I note that Bill Powers' remarks on my posting to this list are less
acerbic
than Mary Powers. However, since I would imagine that I am the list member
referred to in his comments by stating that "at least one member of the
complexity list seems to find it boring to consider how the "bits and
pieces" of the brain relate to perception, yawn, yawn". I have to say that
my first reaction to this was to reply equally dismissively. However I will
just say that having spent a considerable portion of my life dealing with
people with defined lesions and consequent disabilities I have a great
interest in how these, what I unfortunately called "bits and pieces",
actually do distort behaviour. AND HENCE PERCEPTION.
I will merely reiterate to Powers that my view of his book Behaviour: The
control of Perception was favourable in the fact that it was a seminal
break
from previous arguments.
That Powers cannot understand that his approach should be rejected is his
problem not mine. He says that he takes the stand of a physical scientist
and engineer. That is a valid approach if one is trying to build a machine
which can simulate perception in that its behaviour modifies its internal
model/programmes, stores incoming data, corrects this data on further
inputs
and continually tests its models by behaving in the real world and again
updating and so on. This is the same model essentially as that of Richard
Gregory. There is no reason at all why such a machine should not work and
appear to be a perfect model of perception and behaviour in its operation
as
specified by an observer. It is just not how biological perception works.
Perception is being in the world. What the human perceives is the result of
evolution and is adequate and trustworthy for a specific animal in its
given
niche. Bees and dragonflies, toads and hedgehogs and horse perceive very
well in their niche. Perception is a resonance phenomenon of the total
organism. that there are processes involved in this and that there are
feedback mechanisms etc in the functioning of the system is not in doubt.
But the processes do not produce images in the human machine control system
inside the head. Perception is the behaving in the real world and that is
the only one we have. That there are aspects of reality which are beyond
our
organic perceptual systems is not in doubt. Reality is much, much, bigger.
What we have done as humans is to make machined which an produce images
for
us as if they constituted reality. We cannot see the far off galaxies and
structures which make up our universe. No astronomer has ever seen what
radio waves convey until they are made into images. We look with amazement
at pictures of far distant entities and believe we are seeing the thing
itself. Humanity has always investigated the invisible and made more and
more instruments to do so. Our niche expands as we do so. We have made
prostheses to enable us to expand our reality but this will never cease.
Our
hypotheses are tested in reality, Gregory is correct in this; but these are
the hypotheses of cognition and not of perception. I do not expect for one
moment that Powers will even contemplate this alternative view since to him
it would seem that engineering is the only answer. I would merely say that
I
···
-----Original Message-----
From: kim <kim@PSY.CO.UK>
To: COMPLEX-M@HOME.EASE.LSOFT.COM <COMPLEX-M@HOME.EASE.LSOFT.COM>
Date: 10 October 1999 16:48
Subject: [COMPLEX-M] Engineering Perception
am as scientific as he ever has been. Just that my starting point and end
point are different.kim@psy.co.uk
http://www.psy.co.uk
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