[From Bill Powers (990928.0511 MDT)]
Paul Stokes (990927.2251 GMT)--
Nice to hear from you, Paul.
The commentary on my work that you posted is hardly worth replying to. It
isn't about my work, but about something the author somehow got out of
skimming my work plus what he/she imagined it was about. And the author
admits to basing the criticisms on a religion (born-again Gibsonian) rather
than science. If you really want your perceptions of the world to be
veridical, you can find arguments that will lead to that conclusion. But
that has nothing to do with PCT. We, too, assume perceptions to be
veridical, just to avoid being sucked into endless epistemological
arguments. Assuming physics and engineering to provide accurate models of
the world makes modeling the organism a lot easier, and generally such
models are successful. But that neither proves nor disproves the Gibsonian
position. In fact, I don't know how to prove or disprove that position; it
seems to be a choice guided by faith and hope, not evidence. And that's the
whole point of _my_ epistemology, which is agnostic.
Best,
Bill P.
···
Behaviour:the control of Perception. Perception the control of behaviour.
When Powers published his first book on perception and behaviour in the
early 1970s it achieved something of a succ�s de scandal among perception
psychologists, of whom there were somewhat fewer in those days. This was
considered a ground-breaking book. It is well written and authoritative. But
wrong (in our opinion at Psi international).At bottom it is a mechanical materialist approach. The bits and pieces of
the brain, it says, are the key to perception. Find all the bits and we
shall know what the brain does. It is a top-down attitude. Its freshness lay
in the idea that there was a link between behaviour and brain activity. That
perception existed to serve behaviour. Our attitude, which may loosely be
described as a "born-again Gibsonian" is that, like James Gibson, we believe
that perception and behaviour are neither separate nor separable.Gibson said, quite clearly, that although some extremely interesting work is
being done on discovering what parts of the brain are involved in the
perception at a given discrete moment there is no processing of input data
to achieve a "picture in the head" which is by some miraculous facility
projected onto the outside world. In this Gibson was somewhat more tolerant
than Jerry Fodor who in the latest issue of the London Review of Books
meditates on why the neuro-psychologists bother.There are processes in brain function, pathways which may be discretely
examined for example. We know that the LGN is one of the way-stations to the
occipital cortex. We know that some cells in the occipital cortex respond to
discrete inputs at the retinal receptors. What is rarely stated is that
something like 80% of the inputsto the occipitex are from inside the body
and only some 20% from the outside receptors. We are as far as ever from
understanding what happens to make visual perception of the outside world.If we continue to place our faith in examination of the bits and pieces, the
hard-wiring of the brain, we shall never obtain an understanding of the
nature and role of perception. How one thinks of perception will determine
how we interpret our thoughts and our behaviour. The downfall of the Soviet
Union was ultimately decided in 1905 when Lenin wrote his book, Materialism
and Empirio-criticism and departed from the dialectics of Marx and Engels.
Lenin followed Helmholtz in thinking of visual perception as a series of
"images or photographs" of which sense was made in the head. Marx had said,
much more profoundly, "When I see the candle on the table in front of me, it
is on the table and not in my head". By putting perception into the head in
a forerunner of the mechanical materialist approach of Powers, Gregory et
al, Lenin opened the way to a philosophy of ultimate correctness of
perception and hence of truth. "I perceive things more clearly than you, I
have an educated view, you have a distorted perception therefore you are
wrong. As I do not have the time to empty your head of worthless ideas I am
sending you to prison". An attitude to life which is now the foundation of
the crude philosophy of most of our leaders both politically and
commercially. All part of the Sovietisation of the world which we see
around us.Perception is neither in the head nor in the environment. It is the
specification of the state of the organism-in-environment closely coupled
system. It is open to experience but not to description. We can make an
attempt to describe it but it is never more than an approximation. Roughly
speaking when we say; "I see a table in front of me", what we are really
saying is "I am reporting on the state of my
retina-in-eyes-in-head-on-body-interaction-with-the structure-of-light-
relations- totality, as I move from one moment to another. Since we are as
unable to report this in any description of organic function terms we say "I
see" and since the experience is common we are understood. The words "I see"
might as well stand for "I am having a common experience but don't ask me to
describe it". If we are fortunate we do not experience any of the internal
processes, if we are unfortunate and subject to migraine we can get some way
to reporting what happens in different parts of the head as the system
malfunctions.Perception, as both Maturana and Gibson have stated quite clearly, is a
relational state of an active body-in-environment. Maturana has said, "The
individual receptors respond to specific quanta of light but the network
responds to relations between these receptors. The retina of the bird is
modified by light but the behaviour (the actual and potential actions) of
the bird is modified by the relations existing between relations. He terms
these relations "Pure relations". Gibson arrives at the same point from
another direction and calls the Pure Relations "Formless Invariants".Recent work in neuroscience shows that previous mechanical models derived
from human artefacts (water mills, steam engines, telephones, cameras,
videos, computers) are misleading in the extreme. This work shows that not
only does perception involve the neural network pathways classically
concerned with optical stimulation but also, heavily, the networks of more
wet-ware elements; enzymes, hormones, chemistry of proteins and all the wet
stuff flowing about in the body. The chemicals of the emotions are more the
determinant guide to action than the light at the retina.. This has been
known for some years. La Biologie des Passions by Jean-Didier Vincent, the
eminent professor of neurology at Bordeaux University was published in 1986.
Jaak Panksepp's books including his last one "Affective Neuroscience"
(reviewed in the Journal of Consciouness Studies June/July this year), have
made the point for many years that the lower brain organisations are more
determinant in decision making than they have been given credit for. The
lower organisations play a great role in guiding the direction in which the
organism spends its energy. A bottom-up phenomenon. This is something which
scientists in Latin countries have long worked on. The White Anglo-Saxon
Protestant mania with control has lead them in the direction of looking for
what can be controlled. The intellectual accompaniment to imperialism.For those looking for the correct analogy consider the following: The trail
motor-bike is a model of a horse. It needs feeding, it excretes, you sit on
a saddle and you direct it by pulling on the left or right handle (rein). A
perfect horse in that it can be left unattended for years even and still
function. Just don't train your veterinary surgeons on it.http://www.psy.co.uk
Psi INTERNATIONAL web site