{"id":40152,"date":"2019-11-03T17:33:59","date_gmt":"2019-11-03T17:33:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/?p=40152"},"modified":"2020-04-10T21:40:56","modified_gmt":"2020-04-10T21:40:56","slug":"the-way-of-the-eye","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/?p=40152","title":{"rendered":"The Way of the Eye"},"content":{"rendered":"<p id=\"top\" \/>\n<p><em>by Jan Koenderink<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">For a start<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees. p.21g<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>To learn to see is partly to grasp intuitively (that means forgetting; this whole issue) that you don&#8217;t know what you see. &#8211; p.25d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In physics one has observations without observers and actions without agents. Of course, both are pipe dreams. There are no such things. &#8211; p.31d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>At the rock bottom, representations are simply summaries of: actions. This is good physics and good phenomenology (say &#8220;action ontology&#8221;) although most people tend to think that all there is are objects and states of the world, which give rise to actions. It is really the other way around. Actions give rise to objects and states of the world. &#8211; p.32g<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>A physical state of the world is simply the set of potential actions open to an agent, an &#8220;Umwelt&#8221;- An object is an objectified invariant, say the common factor of all possible views of a cat<\/strong>. &#8211; p.32g<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We see the patterns of awareness more clearly in the patterns of behavior of beings different from ourselves. Think of psychiatric patients, babies, demented elderly and various animals. &#8211; p.35g<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>One aspect of learning to see is to develop empathic relations to a variety of things and processes. This is important not only in the case of humans,  but also with respect to other life like animals and plants, and even with inanimate nature like skies, landscapes or stones. &#8211; p.36d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The contents of visual awareness<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>You should distinguish between your &#8220;immediate visual awareness&#8221;, your &#8220;cognition&#8221; and your &#8220;reflective thought&#8221;.<\/strong> It is a broad and more or less continuous spectrum of &#8220;states of mind&#8221;.<strong> At the limits pure awareness feels like something that happens to you and reflective thought feels like something you do<\/strong>. &#8211; p.57g<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Science is about what occurs at the discourse level of reflective thought. Art is what happens at the inter-subjective level of awareness. The two couldn&#8217;t be farther apart. A complete human being lives on the full spectrum in between. &#8211; p.58g<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That by no means implies that the phenomenologist abstains from science, say anatomy, physiology, physics,\u2026 These useful sciences are ultimately based on brute facts, in this case that is a general consensus on the concrete awareness of humans in controlled settings. &#8211; p.61a<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So what is concrete actuality made of then? Intuitively it is made of qualities, values and meanings. Qualities are colours, shapes and so forth, meanings merge with qualities, think of &#8220;threatening&#8221;, &#8220;immanent&#8221; and so forth. Meanings are like potentialities of prospective interactions. Values are like qualities that apply to emotive, rather than perceptual objects. There is nothing in awareness that is not either quality, value, or meaning.  &#8211; p.63g<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In this model the urge is the call for justice by the society, the habits are the &#8220;nose&#8221; and experience of the investigator and the stimulation is the file. <strong>PSYCHOGENESIS IS AN ACTION OF INVESTIGATION; IT IGNORES THE BULK OF THE SENSORY STIMULATION<\/strong>. &#8211; p.69d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When you mindfully notice, you may often catch your awareness suddenly switching because some seek image didn&#8217;t work out. You were aware of the seek image and it was suddenly replaced with a presentation that is better fitted to guide your actions. This is likely to happen when you are thirsty for instance, it may lead you to spot beers where there aren&#8217;t any. When you are ready to notice, you will find that such cases are not rare. <strong>It may well be the case that you are effectively blind to things for which you have no (current) seek images.<\/strong> &#8211; p.72g<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Time in visual awareness plays on a number of different scales. The shortest relevant scale is about a tenth of a second, which is the time to generate visual awareness from scratch. Events on shorter time scales can sometimes be differentiated, but they do not lead to qualities or meanings in awareness. The longest time scales of interest in awareness are those that occur in rare cases of maintained scrutiny. Such time spans may reach several seconds. Longer periods play in reflective thought only. Time on the shortest scale is simply kinematic extrapolation, also for humans. The body does that fully automatically for you, you are aware of movements as brute facts, even where there are none. This is evident from the success of cinema. In animation movies it works fine even if the movie consists of only two frames. You won&#8217;t see the separate frames, you are aware of a single &#8220;animated&#8221; frame. This is due to the automatic kinematic extrapolation, or, in this case, interpolation. &#8211; p.82g<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>This convincingly shows that the coherent space-time in awareness is a construction of your psychogenesis. <\/strong>The coherency is there even when the optical structure is incoherent. What you are aware of is your construction, not &#8220;Physical reality&#8221;. &#8211; p.83g<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There is not so much a &#8220;binding problem&#8221; as a &#8220;prying apart problem&#8221;- The latter occurs the moment someone asks you: &#8220;what is the colour of that object?&#8221; The object had no colour before the question was asked, maybe there wasn&#8217;t even an object! Maybe the question involved the colour of a leaf, whereas you were aware of a tree. You have to produce the colour and it may well seem to you that you were asked to pull a rabbit out of a head. Colours are abstractions from awareness, not building blocks of it. &#8211; p.86g<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SCIENCE DOES NOT ACCOUNT FOR APPEARANCES. APPEARANCES ALLOW FOR SCIENCE TO BE DONE. This is only natural, because science derives from abstractions from appearances. An odd way to express it \u2014 at least to most scientists \u2014 is that <strong>appearances account for science, in the sense that they are the raw material from which science is abstracted<\/strong>. I would say this is the common sense account of the matter. &#8211; p.94g<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As a bottom line, &#8220;learning to see&#8221; necessarily implies learning to see the arts, just as &#8220;learning to read&#8221; implies to learn languages and &#8220;learning to think rationally&#8221; implies to understand the sciences. &#8211; p.95g<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Another example of a strong Gestalt is a generic landscape. In this case one easily shows that the typical artistic &#8220;landscape Gestalt&#8221; echoes averaged ecological optics. One guesses that this might be true for Gestalts in general. &#8211; p.96d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Noticing unlikely coincidences is the business of psychogenesis.<\/strong> <strong>One instance of this is to notice that apparently distinct objects have synchronized time-varying properties. <\/strong>This is taken as a sign for a causal bond, in extreme cases it makes one group the objects, or even see the group as a single object. <strong>An instance is the cast shadow, which always moves with the object that casts it. <\/strong>&#8211; p.113d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Thus Gestalts are hierarchically organised. They contain potential sub-Gestalts and may themselves merge as textural elements in potential super-Gestalts. To some extent you may choose your focus in such a hierarchy. &#8211; p.116g<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This shows that Gestalts are not mere pictorial structures. You cannot extract a gesture, or a gist, through mere algorithmic image processing. The gesture does not just reside in the object, but equally in its perceiver. This is true for the artist who captures the gesture, but just as true for the observer of the drawing who has to experience it emphatically. &#8211; p.133g<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Pattern is the opposite of confusion. Pattern is different from chaos in that it fits into your narrow mind-frame. It is also different from perfect order in that it has a fringe of mystery, suggesting that there is always more to experience than we currently do. In awareness nothing can exist for itself, everything is defined by its relations to other things. In order to be a thing it needs contrast with other things, whereas in order to be in some relation, it needs analogy to other things. Contrast and analogy are combined in gradation, that is repetition combined with variation, where the variation should preserve analogy, although perhaps challenging it. &#8211; p.139g<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Glimpses to vision<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>Awareness refreshes at a rate of about a dozen a second. This is a short period in terms of the implementation. Most of the processing has be of a simultaneous \u2014 or &#8220;parallel&#8221; \u2014 nature, and \u2014 most likely &#8211; focused on seek images or the main task of the moment. But your awareness is always an integral entity, not something that still needs to be stitched together!  &#8211; p.146d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Then you will also know that you often have glimpses of things that you \u2014 in retrospect \u2014 know to be your own hallucinations. T<strong>hese hallucinations serve you well in the sense that they have a high probability of working out okay. They make you an expert.<\/strong> &#8211; p.147g<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Most glimpses are embedded in a series of very similar ones. This makes that you no longer experience &#8220;glimpses&#8221;, but are deluded to feel that you see the world as it is. &#8211; p.148g<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Glimpses do not really have a temporal structure. They are not even moments! <\/strong>Their occurrence is really noticed &#8220;after the fact&#8221;. Your cognitive confabulations fits the glimpse \u2014 if not ignored altogether &#8211; into the stream of consciousness. &#8211; p.148d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Biology of sentience<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"840\" src=\"https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/11\/IMG_20191103_222724-1024x840.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-40161\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/11\/IMG_20191103_222724-1024x840.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/11\/IMG_20191103_222724-300x246.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/11\/IMG_20191103_222724-768x630.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/11\/IMG_20191103_222724.jpg 1595w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><figcaption>Funksionskreis<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>There is input entering the loop from the outside and there are actions that leave the loop without leading to suffering, but the &#8220;stuff&#8221; cycling through the loop is the important part we focus on. What is this &#8220;stuff&#8221;? Some would say &#8220;signals&#8221;, others &#8220;information&#8221;, I will talk of messaging. The meaning of the message is in what the effector does on receipt of it. Think of a message as of a key that fits a certain keyhole of an effector.  &#8211; p.211d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Animals are implemented in terms of countless loops running on all spatiotemporal scales, the molecular to the organs, even the whole body and microseconds to significant parts of the organism&#8217;s lifetime. Since organisms are designed by nobody and have no intended use, there are no manuals. The loops only exist in the mind of an external observer, for instance, von Uexk\u00fcll studying sea urchins. &#8211; p.212g<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"534\" src=\"https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/11\/IMG_20191103_222746-1024x534.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-40162\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/11\/IMG_20191103_222746-1024x534.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/11\/IMG_20191103_222746-300x156.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/11\/IMG_20191103_222746-768x401.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><figcaption>Neuer kreis<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>The organ in the organism that does the prediction entertains a model of the world, that is a theory of the relevant phenomenological physics. This he named &#8220;counter world&#8221; (German Gegenwelt) or &#8220;mirror world&#8221; (German Spiegelwelt). When the new loop runs smoothly, the part of the corresponding functional loop through the environment is simply taken for granted. The poking is done and forgotten about, the suffering is ignored. <strong>All that counts for the organism is the prediction, that is to say, what is in the counter, or mirror world.<\/strong> &#8211; p.213g<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Von Uexk\u00fcll suggests that continued use of some new loop will lead to a &#8220;functional tone&#8221;<\/strong> (German Funktionston). The term derives perhaps from theories of musical harmony. He seems to suggest that the running of the loop will come with a feeling that is specific for the loop. This would be a dim awareness.<strong> It might perhaps be likened to the meaning ascribed to interface elements.<\/strong> &#8211; p.213d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Indeed, <strong>a good &#8220;mark&#8221; is often the coincidence of rare events of different types.<\/strong> These make strong marks because such coincidences have a very low probability to occur for no reason. Thus one has a case for multimodality here, instead of a strict focus on specific modalities. p.214d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The mark world and the poke world together comprise the Umwelt of the animal. Umwelts are very diverse, even for animals sharing a common environment. The Umwelt should never be confused with the environment. Thus,<strong> in a single ecosystem, sentient beings live largely isolated from each other, encapsulated in their Umwelts. When two animals interact, the event may be hugely different from their two perspectives.<\/strong> &#8211; p.214d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There are no answers to be found in the world, answers are resistances against poking and are only meaningful (that is to say, truly &#8220;answers&#8221;) with respect to the intentional probing, that is the question. Thus all an agent may know about the world is necessarily in terms of its own questioning. &#8211; p.215<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>POKING ENGAGING RESISTANCE EVOKES A SPARKS OF AWARENESS.<\/strong> I will call such sparks of awareness &#8220;psychons&#8221;. Thus investigators are likely to generate volleys of sparks of awareness in the course of their questioning. Perhaps an organised swarm of psychons created during the periods of psychogenesis, about a tenth of a second, analogous to the final report of a criminal investigator, then might be equated with &#8220;awareness&#8221;. At least this makes intuitive sense. It seems to fit the human condition. It also makes ill&#8217; sense when applied to organisms of various complexity. It denies awareness to machines that do not intentionally poke their environments. &#8211; p.216d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Is it relevant to have some understanding of the blackboard in your quest to learn to see? To a limited extent yes.<strong> Physical structure that does not make it to the blackboard will never affect your awareness. The blackboard is where the questioning stops, if answers are not found in the blackboard, they are simply not there.<\/strong> &#8211; p.218d <em>This is exactly the idea of the ambien optic array from ecological optics&#8230;<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In the visual arts, the artist addresses your blackboard. Most of the structural elements of a drawing or painting make it to the blackboard with essential (in the informational sense) changes. Studying the effective structure of artistic products is a great way to obtain a feeling for the kinds of structures that your psychogenesis is looking for. &#8211; p.218d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Is <strong>an understanding of the keyboard<\/strong> important in your quest to learn to see? Again, to some extent yes. I already indicated methods of seeing that require your control of eye-ball and eye-lid movements. &#8211; p.219g<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Varieties of visual awareness<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>Every animal will experience its world as perfectly sharp, irrespective of its visual acuity. &#8211; p.245g<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Quilts have to be scanned. <strong>You view a quilt in a number of good looks. This implies that seeing quilts is something you do \u2014 that is the voluntary scanning.<\/strong> It also implies that you can never &#8220;own&#8221; a quilt in the same way that you can &#8220;own&#8221; an iconic image. There always remains some unknown, some mystery. <strong>The next good look is likely to reveal novel structure.<\/strong> &#8211; p.245d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Depth is a quality, a feeling of separation from the self that admits of degrees. It is only depth relations that are relevant, there being no such a thing as &#8220;absolute depth&#8221;. The relations are of a &#8220;more or less&#8221; nature, although there is no natural unit of depth. It is sometimes possible to judge that one depth difference is larger than another, but that is more or less the whole story. <strong>It is not possible to compare a depth difference to a separation in the visual field.<\/strong> That is like comparing apples and oranges. &#8211; p.249g<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The blackboard and the visual field<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>This becomes even more complicated once we notice that any group is an individual on some level and any individual a group at another level. Perhaps fortunately, our limited mental capacity forces us to focus on a single level &#8211; a bit &#8220;thickened&#8221; perhaps &#8211; of the hierarchy. Moreover, it cannot recognize groups of more than a few individuals. &#8211; p.298g<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Mosaics, a foray into uncharted worlds<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>One wonders. <strong>Are we all tarachopic to some extent? Do we learn to &#8220;do the puzzle of the visual field&#8221; during our growing up?<\/strong> My guess would be yes to both questions. Is the peripheral visual field of normal observers tarachopic? Well, the crowding phenomenon would certainly suggest so. This seems to call for a rather different approach to various questions that remain unsolved in vision research. &#8211; p.326d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Indeed, the obvious existence of eidolons has induced brain science to speculate on the &#8220;sparse representation&#8221; of the scene in front of you in the blackboard. When you actually reckon with spooky things like psychogenesis then there are additional explanations. One I happen to like is that there may actually be amply sufficient structure in the blackboard, but that it is hard to query. This would be like a forensic investigator who fails to find evidence in existing files because he fails to look at the right place. &#8211; p.328g<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It is also of interest to remember that you can rather well handle scrambled optical input. Apparently psychogenesis puts things in order, even when the scrambling was done before the eye ever looked at the scene. Your psychogenesis apparently reckons with sloppy local sign near the fixation point, but hardly bothers at places away from it. &#8211; p.329g<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yet there is little doubt that <strong>the very structure of human vision is deeply rooted in the structure of the world at large<\/strong>. Of course, I&#8217;m not so much talking optics here, <strong>this has to do with the structure of psychogenesis in relation to the lawfulness (including the unpredictable!) of the natural environment<\/strong>. &#8211; p.334g<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">A cursory exploration of the Umwelt<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>A visual shape might be an arbitrary configuration, whereas a form is an essential entity.<\/strong> Thus form and shape are by no means synonyms. &#8211; p.340g<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A person&#8217;s head is a form that is independent of arbitrary factors like lighting or hairdo. However, a photographer changes the shape through specific illumination, a cosmetics expert can change the shape of the face by the application of pigments, a hairdresser changes it through arranging the hair, a hat maker changes it by selecting certain bonnets, and so forth. There are numerous shapes that may derive from a form. &#8211; p.341g<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Process does not repeat, it is succession of things in order, sequence, or progression. &#8211; p.341d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>A flight of birds is obviously a process, as you notice its change from moment to moment.<\/strong> Yet it certainly has a kind of being too, as you naturally identify it as the &#8220;same object&#8221; from moment to moment. <strong>I would say it is a fast form.<\/strong> &#8211; p.342g<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>There are also processes and forms that are not immediately bound to material existence. <\/strong>Consider the form of sunlit patches on the bottom of a forest. Consider the movement of a gust of wind as it moves over a field of grass. Consider a vortex on a water surface, a wave-train in the ocean, a dust devil in the desert, a tornado, or a cold front. Objects are composed of objects, to be understood recursively. &#8220;Object&#8221; is a construction of psychogenesis.  &#8211; p.342d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Organic forms look like they &#8220;grew&#8221;.<\/strong> They started from some centre at one time in history. <strong>The eye reads them &#8220;from the inside-out&#8221;. Tooled forms are made from the outside-in. <\/strong>They often lack a &#8220;centre of growth&#8221;, in other cases one sees how they were tooled by accretion and deletion from the outside-in. &#8211; p.344g<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Surfaces are not that common in nature. An example would be the surface of a lake. <strong>Surfaces bound volumetric objects, but are not anything &#8220;additional&#8221; to what is inside.<\/strong> Many artificial objects are bounded by surfaces typically; any object left to &#8220;weather&#8221; will, in time, develop a skin. &#8211; p.346d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Skins bound volumetric bodies. Their properties are (often very!) different from what&#8217;s inside. <\/strong>Think of oxide layers, crusts, bark, animal skins, paint layers. Virtually all organic bodies are cowed by skins. &#8211; p.347<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Atmospheres. Think of hair, the fluffy environment of a peach<\/strong>, or the threatening, spiky envelope of a blow fish. Varnish is a kind of in-between of a skin and an atmosphere. In the case of the globular star cluster, the object is all atmosphere, the same applies to a swarm of mosquitos, but<strong> in most cases atmospheres envelope skins.<\/strong> &#8211; p.347g<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Sheets do not bound anything. <\/strong>They vary in openness (nets, grids, garden fences, &#8230;) and optical properties like opaqueness and gloss. <strong>They have shape properties that are quite different from those of volumetric objects<\/strong> (think of cloth, paper, leather,\u2026). &#8211; p.347g<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>You see a skin when you feel that the inside &#8211; what you cannot see &#8211; is different from the outside. When the outside lets you feel that the interior is of the same stuff, then there is no skin.<\/strong> &#8211; p.348d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It shows you that human awareness is perhaps not the best judge of bumpiness. AT MOST LOCATIONS A SURFACE IS NEITHER BUMP NOR DIMPLE. &#8211; p.361g<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The reason might be found in a well known rule taught to the academic sculptor: &#8220;take care of the convexities, the concavities will take care of themselves&#8221;. Notice that the rule does not mention saddle surfaces at all, they are simply considered non-convexities. &#8211; p.363g<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The image on the right has nothing to do with shading at all. In a sense, it is geometry. But don&#8217;t fall for it! This is a pure artistic device, there is no geometry here. It would be very hard to fake these renderings through computer graphics methods. That is because artists take numerous ad hoc decisions for all kinds of special cases. They simply sense &#8220;what works&#8221; and that makes perfect sense to me. &#8211; p.378g<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In the case of very narrow objects, such as vertical poles, or many trees, such volumes are similar to &#8220;thick planes&#8221;, with the consequence that the intersections with the ground surface are parallel planar sections. Such sections\u2014especially if there are more than one\u2014are very telling about the shape of the ground surface. Your visual system uses this automatically, your awareness rarely brings it to your attention. p.379d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>The shadow is just a dark blob that happens to be there. <\/strong>It usually stands in no need of an &#8220;explanation&#8221; because it is not seen as a thing, thus is not significant. If not obviously connected to some object it may appear as a smudge though<strong>. This calls up the question of how visual awareness comes to discard shadows as &#8220;not things&#8221; (nothings?).<\/strong> &#8211; p.379d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What the main stream scientist fails to understand is that all vision is construction. It has been said that &#8220;<strong>vision is controlled hallucination<\/strong>&#8220;. Here &#8220;hallucination&#8221; is used in pejorative sense. But the keyword is &#8220;controlled&#8221; here. You mostly hallucinate what makes sense in the given situation. Of course, you may be mistaken in what you see. But if you require &#8220;full veridicality&#8221;, vision \u2014 as you know it \u2014 really is impossible. &#8211; p.384d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Contemplation<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>There is little trace of interconnections to be found in the blackboard structure, most of the &#8220;glue&#8221; is provided by the new loop controller, the &#8220;investigator&#8221;.<\/strong> The &#8220;investigator&#8221; has a repertoire of common &#8220;plots&#8221; that might possibly be rejected by reference to the blackboard. Such plots are of various nature. &#8211; p.400d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This implies that the objects of awareness are nested WHOLES and that to &#8220;divide&#8221; is to relate. The parts are plastic to the recognition of the whole, they are interrelations. Phenomena only make sense through relationship. A nested whole is not a &#8220;thing&#8221; in the sense of an isolated object, it comes to presence within its parts. <strong>Interdependent unity is contextual. <\/strong>&#8211; p.400d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>by Jan Koenderink For a start To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees. p.21g To learn to see is partly to grasp intuitively (that means forgetting; this whole issue) that you don&#8217;t know what you see. &#8211; p.25d In physics one has observations without observers and actions without agents. Of &#8230; <a title=\"The Way of the Eye\" class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/?p=40152\" aria-label=\"Read more about The Way of the Eye\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[621],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40152","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40152","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40152"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40152\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40322,"href":"https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40152\/revisions\/40322"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}