Our conscious perception
Consider this outline of Australia as it appears on a map. Visualise it. What do you see? Recently someone posted an image of the outline on social websites showing how it can be seen as a dog’s head (perhaps a Scottish terrier) facing left, joined to a (Siamese?) Cat’s head appearing right, leaning down to eat the morsel of food that is Tasmania. Once you see that image, it’s difficult to overlook it — the map looks different. Suddenly you view it as a combination of two animal heads, and it is a whole lot easier to remember how the northern coastline goes into a kitty’s ear peninsula, and also the relation between the south coast and Tasmania.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, in his Philosophical Investigations, wrote about what he called”aspect dawning”, how we begin to see one thing in a different way,”seeing as” as it’s sometimes called. That is what is happening if you suddenly reconfigure what you are seeing — a brand new facet dawns when you view it under another description. So, for instance, we view the shoreline as a combination of two minds, or at Wittgenstein’s famous example of the duck-rabbit (a guess that he borrowed from the American psychologist Joseph Jastrow), we see the same figure now as a rabbit’s head facing to the right, today as a snowball with its beak open facing abandoned, but not both together. The retinal image, how patterns of light fall on the eyes, hasn’t changed. However, that which we see has shifted. In one sense all the parts are exactly the same, however, we organise them differently and see something different as a result. With a few puzzle pictures like the duck-rabbit, or even the Necker Cube, there’s a sudden, almost vertiginous change of what we see, and also a kind of’aha!’ Moment that we feel with this. It is almost as though the still picture flips over in front of us, then flips back. We can influence this also: we can will ourselves to see that the shape beneath a different description, and then it happens. We can look for the rabbit, or search for the duck, or deliberately seek the combined dog and the cat head contours once we look at the map of Australia, and locate them.
A naïve model of perception has us as passive receptors of incoming data that permits us to make sense of the world. However, it does not appear to work like this at all. There is some reality on the market, something which gives rise to our conscious perception. This is what Immanuel Kant described as the noumenal world that gives rise to phenomena the world we actually encounter. The noumenal world is usually only known indirectly by attempting to work out exactly what it must be like for us to possess the experience that we do.
Our conscious experience — what we see, feel, smell, etc — can’t be of things exactly as they appear to be. As John Locke put it in the 17th century, things have primary qualities (like mass and form ) but secondary qualities such as the color red are created by the interaction between our sensory organs (in this case via light) and what we would call the molecular textures of those objects (he described the tiny elements of objects as”corpuscles”). The redness, a secondary quality, is not in the rug. It just looks that way. As we can now say, it is our brain’s method of representing itself complex information about the planet as our conscious experience. We’ve evolved to have a completely convincing manner of experiencing the world that involves our seeing, for example, colours as inherently in the things we see. It is tough to think yourself outside that. Occasionally psychedelic drugs have jolted individuals into a higher consciousness of the way this works.
Many neuroscientists now, such as Anil Seth, wish to eliminate the notion of their eyes as inactive receptors, and instead think of our brains as constantly upgrading and making best guesses of the nature of what’s out there, drawing on all of the information that they could get. These guesses are described as inferences. Predictive coding is going on, with the mind continuously updating its model of its environment, and our beliefs and expectations influencing what we see alongside the information we receive by our sense organs. That is within a framework of some built-in assumptions that it might take a lot to shift, like that light generally comes from above, an assumption which leads us to interpret shadows and depth in certain ways.
This does not mean that we’re able to project just whatever we want on to the entire world and see it there. It could have been strange had we evolved to perceive whatever we felt like perceiving rather than something that linked closely to what is in our environments. Our brains evaluate what we forecast with what we discover, and make amendments. The real world constrains what we see and our newest information relating to this calibrates the forecasts that we create. You can not easily see the outline of Australia as a coil, for example, nor as an equilateral triangle. We accommodate our perceptions to features of the planet as they impinge on our senses.
It can be liberating to recognise the degree to which expectations and patterns of thinking play a role in shaping what we see and are able to see, imagining what is sometimes described as”the beholder’s share”. By finding new contexts and ways of considering what we perceivewe can alter what we actually see. We could experience things that are extremely familiar to people in new ways, and formerly invisible aspects of those things will dawn on us at which pointwe won’t only see the world differently. Quite literally, we’ll observe different things.