguishes between two different forms of explanation. Subpersonal explanations explain in terms of, say, neural activity.

http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~noe/FillingIn.pdf

It still isn't clear the work he expects to be getting from the word "subject". I think he is using "subject" to mean "that which is doing the perceiving", or the "location where perception is said to occur", not to mean the "topic" of perception. The latter meaning would force the statement to be grammatically incorrect, as in "the proper topic of perception is the animal interacting with its environment", but an animal is not a topic. He seems to be saying that the agent of perception is the animal but the perception "properly" occurs in the interaction of the agent with the environment, where "interaction" means something more than "detecting light". I still see that as one way to slice the issue, but by no means the "proper" way, nor the way that is used to define the basic language of perception.

They wouldn't be the first scientists to make a mess of grammar; it's just a shame it occurs when they're trying to make what they seem to see as a pivotal point.
From background knowledge of Noë, I think Joe Durnavich's interpretation is likely to be correct: I believe they're trying to say "... the proper subject for the study of perception is not the brain, but rather the whole embodied animal interacting with its environment."
Of course, when you write it like that, the flaw in the logic is clear: the proper subject for the study of perception is ... um, well, perception of course, in all its manifestations and mechanisms, not some selected subset thereof.

Grant Hutchison

Yeah, I can't say I like it either way, but I think I see a valid point that he might have been making-- to give the benefit of the doubt: that we cannot fully understand why the brain does what it does, in regard to perception, until we understand why it is doing it, in regard to the interaction with the environment. In other words, if our bodies interacted only ephemerally with our surroundings, able to see light but not interact in any other way, then it seems likely the brain would do different things with that input, if indeed anything at all. So we couple "what is perception" with "why perceive". An analogy might be that it would be hard to learn the technique of playing the violin without understanding the reaction of the audience to the sounds it makes, but I'd stop short of saying "the proper way to study the subject of violin-playing technique is to look at how the violin player interacts with her audience". Surely there is also a useful way of looking at the process as the physics of violin strings when you pluck them, or the way you yourself internally perceive the sounds you make when you do various things with the instrument. The external-interaction picture might be more relevant to how a deaf person learns how to play a violin!

Ken, it boils down to this: the quoted text distinguishes between representational and non-representational approaches to explaining perception. The authors favor a non-representational approach. And if I understand how the academic world works, "proper" means "the grant money should be awarded to."

Although the Gibson quote uses it, the notion of perception occurring anywhere might be too misleading for understanding their viewpoint. What happens in the world is something like a bat chases and catches a mosquito, or you walk up to the mailbox and drop in the letter. They would say that to talk about perception is to talk about those achievements. Traditional representational views tend to talk in terms of representations the brain supposedly creates to "generate perceptions" or somesuch. They argue that positing representations still leaves the problem of vision unexplained and suggest expanding the subject of study to encompass the animal interacting with the environment.

Deaf people tend not to play musical instruments, which shows the importance of sound in the feedback loop consisting of the musician, the instrument, and perhaps the orchestra, the group, the audience or the musical instructor.

I'm quite tone deaf. If you play two notes close together on the scale, I am not always able to tell them apart or tell which is the higher note. Perception is an ability to tell things apart, and the skill to discriminate one note from another is often beyond my reach. I took a year of guitar lessons as a teen and it didn't help. I would often tune a guitar by listening to the beats between two strings that were getting close to being in tune with each other.

My point is that such a "feedback loop" is also possible for a deaf person-- they merely have to look at the expressions on others' faces as they play in a certain way. The "non-representational" approach to learning violin must view these on an equal footing to actually listening to the instrument, as actually hearing the notes is "representational". The analogy is intended to show the flaw in restricting to non-representational descriptions, in the same way that a deaf musician would likely never accomplish the levels of one with hearing.
No wonder you favor "non-representational" approaches to perception!

No, that is a common misconception. The patterns of information flow between musician and audience is of a different character than between musician and instrument. The musician will not respond the same way, either with the subtle muscle movements required to intonate and play in rhythm or with any of the emotional responses people tend to have towards music.

Yes, you are setting up a variant of the "Mary the color scientist" thought experiment. I take it that you are suggesting that there is a key element to music experience that a non-representational approach could never come in contact with, but that a representational approach naturally provides.

That is our intuition, but it is not very rigorous. The thought experiment when presented as an argument is circular in that it assumes the existence of that which is in question. A "representation" doesn't really explain anything either. It is like blaming all illnesses on "toxins" in the body. Toxins may explain some illnesses like poisoning, but scientists should be wary of explanations positing singular entities that necessarily and sufficiently cause and explain the effect in question.

I still love music. I guess you could say I'm a partial tone-zombie. A representationalist would say that I am missing some tone representations inside of me. That makes no sense to me. My impression is that I hear the strings of the guitar being plucked. I can hear the timber of the note change because the effective length of the string has changed and the relative intensities of the harmonics have changed. I just can't reliably tell the two apart in terms of the property of pitch.

There is an analogy that comes to mind. As kids we discovered that we could put pennies on a train track, let a train squash them, and then use them in lieu of quarters at a pinball machine. We could say that the pinball machine could not tell quarters and squashed pennies apart. But there is no need for a representational quarter to explain why that is so. The pinball machine does not need to generate an inner quarter that it responds to with credits for a pinball game. The machine simply lacks the means to distinguish the two coins. It provides credits for either coin.

I would expect it's obvious that such "patterns" are different, the issue is what is representational and what is non-representational. A deaf person can do all the things you listed. It seems that the way the terms are used, representational means you listen to the sounds and form some kind of mental picture of what those sounds are, an activity that seems the key discriminant between deaf and hearing people, and a crucial element of making good music. Do you not see how awkward and clunky ti would be to distinguish a deaf from a hearing musician if we are limited to non-representational analyses of hwo they interact with their environment only? Consider Beethoven-- after he became deaf, did he use a non-representational approach to composing, or did he rely more on his memory of a representational relationship with the actual sounds? Why would we hamstring ourselves by requiring that we analyze Beethoven's composing style in a purely non-representational way, involving how he interacts with his environment instead of what mental pictures of the sounds he forms as he composes?

Exactly.
It does nothing of the sort, it merely contrasts the values of representational and non-representational analyses of a person composing music.It explains the way a composer forms a mental picture of the music she is creating. I expect many good composers can "hear" the music in their heads before they play it on any instrument. A non-representational approach would completely miss this crucial element, or it would be pretending to be something other than what it was (a representational approach).
No, no one said anything about all illnesses, it would be like saying that the "proper" way to approach curing an illness is to evaluate the patient's interactions with their environment, rather than attacking the toxins present. That's the "non-representational" approach to medicine, but I'm not going to that doctor.
My guess is they would simply say your form different representations, which is pretty much just what you described when you said you form a mental image of the strings being plucked. You are a differently-abled music appreciator, shall we analyze that by examining the differences in the representations you form, or the differences in your facial expressions and other behavior while you are listening to music? I still see value in both approaches, and I see the representational approach as being central to the definition of most of the vocabulary we use.
I would agree that non-representational approaches are going to be more successful for studying pinball machines!

Indeed. Mozart would compose orchestral works while travelling long distances by coach. Because of the motion of the coach, he could neither write the music nor play it at the time of composition: he just wrote the whole piece down at the end of his journey.
(He also famously heard Allegri's Miserere once through and then jotted down the entire score, which up to that time had been kept a secret by the Vatican.)

Grant Hutchison