Slashdot Mirror
Vision is a 'Reflex'
kernkopje writes "A recently publicized book by two neurobiologists at Duke University introduces an interesting emperical theory on vision. Rather than postulating a visual system that generates a picture of what actually exists in front of the viewer, they theorize that evolution, as well as life experience, has created a visual system in which perceptions represent what a given visual stimulus has typically signified in the past. Admiring the view from a high building, staring at a beautiful woman, shapes, colors, textures, it's basically all the same knee-jerk response...
The news release is here, read more about the concept here. Their lab work & results can be found here."
... it's not exactly a knee jerk reaction...
Reliable, Great Value Hosting: $7.95/mo 2.4G/120G
Whilst this article is interesting, and raises some interesting points, they seem to come to some very radical conclusions, based on what can only be called a mistaken belief that vision is 'about' something. They claim that rather than perceiving what is out there, we perceive what we've been trained to see, by past experience individually and of the species.
Well, we can take this two ways. We could say that we've grown eyes and a complete visual system purely based on previous stimuli, in which case it's obvious that new stimuli will only be interpreted in terms of past stimuli. Or we can say that we currently have an apparatus, and despite the fact that something we're immediately seeing might be ambiguous and look like something we've previously seen we could have further sense data that tell us that it isn't what we'd seen before - so what looks like a famous statue could be revealed to just be a photograph of a famous statue when you move around and see that it doesn't change corresponding to how it should.
But either of these interpretations - the past-centric and future-centric ones - are just that, interpretations. They still aren't 'about' anything.
What this article seems to be claiming is that anything you're currently seeing is actually 'about' things in the past, but clearly this isn't true. Vision isn't 'about' anything. When you have a robot with sensors you don't say that when they 'see' an object in their way what they're seeing is 'about' their programming, so they're not actually seeing anything in the present.
Sorry, I'm not putting this very well. Basically I'm trying to say that either their claim is banal - the obvious fact that our eyes are only capable of creating objects in our 'minds' based on things that have been saliant in the past (such as emphasising red objects - i.e. berries - in a green field - i.e. leaves - more that they actually contrast), since obviously our visual system has evolved based on what has been saliant in the past. Or they are making an incorrect claim that current vision is just 'seeing the past' because we don't actually get new ideas from our visual fields, we just try to fit it into previous sets of sense data. The reason that this must be incorrect is that past sense data is no more 'real' no more 'seeing actual objects' than current sense data. So if I see an apple now, it isn't fair to say I only know it's an apple because I've seen apples before because the only sense in which I've seen apples before is the sense in which I'm currently seeing apples. There isn't a 'good old days' when we really saw things, and which we're just reminding ourselves of every time we try to see again...
Why? Because nothing revolutionary has ever had given me the message "Flash error: version 6 or better required."