Consciousness
1) Ned Block comments parenthetically that if we are Turing Machines then part of our tape is the external world (Block, Ned. “Troubles With Functionalism” in The Nature of Mind, David Rosenthal ed.). This hint will lead us to see that we are Turing machines indeed, but with a twist and it will resolve many of the paradoxical aspects of our concept of perception and consciousness.
2) Let us then introduce the notion of a NTM (Non-symbolic Turing Machine). A NTM is a Turing machine with a 'head' which, instead of being a read/write machine governed by a set of rules ,is now a Turing machine with a head which, instead, using pattern recognition, responds to what we call objects and situations - as well as to symbols in the conventional way. The 'write' part of the head is replaced by any part of the human body which can modify the world around it. This broadened conception of the head means that the read/write head is now expanded to include the whole human body. Finally the 'tape' of the Non-symbolic Turing Machine is the world: the world is what the new head reads, it is the tape to which it writes.
3) While the classical Turing Machine has a tape and, on the tape, symbols, by contrast, our tape includes anything in the world, and anything which we could recognize with pattern recognition - whether or not the thing is a symbol. A NTM's tape has things on it which we conceptualize as material objects in their relations to each other. We ( a member of homo sapiens) are then not inourselves a Turing machine but only read/write heads scurrying across the world, sharing the same tape.
4) And these 'heads' are on the tape they read.
5) Needless to say the tape also includes anything inside our body. We can regard ourselves as machines which replace the act of moving the tape with movement over the tape, roaming the world we read and write to that world - by picking a flower, making a speech, typing, etc..
6) Objection: “The Turing machine which we are, only has something on its tape if it has been read and if the imprint of the reading has reached our central nervous system. Hence the real world is not literally on the tape, rather only the neural impressions which it creates in us as we observe the world.” Ans.: We can be seen as a read/write heads which have the world as part of their tape, that we consist of a roaming r/w head in the strict sense of the term. Our tape is the world over which we roam. It is tempting to think that we can only operate on something if it is actually in the read/write head, but this misunderstands a Turing machine. Of course a tape is part of any Turing machine and part of it can be in the r/w head, but part of it can be ‘outside’ the head such that almost all of it is not being read at any moment. Hence then, in a NTM we are part of our tape, as part of the world, and that world is not outside the head since the head is itself part of the world.
7) But now we can go further: the tape of a Turing Machine is part of the machine, hence we need to consider the implications of now accepting that the world which I observe must be considered a part of me. And first, that things I see do not have to be brought to/into me. They can't be brought in. The world being part of me it follows that everything in the world is a part of me already - and of you.
8) “Where and how does the yellow of the flower get created in me at the end of the causal chain?” is evidently an inappropriate question. The object examined by a NTM is in the NTM already, was there before it was read - as are all the object's properties. Speaking literally the NTM has the flower as part of itself and that part of the NTM is yellow.
9) On this extended account of Turing Machines we can now say that to see yellow is to be in an internal relation which has parts of ourselves as its relata, it involves seeing the world exactly as it is, and we must conceptualize all the world as within each NTM. This is simple conception of what constitutes our body thus deals with the issues of perception and consciousness. One implication is that there is no inside or outside world relative to an NTM and further that our bodies (newspeak) overlap – like conjoined twins. We therefore see the same flower, indeed, it is part of both of us.
10) Now, such a Turing machine which has the world on its tape (as well as symbols) can have itself and all its activities on its tape - as well as all the contents of its read/write head (our body including the brain). This explains how it is that we are conscious. Let us understand that the essence of a conscious being is that it be both the observer and the observed, then if all my activities are activities of a NTM and I am on my own tape, I am conscious. Indeed, these terms (observer and observed) become paradoxical concepts since in the conventional sense they refer to different things. Newly understood consciousness becomes such that 'being conscious of the world' in the conventional sense is no longer possible. Perception becomes an interesting relation between parts of ourselves which in no way involves bringing the world into ourselves. We no longer have to bring in an essence, or an image, or a phenomenal experience, or a symbol, or whaterver to explain perception. And we can be observer and observed, conscious.
10) Can an NTM be in the same relation to the world as another? No, at any moment the NTM is made distinct by the location of the location of its r/w head. in the (shared) world.
Monday, March 30, 2009
Saturday, December 6, 2008
A New Theory of Vision: Looks as Natural Signs
In the philosophy of mind the central question has to do with consciousness, in particular, how we can have so-called ‘phenomenal experiences’ associated with sensation.
In what follows I argue that there are no mental events involved in perception.
The first part of the argument rejects Platonic Looks, the idea that for each physical object there is a right way for it to look. The way things look, I argue, is relative to circumstances.
The second stage argues that looks are not in the mind. I argue that the way something looks is a purely physical fact about that thing.
The third part of the argument is that the accepted theory of vision is in error and that, given the relativity and physicality of the way things look, we now need a new theory of vision.
The fourth stage offers a new theory of vision. It argues that in order to look at anything outside ourselves we must also be looking at our own internal states. This is the key element for a new theory of vision and perception generally.
4) Indeed, if we take seriously this popular account, then the brain must be somehow capable of producing the seeing all by itself – a truly miraculous event. That is, by accepting the account, we are led to accept that the brain, without any of the prior links, must still somehow be capable of creating the last link – create the very experience itself of actually seeing a real thing outside our body. Why it's Extra-Sensory perception! This, of course, flies in the face of the simple evidence that if there is no stick then there could not have been the seeing of it – however great and miraculous the causal powers of the brain. Shall we then claim to be capable of experiencing non-existent sticks? Oh, why not. The initial poison of the brain’s ‘special powers’ soon infects the whole, and science is left shaking it’s head.
5) We must therefore reject the view that the “seeing of the stick” is this final event which we have appended to the physical chain of events. We must substitute the simple proposal that the seeing refers to the whole chain of physical events from stick to brain, and no more than that. The proof of all this lies in the familiar fact that the non-existence of the stick is evidence enough, all by itself, that a stick was not seen – whatever the opinion of the observer. This simple reflection puts the lie to the idea of a clever brain somehow managing to create the experience of seeing just on its own.
6) If this is right then there is no single special event which can be called “the seeing of the stick” and we shall have to accept that there is no causal chain 'leading up' to the seeing of the stick. We will have to root out the belief that the seeing of the stick is a mysterious final event which only starts at some point after the purely physical. That is just to say that we are not separate from physical reality.
7) Now, the whole physical series of events only takes a tiny fraction of a second so it is really not surprising that we think it all happens inside us. Compounding these problems is the fact that language and experience combine to make us believe that seeing is something which we do and which happens as a ‘mental event’ after the physical events, still we must reject this view and accept that the truth that much of what is logically essential to the seeing must happen well before we are even involved. There has to be a stick or it was not seen. There has to be light or some other means of conveying the information. And this way of thinking and talking is necessary if we want our judgments resulting from the seeing to be about external reality.
8) Of course we do easily have a spooky sense that the process of seeing conceived as a mental event refers to events and states of affairs outside itself, to states of affairs outside the observer, to something not a part of the process of seeing. For, we are taught to judge that the seeing begins after the stick is no longer involved. Then, of course, we wonder how this stick could turn out to be so essential to a process in which it is not even involved! Philosophers dub this embarrassing situation the ‘intentionality’ of seeing and, predictably, can find no explanation in the facts. Having removed the object seen from the events of seeing, they find themselves forced to reintroduce it through the totally mysterious connection of ‘intentionality’. The solution proposed here is to understand that seeing the stick, for example, does not begin inside us, it begins outside us, with the stick. Intentionality is required only to repair the damage done when we insist that seeing is something which we do internally with our special powers.
9) Seeing encompasses both our bodies and events outside ourselves, and events outside ourselves are a logical requirement which we, given our need to know the external world, do place upon any description of the events as ‘seeing’. Seeing is done by our bodies and by bodies outside ourselves. Understanding this there should be no further temptation to talk of ‘intentionality’. We need to conceive of a seamless series of events beginning outside ourselves and ending with brain events. We can discard the notion that seeing happens in our head and that it must then involve a spooky loop back to the outside world. We need to accept that we must include the outside world in the seeing.
10) Intentionality, of course, is just odd enough so that it was once thought to be the very essence, a quintessential mark of the mental (see Brentano, Meinong). What’s being suggested here is that reflection on the chain of events which is the seeing should not lead us to think that the brain makes up or creates the experience of seeing, nor to believe that that there is some special causal power in the human brain to achieve this, nor to think that intentionality is required to cover a 'gap' between the observer and the observed. There is no gap: we are a continuation of the external physical world.
11) Brilliant Objection: “But the brain could create all that I experience entirely without there being a stick – as in an hallucination.” Well, no, it can’t. What will be shown in the next chapter is that even during an hallucination one is still looking at a physical object, one which must look exactly like an instance of whatever is being hallucinated. There will be no further comfort for the mysterians in hallucinations.
Part 4
1) “When I’m looking at a tree I’m looking at something out there, certainly.”
2) Yes, no doubt about that: no trees inside us. On the other hand, let’s ask how we know what it is that we’re looking at. What we’re asking for here is a simple scientific answer, one to replace intuitions, an answer which will replace the philosophers’ appeal to introspection and intentionality.
3) “I just know what I’m looking at.” says the sensible person as their hand shoots out pointing to the tree.
4) But if we were challenged, could we give evidence that we are looking at something in particular rather than another thing? Actually, we can - and we do on occasion. Suppose I’m in doubt whether I’m looking at a stick. I reach out, and see if it is seen to move when I touch it, feel it, and move it. If the change in the way it looks correlates with the way my touch suggests it is moving then that correlated change shows it is the stick that I’m seeing. Mill’s Methods.
5) The rationale for such a test is the following. Given what has been said already, we can be sure that what we are looking at is a partial cause of the way things look, and there are well established ways of finding out the cause of an event or series of events – Mill’s Methods. Therefore in the case of the events involved in seeing those causes must be discoverable by precisely such methods. More generally, and still speaking roughly, we can find out what we’re looking at, by testing to find which thing, when modified, modifies the way things look. Had philosophers used some such criterion in the past we would now have quite a different theory of vision.
6) Now in the past, certainly for thousands of years, it has been assumed that the primary function of our the eyes was to tell us where to feed, find mates, hide, etc. and all these were questions about the external world. Eyes were ‘for’ seeing the world outside us. Well, we now know that eyes were not designed and have no proper purpose or use. And the idea that the external world has a monopoly over vision can now be questioned. And what will be shown below is that in seeing the external world we must be seeing much more than just the world beyond our bodies. Since the causes of seeing are in both the external physical world and the internal physical world, there are many more things being seen than was ever imagined before. In the expanded list of causes due to modern neurology there is an expanded list of what can be seen by normal eyes and what is always being seen though no one would have guessed it even a hundred years ago.
7) Using Mill’s methods it turns out that we are seeing not one but many distinct things when we see the tree. Aristotle noticed that the look of things was modified when we tap our eye. But with our knowledge of light and the physiology of vision we can go much further. We know that if you modify the nature of the light coming from the object, or carefully modify the details of the structure of the retina, that things can be made to look differently down to the minutest detail And the look of things will also be modified if you modify the optic nerve, or parts of the brain. We know that these physical realities, the light, the retina, the optic nerve and the brain are causes of the way things look, causes of every detail seen. The proof is that a modification of each of these can be found which will be found to affect any desired change in the way things look – and vice versa. I shall argue below that when we see the tree we are seeing these things as well. When we look at the stick we look at much, much more than just the stick: we see the light, the retina, the optic nerve and the brain.
8) Obj.: “We are not seeing the retina, for heaven’s sake, the retina doesn’t look like a tree, nor are we seeing the optic nerve, nor any part of the brain. They don’t look like bloody trees, none of them do.”
Ans.: Return to the first chapter, we asked how should something look? That’s the issue here. Is there really a way that retinas should look, must look, or, more to this point, can’t look? There is not and there is no right look to anything. Now, using Mill’s Methods it is clear that the retina is a cause of what we are seeing, hence is one of the things being looked at. It is only a matter of getting used to the idea that the retina, like everything else in the external world, has many ways it can look, and some of those looks are the same as the way a tree sometimes looks. Think of a mirror: looked at the right way it looks the way things around it look. Indeed, we talk of seeing things in a mirror and since we are seeing the mirror it follows that we are seeing the mirror and the things ‘in’ it. Do we not assure someone that we can see them in the mirror? A periscope in war-time: how do we test that we see the ship in the distance, that is, that the periscope works?
9) This conclusion, that when we see the tree we are in fact seeing the light, the retina, the optic nerve, and parts of our brain, I will call penetration: the same look penetrates, so to speak, the whole chain of entities involved in the perception.
10) “Why have we not noticed this before?” Because in the past such knowledge was of no use in our survival. There was little or no ability to profit from our ability to understand the role of light, or to see interior states of our body.
11) Here’s the argument that we are seeing our own internal states in the very act of seeing a tree. :
By modifying small parts of the retina we discover that every part of the look of the tree can be modified, hence we conclude on massive evidence (considering the number of 'pixils' in an everage retina) that we are looking at the retina. That is, we find that when we modify the retina we modify the way things look - and this in exquisite detail. It follows that we are looking at the retina and that, further, the look of the retina is one shared with the look of the tree - since, of course, modification of the tree would show that it too is being looked at and that the look we are enjoying is the look of the tree.
Similar arguments apply to cross-sections of the optic nerve and parts of our brain having a causal relation to the look of things.
By noticing the effect on the look of things of changes to the retina we can then go in a number of directions. By correlating the look which the opthalmologist gets when she examines the functioning eye, we can learn to infer what the eye will look like to her and then we could learn to infer what the look is which the person is enjoying as she examines the eye. We will learn to infer some of the the states of the brain based on what the she sees. An optometrist’s use of the test chart is enough to suggest all this. After all, by your telling her what you see at the location on the chart (the one she points to) she infers the state of your eyes before examining them and can even manage pinpoint the minute details of musculature of the eye which are malfunctioning.
But leaving aside these further inferences, the important part for us here is that since modifications of the retina do cause modifications of what we see it follows that we are looking at the retina and it should then come as no surprise that one can tell the state of the retina must be given a knowledge of what is being looked at in the external world, and also infer the state of the optic nerve and the some parts of the brain. Such inferences are now easily understood.
12) The objection to the Learning Argument: While we can infer the outside entity from the state of the retina, and vice versa, neverthless, it’s just a matter of inference, not of real seeing. When I see a tree I don’t infer that it is a tree, I see that it is a tree.
Ans.: No, in time, we learn that the retina has the same look as the tree, just as we learn that the mirror can have the same look as what is behind us, or that what I see through the lenses of my glasses is the way the outside world looks to someone with 20/20 vision, I don't have to infer these things once the situation is understood. I see the retina when I see the tree, just as I can see what is behind me when I look in the mirror. No inferences are required once the point is made.
13) It’s curious to think that the way the tree looks is also literally the way the retina is looking. Odder still, that it is the way the nerve actually looks when the tree is observed. Odd because, after all, if we looked at the nerve the way a surgeon does it wouldn’t look like a tree. We’re sure a nerve looks like a little white worm, slippery and all too happy to retract into the flesh. But that fixation about how a nerve looks relies on the idea of Platonic Looks, the idea that there is one proper way that a nerve or anything else should look. But given penetration, it is now open to us to accept that we actually can see the retina in two ways, first by examining it in the familiar way we examine other external objects – the way a surgeon might. Then there is a second way, namely, by realizing that we actually see retina as we see the outside world. Obviously these two methods result in two very different ways in which the retina looks. This is not surprising since looking at things in different ways always results in an object presenting, looking, very different. Compare seeing something with eyes alone with seeing it under a magnifying glass, in a fog, or in the distance, or in black and white or in a mirror.
14) We don’t learn to infer what the retina looks like by our studies, we learn that we are seeing the retina. The look of the tree is the look of the retina. If there is inference it is from the look of the outside world to the look which the retina presents to a surgeon. But there is no inference needed for us to see the look of the retina in the case in question: we see it immediately when we are seeing the tree. For, in this instance, retina and tree have one and the same look.
15) We can try to explain by saying that the way one thing looks does actually show us a second thing, we get to see the second thing, hence we see that second thing in seeing the first - even though our eyes may not be, as we say, directed towards it. Roughly speaking, if by looking at X we get masses of detailed information about something Y then that something is one of the things which we are seeing – among other things. Of course, the issue between merely getting some information and actually seeing when we look at ‘something’, reduces, in practice, to the question how much we demand in talk of ‘masses of information’: how much information do we need to gain before we can conclude that we are seeing. At some point we do convert from saying that we are getting some information to saying that we are actually seeing it.
16) Does a digital print-out of a photograph give us the look of a thing scanned? We would say no, but how about the reconstructed image produced from the information alone! That, yes, we do see it when the info is used to make a picture. But someone might become skilled at seeing the picture in the data – without the intervention of a CD player or whatever. Might we learn to see a landscape in a map? Did Aquinas really know what a text said without sounding it out first? Now we know he did but, in his time it, his ability to read in silence was considered miraculous. Language for them had to be an auditory experience as well as visual, while for him it became … simply visual. Words have two looks, the sonic look precedes the visual. The case of music written and played offers the similar lesson. One learns to 'read' music and hear what it would sound like played this way or that and on one instrument or another.
17) Obj.: “No these aren’t cases of looking at anything. We can’t be looking at something which is not in our field of vision. You can’t talk of looking at nerves, nor can we be looking at anything, if it is not illuminated by light, as is the case where you claim to be looking at your brain. We are not talking about looking unless the thing is being looked at directly, in light.”
18) Ans.: But there’s nothing original about the idea of seeing without light, or without having to point our eyes at the thing being seen. Many who are familiar with recent science have already understood that we can, at least in theory, give someone vision by sending the right electrical signals directly into the optic nerves so that the patient will achieve vision without the light ever striking their eyes and whether or not their eyes are directed towards the object. We can now do as much for sound using cochlear implants where none of the air vibrations need to reach the ear itself. In general we should accept that the business of determining exactly how we see is an empirical business, if for no better reason than we need the best possible science of the senses. We do the experiments and we find out the truth about what we are looking at and we then determine carefully what the circumstances are under which things can be seen. Certainly we do not block this study merely because it brings results which surprise us. We learned to accept that we could see people in mirrors even though the persons were behind us and our eyes directed forwards, and that we could see them through rigid physical objects (glass), see them even on television even though they were in another room and none of the light from them could reach our eyes. We can see people in complete darkness using infra-red. So it is only a question whether the phenomenon actually happens or not. Do we get masses of information about something by looking? If so then we are seeing it.
19) I am by now well used to the fascinating thought, and simple truth, that when I look at the world I am also looking at my brain. There is really no difficulty in accepting that when we see the world a part of our brain must look like the world. The upshot is that from experience and training we could soon get knowledge of the brain based on how and what we see. It is common place to suppose that the brain contains some kind of a map of the world around us and that the map contains everything we know about that scene. Well, the next thing is to see that it’s not a map, the brain can look exactly the way the outside world looks. Lucretius was right (though the moderns scorn him) that there is a simulacrum involved in perception.
20) The upshot of all this for the philosophy of mind is that no matter how odd things look we can always rely on there being something, a physical object, something we might touch, which is being seen. So this is the answer to the issues raised by hallucinations. It will turn out that when we hallucinate what we are seeing is parts (or a collection of parts) of our brain that do look like external objects, look like a spider, even though there is no spider, and the same must be the case when we are dreaming. In general, no matter what the look in question, we have no reason not to believe that it is the look of something or other, if not external, then internal. The suggestion here is that there no looks unless they are the look of something. To put it another way, there are no hallucinations, after images, illusions, etc.. it is always just a matter of determining what it is that we are looking at. We can be sure that we are looking at something. This is the reliable way for explaining what we see. We do not see a ‘mental’ spider when we hallucinate, what we are in fact seeing is part of the brain, perhaps events on the retina. Imagining is not a case of making up a non-physical reality.
21) Kirk’s objection: Surely the criterion for what we are looking at is too liberal. If I come up behind you and shake your chair that will certainly change the look of things for you but you won’t want to say that you are, just for that, looking at me.” Kirk is right, being the cause of a modification in the look of things look is not enough to justify saying we are looking at that thing. It is necessary but not sufficient. We shall have to require, in addition, that we can also learn masses of information about the thing or whatever is causing the modification in the way things look at the time the look is affected. These requirements are met in the case of the optic nerve but not in the case of someone shaking my chair. I can’t infer the way Kirk looks from the fact he (someone) is shaking my chair.
22) Much study is needed to discover what we are looking at – certainly not all of the brain, for example. There will be considerable fine tuning based on empirical methods as we slowly discover how much we can learn of any particular cause from the effect it has in the way things look – and we shall have to see how the language use settles in. Many, of course, will balk at saying that we can see our brain – just as they balked against the idea of having seen someone merely because they were seen on TV. Yet, slowly, such a way of talking - that we ‘see’ people on television - seems to have been adopted. Only experience will show how we find it convenient to parse the various contexts and packages of information. I feel sure that if our ability to see the state of our brain turns out to have medical uses then the language will adjust with great alacrity. Despite Wittgenstein we must ask not just what the use of a piece of language is, but what the use could be.
23) Together, the three aspects of the look of things, namely, relativity, penetration and veridity, have the effect of introducing a new theory of vision.
Part 5
We should conceive of seeing rather differently, as follows.
A) We should not think of seeing as something we do alone. We need either to take an externalist view of seeing or we can expand the definition of the human body to include the thing seen while it is being seen. In either case seeing becomes akin to eating.
B) We need to give up the idea that certain looks of a thing, looks which cause us to make mistakes, are somehow deficient and that the experience of them is therefore not an experience of reality. We need to accept that all of the ways a thing looks are veridic notwithstanding a tendency to mistake them. Here our theory of vision would evolve in the way our view of nature evolved as we learned to reject descriptions of some parts of nature as 'bad' merely because we were threatened by them.
C) Accepting all looks as veridic means that we reject the metaphysical credentials of 'illusions', 'hallucinations', 'mirages', after-images'. The argument in the past has been that since such experiences are experiences of something which does not exist, hence such experiences must be of non-physical events, namely, mental events. We can now substitute the view that such experiences are experiences of internal events which do exist. This final move is akin to that which we have made with respect to insanity: what is wrong with the insane, we think, is not that they live in an unreal world but that their very real brain is taking a larger causal role in the shaping of behavior than is normal.
E) We need to think of the thing seen as having a purely abstract description and is such that it can only be attributed with having properties like color, taste, odour, etc. when facts about the circumstances of perception are added to the description. Seeing has to be understood abstractly as well, perhaps as any system for obtaining masses of information about an object through the use of eyes, or the use of any instrument which supplies the same kind of information normally supplied by the eyes – perhaps assisted by various technologies (glasses, mirrors, periscopes, TV’s, x-rays, MRI’s, fluorescent proteins, particle colliders, etc.) . That is, systems which allow us to see things which we formerly deemed invisible.
Part 6
Objection 1) "But then how do we recognize an object? Surely we can only recognize something by vision if we know what it looks like. So there must be paradigms, there must be ways a thing should look.”
Ans.: The look of an object is a complex property of the object which it only has under the specific kinds of circumstances of observation, it is a relational property in the sense that each part of the look depends upon the circumstances of observation as well as the nature of the thing observed. The way the surface looks depends both upon the surface and the lighting and, for example, the kind of eye doing the looking. Now, granted, we could train people to test for red by drawing their attention to red things in sunlight and stating that this is the proper way for telling that something is red. Yet the fact remains that there now lots of other ways of telling whether something is red, and they don't have to involve sunlight!
Presumably the brain would use a system in which the experiences it has had of each kind of thing are employed to create the practical equivalent of an abstract description (the practical equivalent of what we would call a scientific description) of each kind of object and then sort through a variety of such descriptions to find the right one using the circumstances of observation to hugely narrow down the plausible candidates. We don't expect to see the sun at night, so we know a priori that any bright object is not the sun. Such abstract tests need not involve the retention of looks nor the creation of a Platonic Look to be used in recognition. The structure of the brain can act as a computer searching for purely abstract features - like the mix of wave-lengths present.
Objection 2: "But I do have an image of the tree when I see a tree, that is a must if I am to see the tree at all, and it has to be this image which submitts to the 'abstract tests' and allows us to know what we are looking at. That image at least is essential to the process."
Ans.: The account being offered here is that there isn't an image of the tree in you when you see a tree. What you are seeing is not an image of the tree but just the tree itself. The temptations to think there are images involved (some kind of copies) arise from many quarters but we needn't give in to such fantasies. Proof that you are seeing the thing and not the image is that the removal of the thing is concomitant with no longer seeing it - even if you continue to 'have' the image. The residual 'image' is then, presumably, the seeing of an internal state of the observer no less a material object than the tree itself. Proof of the second's existence and role lies in the fact that the removal of certain internal states also removes what was formerly regarded as an 'image'.
Objection 3: The tree is outside me while the experience is internal, therefore there must be a representative of the tree inside me."
Ans.: The tree is there and supplies everything needed for the operation. But now, if you still think that the process of seeing is happening entirely inside you (while the tree is outside) then you really will have to believe that some substitute for the tree has to be brought into you. In fact, what's been said already shows that the tree is a logically essential part of the process of seeing the tree and the best way to express this is to say that, for the purposes of understanding seeing we must conceive it not as something which happens entirely inside you. We need to regard seeing as a process in which we become physically continuous with the thing seen and we do so by becoming connected to the object seen, and it is not too much to say that the thing being seen actually becomes a part of us, for a time. Many of the ancients thought that our eyes reach out to the thing seen bringing it into themselves and we can understand why they thought that.
The connection in question is purely physical, of course (we're not being mysterious): light bounces off the object, travels to our eye, and a continuous process then penetrates all the way into our brain. We are joined to the object by an unbroken chain of events not unlike the streams of events which connect our limbs' nervous system to the brain. Notice that one might cut off an arm, supply it with blood and all the rest, then create a radio link between the arm's nerves and the spinal column. Do this and the arm would be the person's in the very same sense as when it was attached more naturally. What I'm suggesting is that the arm connected by radio link would still be that person's arm yet the arm would not be physically attached to the body - nomore attached than the tree is attached to you when you see it and bring it inside yourself (by playing with a definition!)
Objection 4: "When I see the tree there is something which it is like to have that experience and few other things in the universe are capable of that experience. That is the evidence which shows that I am conscious and this experience and it certainly can't be explained as a physical connection."
Ans.: This rings true, certainly, but now notice that when we say this we are reporting a self-observation, we are sensing something not just about the situation but also about ourselves. In addition to sensing the tree we are also having a feeling, something in ourselves difficult to describe. Fair to say that we are all as familiar with that feeling - the feeling associated with being conscious.
Granting all this we can now apply the rule discussed earlier that what we are looking at is whatever it is which, when varied, varies the look of the thing. Of course the root entity always has to be found by Mill's Methods and this is an empirical question. In the case of consciousness these events will undoubtedly be found inside the body of the observer, probably in the brain or spinal chord. My guess is that the neural structures being observed when we feel this consciousness are structures which vary with the activation of any one of our senses and memory and where we become, in this way, connected to the outside world, or forge such connections with internal parts in our body. These events are then what distinguishes a conscious entity and they will not be found in other entities. Note that we are not speaking now (or before) of correlates since discovering such events is the discovery of what is being observed when we observe our admirable consciousness.
Our general rule is and has to remain that we determine what we are observing by seeing
what it is which causes changes in our experiences of reality. And this rule applies even to awareness itself: we can watch how a person's brain changes as he/she comes in and out of consciousness. Here we find a way to collapse talk of correlates between the mental and the physical, into statements about the physical alone. This is not reduction: it is a discovery about what we can sense explaining what we are aware of and how we become aware of it.
Objection 5 "Surely you can not equate having a feeling with neural events. You can't say one is the other, it's absurd. Feelings aren't that kind of thing."
Ans.: The key here is to distinguish between just 'having' a feeling and observing the feeling. If we move to the idea of observing a feeling then one can rationally ask "What am I observing?" and search methodically using empirical methods for the answer. The difference here is like the difference between saying that one sees the bird and that one observes the bird. The two are the same, usually, except that 'observes' triggers our scientific instincts to look methodically and find out what it is which has changed when the observations change and to find out what that thing is like. And since the project is empirical, not logical or analytical, we prepare ourselves for a discovery, quite possibly to be completely surprised. Well, if it turns out that to have a feeling of being aware, of being conscious, is to observe certain of one's internal states. Surely that's a surprising and rewarding discovery. Who would have thought, indeed, that the way we sense certain neural structures is by feeling them!
Objection 6: "Suppose that one is struck in the eye and one sees bright flashes, surely you are not saying that these flashes are physical realities, no one would claim that there really are flashes occurring in the eye!"
Ans.: This objection assumes that when we look into the eye to check for flashes we observe as an opthalmologist would observe. Under such conditions the eye would not look like there are any flashes in it. But the look of the eye is very different indeed observed by its owner - as he/she tries to see an external scene. Here there are flashes, undeniably, that's how the stressed retina does look in such a case. So there are two ways of observing the retina - even in the case of the observer - one can investigate as would an opthalmologist (with mirrors?) and one could investigate by 'also seeing' the retina in the course of looking about and testing the eye for damage. Under one set of circumstances the retina has one look, under another, quite a different look. Both are objective realities,entirely physical. Therefore the answer to the question 'Are there flashes in the eye?" the answer is that injuries to the retina certainly can look that way. In time we will be able to make records of these flashes to assist in the diagnosis of the damage done to the retina.
Neither of these is the right look of the injured or stressed retina. So we can say that flashes. bright flashes, can be seen as part of how the retina looks, given that it is being observed under certain circumstances, physically specifiable circumstances, namely when the owner of the eye is looking about to test the eye. On the other hand one can look at the retina another way and see all the details of the retina without seeing any flashes at all.
Objection 7: "But, again, the scientific facts are those which are observed using the methods of science. When you see the flashes in your own eyes you are seeing flashes only because the eye is damaged or stressed, a properly functioning eye would not see them. Or perhaps we should say 'not have them". Hence the case of self-observation is not scientific, it is done by a damaged eye. When well functioning eyes examine the retina they find no evidence of flashes.
Ans.: Fair enbough, during a scientific examination we want our observing instrument to be functioning properly, not to be damaged. But in this case the eye is damaged only in the sense that the look of things is not accurate to events and states outside the eye. But, the flashes are a sign of the eyes functioning properly if we understand that an alternate use of the eyes allows us to infer internal physical states. Understood in this way the flashes are veridic, they allow us to infer internal states resulting from the trauma. Once we understand that vision can be used for the detection of internal states, then we must judge the eye to be functioning satisfactorily: the flashes warn us of internal injury and a detailed study of the flashes would allow us to infer many of the details of the relevant stresses and injuries. The flashes are no more errors in the system of detection, so understood and employed, than is our ability to see the look of a straight stick underwater. In the past we have called such looks 'illusions', but they can be understood as giving us important knowledge that the stick is in a clear (but harshly refractory) fluid and that, accordingly there is nothing illusory, nothing misleading when things are looked at this way.
Objection 8: "But the flashes are not objective, no one else can see them and science must restrict itself to third party observability."
Ans.: The flashes are the way an eye looks after being hit, as observed by the owner of the eye. Now, let us suppose that the flashes can be correlated with the very different looks of the same injured and stressed states of affair detected by, say, an opthalmologist using an MRI. The two looks are then equally objective since both can be used reliably to detect events in the shared world of the two observers. Another opthalmologist, using the MRI differently might find that the same states of affairs look very different from the way they looked to either of the other two. What will legitimize the material reality of the flashes is that, carefully studied, such flashes will allow us to infer facts about the affected eye in inferences which can be confirmed by the others methods.
This objection points out is that the new theory of vision erodes the distinction between objective and subjective, something which is inevitable once we accept that looks are veridic.
On this new account, the look of something is a natural sign.
Objection 9: "The general principle of using Mill's Methods involves the search for the cause of a physical event. How then is a change in the experience we have of something to be understood as a physical event? In the cases you discuss we are searching for the cause of a visual experience. Is this a physical event? It seems not and that we are therefore misusing Mill's methods to correlate the physical and the mental bringing us back to parallelism. "
Ans.: Fair enough. If we are looking for the cause of a 'visual experience' then we are going to be understood as looking for the cause of a mental event, and that would be to endorse parallelism. Experiences are a typical example of the mental.
Speaking carefully, what we test for is any change in the look of the thing caused by a change in the thing. This look is a physical property of the object which depends upon the circumstances of observation. Thus, we want to change the object being tested to see if there is any change in the way the object looks but without changing the circumstances of observation. The change in the object is then discovered to cause/not cause a change in the look of the object, taking the look to be a physical property of the object. It is worth remembering that the look of an object is often captured by a camera.
In what follows I argue that there are no mental events involved in perception.
The first part of the argument rejects Platonic Looks, the idea that for each physical object there is a right way for it to look. The way things look, I argue, is relative to circumstances.
The second stage argues that looks are not in the mind. I argue that the way something looks is a purely physical fact about that thing.
The third part of the argument is that the accepted theory of vision is in error and that, given the relativity and physicality of the way things look, we now need a new theory of vision.
The fourth stage offers a new theory of vision. It argues that in order to look at anything outside ourselves we must also be looking at our own internal states. This is the key element for a new theory of vision and perception generally.
The fifth part summerizes the changes required by the new theory of vision if it structured to be consistent with empirical evidence and scientific practice.
The last part answers a number of objections.
Part 1
1) We are taught to associate a particular look with the name of each kind of physical object. "A straight stick looks like this." It begins with children's books.
2) But there really isn't a way that a straight stick should look. If there were, what kind of a ‘should’ would this be?
3) A straight stick in water and a straight stick in air: which has the look of a straight stick? Because one can imagine someone getting used to seeing straight sticks partly immersed in water and knowing what a straight stick looks like in such cases. A weir builder, perhaps, might value such a skill.
4) We say some straight things ‘look straight’ but other things which are straight just don’t look straight. We are amused by the ‘optical illusion’ when someone makes a stick 'look bent' by immersing it in water. But is there an illusion?
5) First off, a stick immersed in water looks bent because of the physics of water, the bending light etc. and we know the physics perfectly well. Do we call it an ‘illusion’ to honor the ignorant? A physicist not only predicts how the stick will look, she sees the bending as vital information about the environment of the stick - and remains convinced that the stick is straight.
6) We non-scientists talk of an ‘illusion’ because, as we say, the stick underwater does not look the way it should, it looks bent. It should look straight, because straight is the way it is really. And we talk that way because we think that a straight stick should have a quite definite look to it. A kind of primary, familiar, proper look. Think of Wittgenstein’s paradigm cases.
7) Now chemists do have a useful idea of the volume of a gas at STP – at standard temperature and pressure. Their idea is that the volume of a gas, say a quantity of air, varies according to the temperature and pressure. The volume of a mass of gas is not set but relative to temperature and pressure. Fancifully we might try to devise an STP for ‘looks straight’; call it SLA for Standard Light in Air. Whatever a straight stick looked like in SLA we could say “that’s what a straight stick really should look like”. Now if the chemists took the same tack they’d say that each lot of air has a volume which it should have, the volume at STP. But this kind of talk would mystify a scientist: the volume of a gas at STP is not the right or proper volume of that gas, that’s not the point of the equations, the present volume is just one of a virtually infinite number of volumes which it has under different conditions. And a scientist will not say that having reduced the volume, the pressure is higher than it should be! Or that it’s not the gas's real pressure. Gas volume is relative. Well, now we can learn to think the same way and notice that looks, by parallel, vary according to multiple factors so that they too are entirely relative and there just is no ‘right’ way for a thing to look.
8) Red can look all kinds of ways depending on circumstances. Nature has not designated any particular way for it to look. She couldn’t.
9) In truth, what are all the possible ways something could look? Uncountable. I want to say that all the different looks of the straight stick have an equal pedigree – all are winning looks, all are physical and real. Put it another way, once we understand the physics then we see that everything always looks the way it should, the way it looks under the given circumstances: here there is no distinction marked by 'should'.
10) Consider the screen in a cinema, a white sheet. How does it look? What does it look like? The possibilities are infinite. A stage-coach, a sunny morning, a silly man?
11) And not surprisingly, one thing can easily look like another: “You have to be careful …”
12) Descartes worried that a square tower in the distance looked round, and thought this showed the unreliability of the senses. Russell worried that a round coin could look like an ellipse and thought it left us with legitimate doubt. All rubbish.
13) Accepting such reflections one is tempted to say that we can’t tell anything about anything by just looking at it.
14) Let’s call the general point being made here the ‘relativity of looks’. The look of something is always relative to the circumstances. There is no Platonic Look - even for Athena herself.
15) The relativity of looks applies to everything, even to colors. Red things change the way they look depending on the light, the eyes, the colors around them.
16) Why does any of this matter? Because when we allow ourselves to think that something isn’t looking the way it should then we are thinking that, by contrast, some other look is the real one. The first look isn’t real! And we have invented something which, though experienced, is not real, and voila, we have invented a mental object. That’s what we are trying to avoid doing. The notion of Platonic Looks leads directly to a metaphysical confusion.
17) Putting aside the demands of language, we can say without misleading anyone that the look of an object changes with the circumstances of lighting and much else. But we can now add that it’s not a question of illusion, or of internal states, or Plato’s Forms since the variety of looks is a scientific fact. It isn’t a matter of opinion, an invention of the mind, on the contrary, it’s as firm an external a fact as the measurement of moving rods in the inertial frames of special relativity. The rods simply have no ‘right’ length. Different observers, different lengths.
18) We say that one only sees a thing’s real color if one is in good light? Good light? Real color? Seeing in pure blue light isn’t real seeing? Blue light isn’t good?
19) Conclusion: There’s no way that a thing should look, it depends on circumstances. And the association of a particular look with a physical object is a mistake. Things are chameleons, but but the changes are predictable.
Part 2
1) Objection: “And if the stick is straight and it doesn’t look straight then its many looks must be our mind’s creation! I mean, if something doesn’t look the way it is then they way it looks must be the work of the mind! It isn’t created by the thing, so we create it.” This is the intuition I need to banish. This kind of reasoning is the way talk of mind gets going.
2) Notice that a camera captures the look of the immersed stick. It captures the very same look as is offered to us … and it does it without having a mind.
3) Well, surely we create all but the right ones.” No. There are no ‘right ones’ in the first place. There are no Platonic Looks. The way something looks varies according to familiar laws and there is no one right look for a thing given varying circumstances. And, this will become important later; it’s just because looks can vary so radically that many, many very different things can have exactly same look.
4) In sum, the traditional belief – fatal for the philosophy of mind – that what we see is made up by the mind – this belief results from the habit of thinking that there is a Platonic Look for every object be it Descartes’ tower, Russell’s desk and coin, Smart’s oranges. I’m thinking here of all the many philosophers (add in Locke, Kant) who would convince us that the mind actually creates the way the world looks to us. They can play this trick upon us only because we read the philosophers after accepting the common belief that every object has a proper look and this means that the present look, having in mind the weakness of eyes, the varying light, distance, fog and all the rest must be one which is made up by the mind.
5) At the height of the disease we are convinced that the mind always ‘makes up’ the look of an object.
6) There is a second point suggested here, call it the veridity of looks: every look is fully explainable scientifically without reference to a mind because every aspect of the way something looks tells us about the thing and the circumstances and machinery of perception.
7) Looks are no more in the mind than the things themselves are in the mind. The way something looks is a physical property of the thing at the time, albeit relative – just as the volume of a gas, or the length of a stick.
Part 3
1) Consider the standard (spooky) account of seeing offered by psychologists. The account begins by apparently adopting a purely physiological account of seeing. We are thereby led from the stick, to the light, thence to the retina, the optic nerve and finally into the brain. But to this sensible and sober account one final link is then appended, a link in which the brain somehow ‘interprets’, and, worse, ‘creates’ the experience of seeing. Tragically, this miraculous final creation of the experience of seeing is represented as the climax of the whole explanation, even though it turns out to be a wholly undetectable event! It is undetectable by any of the methods used to find any and all of the other parts of the chain of events involved in seeing. The spooky appendage remains perpetually unaccountable but supposedly necessary. It is left as a deliciously mysterious gift to the mysterians, to the anti-science claque.
2) Thinking in this way we certainly will get to the ‘hard problem’ the problem of how a mere physical object (the brain) ‘creates’ sensation and perception as the philosophers call it. The ‘mystery of wine from water’!
3) The above (antique) account of perception is faithfully passed on generation to generation. At the heart of its errors is the conviction that our seeing is a mental event, that it is something which happens in addition to, over and above, the familiar physical chain of events involving light, retina, etc.. The mysterious final event, tossed in even by well-meaning scientists, gives rise, fatally, to Searle’s idea of the special causal powers of the brain. For Searle the brain is the last physical link so it must be the brain, he thinks, which is creating this further mysterious ‘conscious’ event. ‘Special’ because if the same mysterious powers were conveyed into the details of the whole chain, if we said that light, reflection, refraction - even the chemical events in the retina and nerves - should be thought of in this mysterious way, then science would be entirely destroyed.
The last part answers a number of objections.
Part 1
1) We are taught to associate a particular look with the name of each kind of physical object. "A straight stick looks like this." It begins with children's books.
2) But there really isn't a way that a straight stick should look. If there were, what kind of a ‘should’ would this be?
3) A straight stick in water and a straight stick in air: which has the look of a straight stick? Because one can imagine someone getting used to seeing straight sticks partly immersed in water and knowing what a straight stick looks like in such cases. A weir builder, perhaps, might value such a skill.
4) We say some straight things ‘look straight’ but other things which are straight just don’t look straight. We are amused by the ‘optical illusion’ when someone makes a stick 'look bent' by immersing it in water. But is there an illusion?
5) First off, a stick immersed in water looks bent because of the physics of water, the bending light etc. and we know the physics perfectly well. Do we call it an ‘illusion’ to honor the ignorant? A physicist not only predicts how the stick will look, she sees the bending as vital information about the environment of the stick - and remains convinced that the stick is straight.
6) We non-scientists talk of an ‘illusion’ because, as we say, the stick underwater does not look the way it should, it looks bent. It should look straight, because straight is the way it is really. And we talk that way because we think that a straight stick should have a quite definite look to it. A kind of primary, familiar, proper look. Think of Wittgenstein’s paradigm cases.
7) Now chemists do have a useful idea of the volume of a gas at STP – at standard temperature and pressure. Their idea is that the volume of a gas, say a quantity of air, varies according to the temperature and pressure. The volume of a mass of gas is not set but relative to temperature and pressure. Fancifully we might try to devise an STP for ‘looks straight’; call it SLA for Standard Light in Air. Whatever a straight stick looked like in SLA we could say “that’s what a straight stick really should look like”. Now if the chemists took the same tack they’d say that each lot of air has a volume which it should have, the volume at STP. But this kind of talk would mystify a scientist: the volume of a gas at STP is not the right or proper volume of that gas, that’s not the point of the equations, the present volume is just one of a virtually infinite number of volumes which it has under different conditions. And a scientist will not say that having reduced the volume, the pressure is higher than it should be! Or that it’s not the gas's real pressure. Gas volume is relative. Well, now we can learn to think the same way and notice that looks, by parallel, vary according to multiple factors so that they too are entirely relative and there just is no ‘right’ way for a thing to look.
8) Red can look all kinds of ways depending on circumstances. Nature has not designated any particular way for it to look. She couldn’t.
9) In truth, what are all the possible ways something could look? Uncountable. I want to say that all the different looks of the straight stick have an equal pedigree – all are winning looks, all are physical and real. Put it another way, once we understand the physics then we see that everything always looks the way it should, the way it looks under the given circumstances: here there is no distinction marked by 'should'.
10) Consider the screen in a cinema, a white sheet. How does it look? What does it look like? The possibilities are infinite. A stage-coach, a sunny morning, a silly man?
11) And not surprisingly, one thing can easily look like another: “You have to be careful …”
12) Descartes worried that a square tower in the distance looked round, and thought this showed the unreliability of the senses. Russell worried that a round coin could look like an ellipse and thought it left us with legitimate doubt. All rubbish.
13) Accepting such reflections one is tempted to say that we can’t tell anything about anything by just looking at it.
14) Let’s call the general point being made here the ‘relativity of looks’. The look of something is always relative to the circumstances. There is no Platonic Look - even for Athena herself.
15) The relativity of looks applies to everything, even to colors. Red things change the way they look depending on the light, the eyes, the colors around them.
16) Why does any of this matter? Because when we allow ourselves to think that something isn’t looking the way it should then we are thinking that, by contrast, some other look is the real one. The first look isn’t real! And we have invented something which, though experienced, is not real, and voila, we have invented a mental object. That’s what we are trying to avoid doing. The notion of Platonic Looks leads directly to a metaphysical confusion.
17) Putting aside the demands of language, we can say without misleading anyone that the look of an object changes with the circumstances of lighting and much else. But we can now add that it’s not a question of illusion, or of internal states, or Plato’s Forms since the variety of looks is a scientific fact. It isn’t a matter of opinion, an invention of the mind, on the contrary, it’s as firm an external a fact as the measurement of moving rods in the inertial frames of special relativity. The rods simply have no ‘right’ length. Different observers, different lengths.
18) We say that one only sees a thing’s real color if one is in good light? Good light? Real color? Seeing in pure blue light isn’t real seeing? Blue light isn’t good?
19) Conclusion: There’s no way that a thing should look, it depends on circumstances. And the association of a particular look with a physical object is a mistake. Things are chameleons, but but the changes are predictable.
Part 2
1) Objection: “And if the stick is straight and it doesn’t look straight then its many looks must be our mind’s creation! I mean, if something doesn’t look the way it is then they way it looks must be the work of the mind! It isn’t created by the thing, so we create it.” This is the intuition I need to banish. This kind of reasoning is the way talk of mind gets going.
2) Notice that a camera captures the look of the immersed stick. It captures the very same look as is offered to us … and it does it without having a mind.
3) Well, surely we create all but the right ones.” No. There are no ‘right ones’ in the first place. There are no Platonic Looks. The way something looks varies according to familiar laws and there is no one right look for a thing given varying circumstances. And, this will become important later; it’s just because looks can vary so radically that many, many very different things can have exactly same look.
4) In sum, the traditional belief – fatal for the philosophy of mind – that what we see is made up by the mind – this belief results from the habit of thinking that there is a Platonic Look for every object be it Descartes’ tower, Russell’s desk and coin, Smart’s oranges. I’m thinking here of all the many philosophers (add in Locke, Kant) who would convince us that the mind actually creates the way the world looks to us. They can play this trick upon us only because we read the philosophers after accepting the common belief that every object has a proper look and this means that the present look, having in mind the weakness of eyes, the varying light, distance, fog and all the rest must be one which is made up by the mind.
5) At the height of the disease we are convinced that the mind always ‘makes up’ the look of an object.
6) There is a second point suggested here, call it the veridity of looks: every look is fully explainable scientifically without reference to a mind because every aspect of the way something looks tells us about the thing and the circumstances and machinery of perception.
7) Looks are no more in the mind than the things themselves are in the mind. The way something looks is a physical property of the thing at the time, albeit relative – just as the volume of a gas, or the length of a stick.
Part 3
1) Consider the standard (spooky) account of seeing offered by psychologists. The account begins by apparently adopting a purely physiological account of seeing. We are thereby led from the stick, to the light, thence to the retina, the optic nerve and finally into the brain. But to this sensible and sober account one final link is then appended, a link in which the brain somehow ‘interprets’, and, worse, ‘creates’ the experience of seeing. Tragically, this miraculous final creation of the experience of seeing is represented as the climax of the whole explanation, even though it turns out to be a wholly undetectable event! It is undetectable by any of the methods used to find any and all of the other parts of the chain of events involved in seeing. The spooky appendage remains perpetually unaccountable but supposedly necessary. It is left as a deliciously mysterious gift to the mysterians, to the anti-science claque.
2) Thinking in this way we certainly will get to the ‘hard problem’ the problem of how a mere physical object (the brain) ‘creates’ sensation and perception as the philosophers call it. The ‘mystery of wine from water’!
3) The above (antique) account of perception is faithfully passed on generation to generation. At the heart of its errors is the conviction that our seeing is a mental event, that it is something which happens in addition to, over and above, the familiar physical chain of events involving light, retina, etc.. The mysterious final event, tossed in even by well-meaning scientists, gives rise, fatally, to Searle’s idea of the special causal powers of the brain. For Searle the brain is the last physical link so it must be the brain, he thinks, which is creating this further mysterious ‘conscious’ event. ‘Special’ because if the same mysterious powers were conveyed into the details of the whole chain, if we said that light, reflection, refraction - even the chemical events in the retina and nerves - should be thought of in this mysterious way, then science would be entirely destroyed.
4) Indeed, if we take seriously this popular account, then the brain must be somehow capable of producing the seeing all by itself – a truly miraculous event. That is, by accepting the account, we are led to accept that the brain, without any of the prior links, must still somehow be capable of creating the last link – create the very experience itself of actually seeing a real thing outside our body. Why it's Extra-Sensory perception! This, of course, flies in the face of the simple evidence that if there is no stick then there could not have been the seeing of it – however great and miraculous the causal powers of the brain. Shall we then claim to be capable of experiencing non-existent sticks? Oh, why not. The initial poison of the brain’s ‘special powers’ soon infects the whole, and science is left shaking it’s head.
5) We must therefore reject the view that the “seeing of the stick” is this final event which we have appended to the physical chain of events. We must substitute the simple proposal that the seeing refers to the whole chain of physical events from stick to brain, and no more than that. The proof of all this lies in the familiar fact that the non-existence of the stick is evidence enough, all by itself, that a stick was not seen – whatever the opinion of the observer. This simple reflection puts the lie to the idea of a clever brain somehow managing to create the experience of seeing just on its own.
6) If this is right then there is no single special event which can be called “the seeing of the stick” and we shall have to accept that there is no causal chain 'leading up' to the seeing of the stick. We will have to root out the belief that the seeing of the stick is a mysterious final event which only starts at some point after the purely physical. That is just to say that we are not separate from physical reality.
7) Now, the whole physical series of events only takes a tiny fraction of a second so it is really not surprising that we think it all happens inside us. Compounding these problems is the fact that language and experience combine to make us believe that seeing is something which we do and which happens as a ‘mental event’ after the physical events, still we must reject this view and accept that the truth that much of what is logically essential to the seeing must happen well before we are even involved. There has to be a stick or it was not seen. There has to be light or some other means of conveying the information. And this way of thinking and talking is necessary if we want our judgments resulting from the seeing to be about external reality.
8) Of course we do easily have a spooky sense that the process of seeing conceived as a mental event refers to events and states of affairs outside itself, to states of affairs outside the observer, to something not a part of the process of seeing. For, we are taught to judge that the seeing begins after the stick is no longer involved. Then, of course, we wonder how this stick could turn out to be so essential to a process in which it is not even involved! Philosophers dub this embarrassing situation the ‘intentionality’ of seeing and, predictably, can find no explanation in the facts. Having removed the object seen from the events of seeing, they find themselves forced to reintroduce it through the totally mysterious connection of ‘intentionality’. The solution proposed here is to understand that seeing the stick, for example, does not begin inside us, it begins outside us, with the stick. Intentionality is required only to repair the damage done when we insist that seeing is something which we do internally with our special powers.
9) Seeing encompasses both our bodies and events outside ourselves, and events outside ourselves are a logical requirement which we, given our need to know the external world, do place upon any description of the events as ‘seeing’. Seeing is done by our bodies and by bodies outside ourselves. Understanding this there should be no further temptation to talk of ‘intentionality’. We need to conceive of a seamless series of events beginning outside ourselves and ending with brain events. We can discard the notion that seeing happens in our head and that it must then involve a spooky loop back to the outside world. We need to accept that we must include the outside world in the seeing.
10) Intentionality, of course, is just odd enough so that it was once thought to be the very essence, a quintessential mark of the mental (see Brentano, Meinong). What’s being suggested here is that reflection on the chain of events which is the seeing should not lead us to think that the brain makes up or creates the experience of seeing, nor to believe that that there is some special causal power in the human brain to achieve this, nor to think that intentionality is required to cover a 'gap' between the observer and the observed. There is no gap: we are a continuation of the external physical world.
11) Brilliant Objection: “But the brain could create all that I experience entirely without there being a stick – as in an hallucination.” Well, no, it can’t. What will be shown in the next chapter is that even during an hallucination one is still looking at a physical object, one which must look exactly like an instance of whatever is being hallucinated. There will be no further comfort for the mysterians in hallucinations.
Part 4
1) “When I’m looking at a tree I’m looking at something out there, certainly.”
2) Yes, no doubt about that: no trees inside us. On the other hand, let’s ask how we know what it is that we’re looking at. What we’re asking for here is a simple scientific answer, one to replace intuitions, an answer which will replace the philosophers’ appeal to introspection and intentionality.
3) “I just know what I’m looking at.” says the sensible person as their hand shoots out pointing to the tree.
4) But if we were challenged, could we give evidence that we are looking at something in particular rather than another thing? Actually, we can - and we do on occasion. Suppose I’m in doubt whether I’m looking at a stick. I reach out, and see if it is seen to move when I touch it, feel it, and move it. If the change in the way it looks correlates with the way my touch suggests it is moving then that correlated change shows it is the stick that I’m seeing. Mill’s Methods.
5) The rationale for such a test is the following. Given what has been said already, we can be sure that what we are looking at is a partial cause of the way things look, and there are well established ways of finding out the cause of an event or series of events – Mill’s Methods. Therefore in the case of the events involved in seeing those causes must be discoverable by precisely such methods. More generally, and still speaking roughly, we can find out what we’re looking at, by testing to find which thing, when modified, modifies the way things look. Had philosophers used some such criterion in the past we would now have quite a different theory of vision.
6) Now in the past, certainly for thousands of years, it has been assumed that the primary function of our the eyes was to tell us where to feed, find mates, hide, etc. and all these were questions about the external world. Eyes were ‘for’ seeing the world outside us. Well, we now know that eyes were not designed and have no proper purpose or use. And the idea that the external world has a monopoly over vision can now be questioned. And what will be shown below is that in seeing the external world we must be seeing much more than just the world beyond our bodies. Since the causes of seeing are in both the external physical world and the internal physical world, there are many more things being seen than was ever imagined before. In the expanded list of causes due to modern neurology there is an expanded list of what can be seen by normal eyes and what is always being seen though no one would have guessed it even a hundred years ago.
7) Using Mill’s methods it turns out that we are seeing not one but many distinct things when we see the tree. Aristotle noticed that the look of things was modified when we tap our eye. But with our knowledge of light and the physiology of vision we can go much further. We know that if you modify the nature of the light coming from the object, or carefully modify the details of the structure of the retina, that things can be made to look differently down to the minutest detail And the look of things will also be modified if you modify the optic nerve, or parts of the brain. We know that these physical realities, the light, the retina, the optic nerve and the brain are causes of the way things look, causes of every detail seen. The proof is that a modification of each of these can be found which will be found to affect any desired change in the way things look – and vice versa. I shall argue below that when we see the tree we are seeing these things as well. When we look at the stick we look at much, much more than just the stick: we see the light, the retina, the optic nerve and the brain.
8) Obj.: “We are not seeing the retina, for heaven’s sake, the retina doesn’t look like a tree, nor are we seeing the optic nerve, nor any part of the brain. They don’t look like bloody trees, none of them do.”
Ans.: Return to the first chapter, we asked how should something look? That’s the issue here. Is there really a way that retinas should look, must look, or, more to this point, can’t look? There is not and there is no right look to anything. Now, using Mill’s Methods it is clear that the retina is a cause of what we are seeing, hence is one of the things being looked at. It is only a matter of getting used to the idea that the retina, like everything else in the external world, has many ways it can look, and some of those looks are the same as the way a tree sometimes looks. Think of a mirror: looked at the right way it looks the way things around it look. Indeed, we talk of seeing things in a mirror and since we are seeing the mirror it follows that we are seeing the mirror and the things ‘in’ it. Do we not assure someone that we can see them in the mirror? A periscope in war-time: how do we test that we see the ship in the distance, that is, that the periscope works?
9) This conclusion, that when we see the tree we are in fact seeing the light, the retina, the optic nerve, and parts of our brain, I will call penetration: the same look penetrates, so to speak, the whole chain of entities involved in the perception.
10) “Why have we not noticed this before?” Because in the past such knowledge was of no use in our survival. There was little or no ability to profit from our ability to understand the role of light, or to see interior states of our body.
11) Here’s the argument that we are seeing our own internal states in the very act of seeing a tree. :
By modifying small parts of the retina we discover that every part of the look of the tree can be modified, hence we conclude on massive evidence (considering the number of 'pixils' in an everage retina) that we are looking at the retina. That is, we find that when we modify the retina we modify the way things look - and this in exquisite detail. It follows that we are looking at the retina and that, further, the look of the retina is one shared with the look of the tree - since, of course, modification of the tree would show that it too is being looked at and that the look we are enjoying is the look of the tree.
Similar arguments apply to cross-sections of the optic nerve and parts of our brain having a causal relation to the look of things.
By noticing the effect on the look of things of changes to the retina we can then go in a number of directions. By correlating the look which the opthalmologist gets when she examines the functioning eye, we can learn to infer what the eye will look like to her and then we could learn to infer what the look is which the person is enjoying as she examines the eye. We will learn to infer some of the the states of the brain based on what the she sees. An optometrist’s use of the test chart is enough to suggest all this. After all, by your telling her what you see at the location on the chart (the one she points to) she infers the state of your eyes before examining them and can even manage pinpoint the minute details of musculature of the eye which are malfunctioning.
But leaving aside these further inferences, the important part for us here is that since modifications of the retina do cause modifications of what we see it follows that we are looking at the retina and it should then come as no surprise that one can tell the state of the retina must be given a knowledge of what is being looked at in the external world, and also infer the state of the optic nerve and the some parts of the brain. Such inferences are now easily understood.
12) The objection to the Learning Argument: While we can infer the outside entity from the state of the retina, and vice versa, neverthless, it’s just a matter of inference, not of real seeing. When I see a tree I don’t infer that it is a tree, I see that it is a tree.
Ans.: No, in time, we learn that the retina has the same look as the tree, just as we learn that the mirror can have the same look as what is behind us, or that what I see through the lenses of my glasses is the way the outside world looks to someone with 20/20 vision, I don't have to infer these things once the situation is understood. I see the retina when I see the tree, just as I can see what is behind me when I look in the mirror. No inferences are required once the point is made.
13) It’s curious to think that the way the tree looks is also literally the way the retina is looking. Odder still, that it is the way the nerve actually looks when the tree is observed. Odd because, after all, if we looked at the nerve the way a surgeon does it wouldn’t look like a tree. We’re sure a nerve looks like a little white worm, slippery and all too happy to retract into the flesh. But that fixation about how a nerve looks relies on the idea of Platonic Looks, the idea that there is one proper way that a nerve or anything else should look. But given penetration, it is now open to us to accept that we actually can see the retina in two ways, first by examining it in the familiar way we examine other external objects – the way a surgeon might. Then there is a second way, namely, by realizing that we actually see retina as we see the outside world. Obviously these two methods result in two very different ways in which the retina looks. This is not surprising since looking at things in different ways always results in an object presenting, looking, very different. Compare seeing something with eyes alone with seeing it under a magnifying glass, in a fog, or in the distance, or in black and white or in a mirror.
14) We don’t learn to infer what the retina looks like by our studies, we learn that we are seeing the retina. The look of the tree is the look of the retina. If there is inference it is from the look of the outside world to the look which the retina presents to a surgeon. But there is no inference needed for us to see the look of the retina in the case in question: we see it immediately when we are seeing the tree. For, in this instance, retina and tree have one and the same look.
15) We can try to explain by saying that the way one thing looks does actually show us a second thing, we get to see the second thing, hence we see that second thing in seeing the first - even though our eyes may not be, as we say, directed towards it. Roughly speaking, if by looking at X we get masses of detailed information about something Y then that something is one of the things which we are seeing – among other things. Of course, the issue between merely getting some information and actually seeing when we look at ‘something’, reduces, in practice, to the question how much we demand in talk of ‘masses of information’: how much information do we need to gain before we can conclude that we are seeing. At some point we do convert from saying that we are getting some information to saying that we are actually seeing it.
16) Does a digital print-out of a photograph give us the look of a thing scanned? We would say no, but how about the reconstructed image produced from the information alone! That, yes, we do see it when the info is used to make a picture. But someone might become skilled at seeing the picture in the data – without the intervention of a CD player or whatever. Might we learn to see a landscape in a map? Did Aquinas really know what a text said without sounding it out first? Now we know he did but, in his time it, his ability to read in silence was considered miraculous. Language for them had to be an auditory experience as well as visual, while for him it became … simply visual. Words have two looks, the sonic look precedes the visual. The case of music written and played offers the similar lesson. One learns to 'read' music and hear what it would sound like played this way or that and on one instrument or another.
17) Obj.: “No these aren’t cases of looking at anything. We can’t be looking at something which is not in our field of vision. You can’t talk of looking at nerves, nor can we be looking at anything, if it is not illuminated by light, as is the case where you claim to be looking at your brain. We are not talking about looking unless the thing is being looked at directly, in light.”
18) Ans.: But there’s nothing original about the idea of seeing without light, or without having to point our eyes at the thing being seen. Many who are familiar with recent science have already understood that we can, at least in theory, give someone vision by sending the right electrical signals directly into the optic nerves so that the patient will achieve vision without the light ever striking their eyes and whether or not their eyes are directed towards the object. We can now do as much for sound using cochlear implants where none of the air vibrations need to reach the ear itself. In general we should accept that the business of determining exactly how we see is an empirical business, if for no better reason than we need the best possible science of the senses. We do the experiments and we find out the truth about what we are looking at and we then determine carefully what the circumstances are under which things can be seen. Certainly we do not block this study merely because it brings results which surprise us. We learned to accept that we could see people in mirrors even though the persons were behind us and our eyes directed forwards, and that we could see them through rigid physical objects (glass), see them even on television even though they were in another room and none of the light from them could reach our eyes. We can see people in complete darkness using infra-red. So it is only a question whether the phenomenon actually happens or not. Do we get masses of information about something by looking? If so then we are seeing it.
19) I am by now well used to the fascinating thought, and simple truth, that when I look at the world I am also looking at my brain. There is really no difficulty in accepting that when we see the world a part of our brain must look like the world. The upshot is that from experience and training we could soon get knowledge of the brain based on how and what we see. It is common place to suppose that the brain contains some kind of a map of the world around us and that the map contains everything we know about that scene. Well, the next thing is to see that it’s not a map, the brain can look exactly the way the outside world looks. Lucretius was right (though the moderns scorn him) that there is a simulacrum involved in perception.
20) The upshot of all this for the philosophy of mind is that no matter how odd things look we can always rely on there being something, a physical object, something we might touch, which is being seen. So this is the answer to the issues raised by hallucinations. It will turn out that when we hallucinate what we are seeing is parts (or a collection of parts) of our brain that do look like external objects, look like a spider, even though there is no spider, and the same must be the case when we are dreaming. In general, no matter what the look in question, we have no reason not to believe that it is the look of something or other, if not external, then internal. The suggestion here is that there no looks unless they are the look of something. To put it another way, there are no hallucinations, after images, illusions, etc.. it is always just a matter of determining what it is that we are looking at. We can be sure that we are looking at something. This is the reliable way for explaining what we see. We do not see a ‘mental’ spider when we hallucinate, what we are in fact seeing is part of the brain, perhaps events on the retina. Imagining is not a case of making up a non-physical reality.
21) Kirk’s objection: Surely the criterion for what we are looking at is too liberal. If I come up behind you and shake your chair that will certainly change the look of things for you but you won’t want to say that you are, just for that, looking at me.” Kirk is right, being the cause of a modification in the look of things look is not enough to justify saying we are looking at that thing. It is necessary but not sufficient. We shall have to require, in addition, that we can also learn masses of information about the thing or whatever is causing the modification in the way things look at the time the look is affected. These requirements are met in the case of the optic nerve but not in the case of someone shaking my chair. I can’t infer the way Kirk looks from the fact he (someone) is shaking my chair.
22) Much study is needed to discover what we are looking at – certainly not all of the brain, for example. There will be considerable fine tuning based on empirical methods as we slowly discover how much we can learn of any particular cause from the effect it has in the way things look – and we shall have to see how the language use settles in. Many, of course, will balk at saying that we can see our brain – just as they balked against the idea of having seen someone merely because they were seen on TV. Yet, slowly, such a way of talking - that we ‘see’ people on television - seems to have been adopted. Only experience will show how we find it convenient to parse the various contexts and packages of information. I feel sure that if our ability to see the state of our brain turns out to have medical uses then the language will adjust with great alacrity. Despite Wittgenstein we must ask not just what the use of a piece of language is, but what the use could be.
23) Together, the three aspects of the look of things, namely, relativity, penetration and veridity, have the effect of introducing a new theory of vision.
Part 5
We should conceive of seeing rather differently, as follows.
A) We should not think of seeing as something we do alone. We need either to take an externalist view of seeing or we can expand the definition of the human body to include the thing seen while it is being seen. In either case seeing becomes akin to eating.
B) We need to give up the idea that certain looks of a thing, looks which cause us to make mistakes, are somehow deficient and that the experience of them is therefore not an experience of reality. We need to accept that all of the ways a thing looks are veridic notwithstanding a tendency to mistake them. Here our theory of vision would evolve in the way our view of nature evolved as we learned to reject descriptions of some parts of nature as 'bad' merely because we were threatened by them.
C) Accepting all looks as veridic means that we reject the metaphysical credentials of 'illusions', 'hallucinations', 'mirages', after-images'. The argument in the past has been that since such experiences are experiences of something which does not exist, hence such experiences must be of non-physical events, namely, mental events. We can now substitute the view that such experiences are experiences of internal events which do exist. This final move is akin to that which we have made with respect to insanity: what is wrong with the insane, we think, is not that they live in an unreal world but that their very real brain is taking a larger causal role in the shaping of behavior than is normal.
E) We need to think of the thing seen as having a purely abstract description and is such that it can only be attributed with having properties like color, taste, odour, etc. when facts about the circumstances of perception are added to the description. Seeing has to be understood abstractly as well, perhaps as any system for obtaining masses of information about an object through the use of eyes, or the use of any instrument which supplies the same kind of information normally supplied by the eyes – perhaps assisted by various technologies (glasses, mirrors, periscopes, TV’s, x-rays, MRI’s, fluorescent proteins, particle colliders, etc.) . That is, systems which allow us to see things which we formerly deemed invisible.
Part 6
Objection 1) "But then how do we recognize an object? Surely we can only recognize something by vision if we know what it looks like. So there must be paradigms, there must be ways a thing should look.”
Ans.: The look of an object is a complex property of the object which it only has under the specific kinds of circumstances of observation, it is a relational property in the sense that each part of the look depends upon the circumstances of observation as well as the nature of the thing observed. The way the surface looks depends both upon the surface and the lighting and, for example, the kind of eye doing the looking. Now, granted, we could train people to test for red by drawing their attention to red things in sunlight and stating that this is the proper way for telling that something is red. Yet the fact remains that there now lots of other ways of telling whether something is red, and they don't have to involve sunlight!
Presumably the brain would use a system in which the experiences it has had of each kind of thing are employed to create the practical equivalent of an abstract description (the practical equivalent of what we would call a scientific description) of each kind of object and then sort through a variety of such descriptions to find the right one using the circumstances of observation to hugely narrow down the plausible candidates. We don't expect to see the sun at night, so we know a priori that any bright object is not the sun. Such abstract tests need not involve the retention of looks nor the creation of a Platonic Look to be used in recognition. The structure of the brain can act as a computer searching for purely abstract features - like the mix of wave-lengths present.
Objection 2: "But I do have an image of the tree when I see a tree, that is a must if I am to see the tree at all, and it has to be this image which submitts to the 'abstract tests' and allows us to know what we are looking at. That image at least is essential to the process."
Ans.: The account being offered here is that there isn't an image of the tree in you when you see a tree. What you are seeing is not an image of the tree but just the tree itself. The temptations to think there are images involved (some kind of copies) arise from many quarters but we needn't give in to such fantasies. Proof that you are seeing the thing and not the image is that the removal of the thing is concomitant with no longer seeing it - even if you continue to 'have' the image. The residual 'image' is then, presumably, the seeing of an internal state of the observer no less a material object than the tree itself. Proof of the second's existence and role lies in the fact that the removal of certain internal states also removes what was formerly regarded as an 'image'.
Objection 3: The tree is outside me while the experience is internal, therefore there must be a representative of the tree inside me."
Ans.: The tree is there and supplies everything needed for the operation. But now, if you still think that the process of seeing is happening entirely inside you (while the tree is outside) then you really will have to believe that some substitute for the tree has to be brought into you. In fact, what's been said already shows that the tree is a logically essential part of the process of seeing the tree and the best way to express this is to say that, for the purposes of understanding seeing we must conceive it not as something which happens entirely inside you. We need to regard seeing as a process in which we become physically continuous with the thing seen and we do so by becoming connected to the object seen, and it is not too much to say that the thing being seen actually becomes a part of us, for a time. Many of the ancients thought that our eyes reach out to the thing seen bringing it into themselves and we can understand why they thought that.
The connection in question is purely physical, of course (we're not being mysterious): light bounces off the object, travels to our eye, and a continuous process then penetrates all the way into our brain. We are joined to the object by an unbroken chain of events not unlike the streams of events which connect our limbs' nervous system to the brain. Notice that one might cut off an arm, supply it with blood and all the rest, then create a radio link between the arm's nerves and the spinal column. Do this and the arm would be the person's in the very same sense as when it was attached more naturally. What I'm suggesting is that the arm connected by radio link would still be that person's arm yet the arm would not be physically attached to the body - nomore attached than the tree is attached to you when you see it and bring it inside yourself (by playing with a definition!)
Objection 4: "When I see the tree there is something which it is like to have that experience and few other things in the universe are capable of that experience. That is the evidence which shows that I am conscious and this experience and it certainly can't be explained as a physical connection."
Ans.: This rings true, certainly, but now notice that when we say this we are reporting a self-observation, we are sensing something not just about the situation but also about ourselves. In addition to sensing the tree we are also having a feeling, something in ourselves difficult to describe. Fair to say that we are all as familiar with that feeling - the feeling associated with being conscious.
Granting all this we can now apply the rule discussed earlier that what we are looking at is whatever it is which, when varied, varies the look of the thing. Of course the root entity always has to be found by Mill's Methods and this is an empirical question. In the case of consciousness these events will undoubtedly be found inside the body of the observer, probably in the brain or spinal chord. My guess is that the neural structures being observed when we feel this consciousness are structures which vary with the activation of any one of our senses and memory and where we become, in this way, connected to the outside world, or forge such connections with internal parts in our body. These events are then what distinguishes a conscious entity and they will not be found in other entities. Note that we are not speaking now (or before) of correlates since discovering such events is the discovery of what is being observed when we observe our admirable consciousness.
Our general rule is and has to remain that we determine what we are observing by seeing
what it is which causes changes in our experiences of reality. And this rule applies even to awareness itself: we can watch how a person's brain changes as he/she comes in and out of consciousness. Here we find a way to collapse talk of correlates between the mental and the physical, into statements about the physical alone. This is not reduction: it is a discovery about what we can sense explaining what we are aware of and how we become aware of it.
Objection 5 "Surely you can not equate having a feeling with neural events. You can't say one is the other, it's absurd. Feelings aren't that kind of thing."
Ans.: The key here is to distinguish between just 'having' a feeling and observing the feeling. If we move to the idea of observing a feeling then one can rationally ask "What am I observing?" and search methodically using empirical methods for the answer. The difference here is like the difference between saying that one sees the bird and that one observes the bird. The two are the same, usually, except that 'observes' triggers our scientific instincts to look methodically and find out what it is which has changed when the observations change and to find out what that thing is like. And since the project is empirical, not logical or analytical, we prepare ourselves for a discovery, quite possibly to be completely surprised. Well, if it turns out that to have a feeling of being aware, of being conscious, is to observe certain of one's internal states. Surely that's a surprising and rewarding discovery. Who would have thought, indeed, that the way we sense certain neural structures is by feeling them!
Objection 6: "Suppose that one is struck in the eye and one sees bright flashes, surely you are not saying that these flashes are physical realities, no one would claim that there really are flashes occurring in the eye!"
Ans.: This objection assumes that when we look into the eye to check for flashes we observe as an opthalmologist would observe. Under such conditions the eye would not look like there are any flashes in it. But the look of the eye is very different indeed observed by its owner - as he/she tries to see an external scene. Here there are flashes, undeniably, that's how the stressed retina does look in such a case. So there are two ways of observing the retina - even in the case of the observer - one can investigate as would an opthalmologist (with mirrors?) and one could investigate by 'also seeing' the retina in the course of looking about and testing the eye for damage. Under one set of circumstances the retina has one look, under another, quite a different look. Both are objective realities,entirely physical. Therefore the answer to the question 'Are there flashes in the eye?" the answer is that injuries to the retina certainly can look that way. In time we will be able to make records of these flashes to assist in the diagnosis of the damage done to the retina.
Neither of these is the right look of the injured or stressed retina. So we can say that flashes. bright flashes, can be seen as part of how the retina looks, given that it is being observed under certain circumstances, physically specifiable circumstances, namely when the owner of the eye is looking about to test the eye. On the other hand one can look at the retina another way and see all the details of the retina without seeing any flashes at all.
Objection 7: "But, again, the scientific facts are those which are observed using the methods of science. When you see the flashes in your own eyes you are seeing flashes only because the eye is damaged or stressed, a properly functioning eye would not see them. Or perhaps we should say 'not have them". Hence the case of self-observation is not scientific, it is done by a damaged eye. When well functioning eyes examine the retina they find no evidence of flashes.
Ans.: Fair enbough, during a scientific examination we want our observing instrument to be functioning properly, not to be damaged. But in this case the eye is damaged only in the sense that the look of things is not accurate to events and states outside the eye. But, the flashes are a sign of the eyes functioning properly if we understand that an alternate use of the eyes allows us to infer internal physical states. Understood in this way the flashes are veridic, they allow us to infer internal states resulting from the trauma. Once we understand that vision can be used for the detection of internal states, then we must judge the eye to be functioning satisfactorily: the flashes warn us of internal injury and a detailed study of the flashes would allow us to infer many of the details of the relevant stresses and injuries. The flashes are no more errors in the system of detection, so understood and employed, than is our ability to see the look of a straight stick underwater. In the past we have called such looks 'illusions', but they can be understood as giving us important knowledge that the stick is in a clear (but harshly refractory) fluid and that, accordingly there is nothing illusory, nothing misleading when things are looked at this way.
Objection 8: "But the flashes are not objective, no one else can see them and science must restrict itself to third party observability."
Ans.: The flashes are the way an eye looks after being hit, as observed by the owner of the eye. Now, let us suppose that the flashes can be correlated with the very different looks of the same injured and stressed states of affair detected by, say, an opthalmologist using an MRI. The two looks are then equally objective since both can be used reliably to detect events in the shared world of the two observers. Another opthalmologist, using the MRI differently might find that the same states of affairs look very different from the way they looked to either of the other two. What will legitimize the material reality of the flashes is that, carefully studied, such flashes will allow us to infer facts about the affected eye in inferences which can be confirmed by the others methods.
This objection points out is that the new theory of vision erodes the distinction between objective and subjective, something which is inevitable once we accept that looks are veridic.
On this new account, the look of something is a natural sign.
Objection 9: "The general principle of using Mill's Methods involves the search for the cause of a physical event. How then is a change in the experience we have of something to be understood as a physical event? In the cases you discuss we are searching for the cause of a visual experience. Is this a physical event? It seems not and that we are therefore misusing Mill's methods to correlate the physical and the mental bringing us back to parallelism. "
Ans.: Fair enough. If we are looking for the cause of a 'visual experience' then we are going to be understood as looking for the cause of a mental event, and that would be to endorse parallelism. Experiences are a typical example of the mental.
Speaking carefully, what we test for is any change in the look of the thing caused by a change in the thing. This look is a physical property of the object which depends upon the circumstances of observation. Thus, we want to change the object being tested to see if there is any change in the way the object looks but without changing the circumstances of observation. The change in the object is then discovered to cause/not cause a change in the look of the object, taking the look to be a physical property of the object. It is worth remembering that the look of an object is often captured by a camera.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)