Believing

Perceiving & Believing

In English we have a saying:
"Seeing Is Believing".
When we say it we are telling others that a second hand description of something was not enough, we needed proof from our own senses and now we have it. In the case of promises made by politicians or advertisements placed by used car dealers we tend to phrase it:
"I'll believe that when I see it!"

Much of our life experience can be put the other way round however:
"Believing is seeing."
What this means is that we see (or hear or generally sense) things as we believe them to be. In times past the Earth was believed to be flat and at the centre of the universe. The Sun, Moon, planets and stars were believed to revolve around the Earth, being kept in place and in motion by perfect, "crystal spheres". Before the idea of crystal spheres took on, the heavenly bodies were believed to be gods and goddesses. In fact in times past most of the processes of nature were attributed to divine agencies of one sort or another. In many places around the world even today this is the case.

You may want to disown these examples as being too distant from us, not relevant. There are many other instances which demonstrate this process however. It is most easily seen where perception of an object or event is made difficult by bad light, excessive noise or other distractions. Thus, for example, a picture, map, written page or a name on a street sign may be hard to decipher as daylight fades into dim street-light (star or moon light for country people). If you know before hand what the thing is supposed to be it is normally much easier to recognise. On the other hand the expectation of seeing or hearing something can be so strong that even in good conditions we can be mistaken and "see" what we want to rather than what is there. Camouflage, whether it is used by animals, plants or people, works on the principle of breaking up the natural, visual outline of a physical object by the use of striping or mottling of the surface colour scheme. Seeing through the deception is much easier if one already knows what to look for.

Another example is "things that go 'bump' in the night". Lying in bed with the lights out, unable to sleep, wondering and listening, can be interesting or downright unnerving depending on how one accounts for all the sounds one hears. If one already knows there are rats living under the roof or that the branch of a tree is touching one of the gutters and knocks when the wind blows, then it is so much easier to reassure oneself that a strange sound was not made by a burglar!

You may argue that all these examples only deal with direct perception of physical objects but perception and recognition of any kind of object involves a very complex process with decisions being made at many different stages. The same difficulties of perceiving so called physical objects as mentioned above also occur in perception of people (have I seen her before?), social scenes (is it a party, a crowd or a riot?) and in all manner of complex abstract situations in life (is it a capital or revenue expense?). Perceiving, whether by sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell, kinaesthesia or any combination of these, is fundamentally a matter of applying constructions [constructs]to the world.

Awareness - Conscious versus Unconscious mental processes

Our awareness - our day to day conscious awareness - is the end result of the automatic activity of the brain at its lower levels of organisation. This automatic activity is normally unconscious unless something occurs to confound a previously learned decision making process. When this happens, the mind/brain has to make a higher level decision about whether to spend time and energy concentrating on the problem, or to ignore it, perhaps storing away some fragmentary representation until a future situation invokes the appropriate association and allows it to become conscious.

But what determines whether something is conscious as such?
The ideas of conscious and unconscious mental processes have come to form a major feature of the study of mind and brain in the twentieth century because of evidence derived from many kinds of clinical and experimental situations. A unified theory of brain, mind and consciousness with which to account for the dichotomy has been lacking until quite recently however.

The best explanation I have come across for our experience of consciousness - and for why it seems to coincide with only a part of the total of brain and mental activity is as follows.

My (ego) consciousness is what it is like to be the model of self-in-the-world which my brain has created. I attribute this particularly succinct formulation to Susan Blackmore although I believe many others express the same basic idea in the language of their own discipline, eg Gerald Edelman[1], and Patricia Churchland.

It may be more correct [and long-winded?] to say that subjective awareness is in fact what it is like to be the moment by moment updating of the model of self and world. Why? Because we know that for anything to be really happening energy must be changing form and entropy increasing.

This explanation fits well with the idea of the mind as being a person’s model of the universe, the total of all the representations of significant external and internal things which the brain has experienced and which it uses to account for the world and to keep track of where, what, who the body is and where the next meal is coming from. In this scheme the model (or construct or image) of "self " [3] is vitally important. It is the central accounting mechanism of the wakeful brain and the focus [or should that be locus?] of all normal self-reference, whether in conversation, private thought or in gross physical action. "I" am only conscious of some thing, some person, some idea or some itch if the representation of her, him or it is linked into my self-model. If it is not then the brain may still be using that representation in sophisticated and creative ways and thus reacting in some way to the thing, person, idea, etcetera, which it represents but "I" am not consciously aware of it.

There are many ideas and useful insights to be drawn from this theory which I will consider in other pages. Right here we are looking at the nature of perception and recognition only and the claim I am making is fairly extreme. That is to say we normally only see (hear, smell, etc) what we know or believe in, and we do not see or we ignore what we do not know or believe in.

How so?

"The fundamental capacity of the brain of higher vertebrates, particularly humans, involves the construction of "representations", either as a result of interaction with the environment or spontaneously by an internal focusing of attention.......these representations are built up by the activation of neurons, whose dispersion throughout multiple cortical areas determines the figurative or abstract character of the representation...."[2]

It is these representations which constitute "the mind". If a particular thing or process in the external world is not represented within the brain then, for the individual concerned, that thing does not exist.

We create the world we live in, each one of us uniquely interpreting "it" out there by means of the concepts [constructs] we have learned. [4] We experience the world as being out there by what has been called projection. That is to say, patterns of stimulation from the environment evoke corresponding representations in the brain which may or may not be linked to the self model. If they are, we become consciously aware of whatever the thing is and place it out there in whatever location we have learnt is appropriate for it. If they are not linked to the self model we may none the less react to the thing without being aware of the fact.

Animal brains in general function like this, depending in each case of course on the size and complexity of the particular brain. For the simplest brains (the majority of animal species) most of the constructs they have are genetically predetermined and probably not very much altered by learning. The model of "self" may be quite rudimentary and hard-wired [or simply none existent]. For more complex brains, the ability to adapt the in-bred, "hard-wired" processing system is much greater.

The human being differs only in that constructs are acquired mostly from culture via language and social experiences, but built upon a strong instinctive foundation. Thus it is that the world each one of us experiences is projected from learned constructs. This makes our human world a cultural creation.

Whilst this might seem to be a form of solipsism - the philosophical [or perhaps more correctly "psychotic"] assertion that the world disappears when I am not looking at it - in fact the opposite is the case. What we are looking at here are the extremely practical details of how we deal with reality. What we are up against is the paradox at the centre of our human experience.

The Primary Paradox

The paradox is we assume our experience to be that of perceiving or dealing with the actual things "out there" [the category one thing];we assume that we are actually in contact with the real world.
[I.e. each of us assumes him/herself to be some kind of real "I" doing or seeing something.] Our assumption is a mistake however because our experience is actually what it is like to be a model of what is going on. This subjective impression of being here now is all constructed and because many parts of the self are not represented in the self-model due to ignorance or denial therefore our customary experience and thoughts about ourselves are flawed. Any action or reaction originating from such unrepresented parts [eg unconscious, habitual, emotional reactions] may either be subjectively experienced as an attribute of whatever person or thing is associated with the reaction or may be attributed to some other entity entirely.

What this means is that each one of us is only conscious of a very small part of the totality of his or her being but we are not normally aware of this limitation either. The consequences of this can be serious. For one thing we tend to blame other people when we feel bad about the situation we are in and tend not to accept responsibility for reactions to people and events. We also tend to explain things which result from unconscious processes of self in terms of external agencies. G/god/s, D/devil/s, unseen enemies, lucky charms and numbers, star signs, tribal totems and myriads of other signs and symbols.

If you think about this for long enough I believe you will start laughing - just like I do - because the joke is on us. Whatever the "real" world may be like, our experience is a virtual reality. Always. And each one of us is ...... a story. No more and no less.

An example

Here is the tale of how one person came to see the world as being a construction created by - and within - his own brain. My friend Peter Main has very graciously allowed me to use his story because he doesn't think he will get around to writing 'the book' -
not just yet anyway .

Peter Main's Story

It was a weekday morning, and I was getting dressed for work. I stood in my bedroom in my underwear, with a book in my hands. It was Richard L. Gregory's "The Intelligent Eye", which I had just bought the day before.

I had suddenly remembered, as I was dressing, that the book came with a red/green viewer for looking at red and green stereo drawings, of which there were a number in the book. To keep the viewer with it, the book had come shrink-wrapped, and for some reason I had not unwrapped it when I had returned home with it the day before. I'd just left it on my lowboy.

When I saw it there as I was dressing on that cold Monday morning I was suddenly struck with curiosity about the stereo images in the book. I tore off the shrink-wrapping then and there, put the viewer to my eyes, and having found a page of red and green line drawings, struggled to bring the separate images seen by each eye into fusion, to create the intended illusion of depth. Finally I managed to see a line drawing of a cube, a clear three-dimensional view right there before my eyes, the illusion of depth unmistakeable.

As I stood there gazing at the image, shivering slightly, my mind wandered - I thought idly of what would be involved in programming a computer to generate the two separate two-dimensional images, one for each eye, similar yet importantly different, that would be necessary to produce the illusion of depth on a computer screen - seen, of course, through exactly the kind of viewer I was using - red for one eye and green for the other, to make sure that each eye saw only the image intended for it. Such a computer-generated stereoscopic image of a cube, I pondered, would never have been seen by any human before. From the program within the computer to the flat, two-dimensional screen there would be only two flat line drawings, one in red and the other in green, just like those on the printed page of the book I held in my hands. Never seen by any human before! It was a momentous thought ...

So where, I wondered, would the /volume/ come from in such a computer-generated image of a cube? The volume enclosed within the edges of the cube, such as I so clearly saw before my eyes? Surely not from within the computer, where only electronic pulses represented the lines drawn on its screen. Not from the screen, either, for no flat, two-dimensional images can embrace tangible space, measurable volume. Nor from my eyes, for each eye again would see only one flat image projected onto its retina by its lens. And so through to the brain. Only within my brain would the two images find each other and fuse into a single representation of a three-dimensional cube, holding within its dozen lines a visible volume, right there in front of me, hovering above the page of the book. I would be the first human ever to see that three-dimensional space, that volume, in my imagined computer experiment!

Yet how could that volume be right there in front of my eyes, if it had never existed anywhere but within my brain? The answer hit me, standing there in my underwear, with such shattering force that I gasped out loud.

The stereoscopic cube would be no different, in any way at all so far as my eyes and brain are concerned, to normal vision. So my whole visual world must be a construction by my brain! Everything I see, everything I have ever seen, must have been put together inside my head on the basis of two flat images, one from each eye. The very space surrounding me must be within my head. No matter how difficult the idea seemed to be to grasp, there was no escape. I went over the reasoning again. It was airtight.

I gasped again. This realisation was going to change my philosophical life forever. Everything I had thought firm and final was up for re-evaluation.

I spent the rest of that day in a daze as the consequences of my insight dawned on me in a series of mental aftershocks. It was weeks, months even, before I reached some sort of stability, and when I did I had become a different person.

An in-depth discussion of the reality of Peter's view point is developed by Steven Lehar in a very nicely drawn set of cartoons putting both sides of the divide between direct perception or naive realism versus indirect perception or representationalsim.

One reason why all this is very important.

We can distinguish two main ways of understanding our human experience: naive realism versus indirect perception/representationalism. Naive realism can be seen as the root of all sorts of problems.

For instance, in a kindergarten or preschool [or any kind of school at any level for that matter] it can make a profound difference to the treatment children receive depending on what the teacher and caregivers understand about what may be going on in the children's heads. An uncritical assumption of naive realism or 'direct perception' will lead a teacher or carer to misinterpret the actions of many of the children. The teacher will assume the child is being disobedient when the child does not follow the instructions given. What is more likely to be true though, is that the child is not seeing the same things as the teacher when they are both looking at the paint pots, brushes and so forth. And when the child picks up the pot of paint or the water pot for brush cleaning, it will not be the same sensations. This only really makes sense when we understand that the child's brain is creating the sensations, constructing the experience.

If the teacher sees the child's behaviour as disobedience when it is in fact a misconstruction of the task because of perceptual or conceptual difficulty, it will be totally useless for the teacher to blame the child as if she deliberately did not follow instructions. In fact it will be harmful to the child.

Footnotes [NB: Alt+left arrow will take you back to where you were]
1	Gerald M Edelman: The Remembered Present: A Biological Theory of Consciousness, Basic Books, 1990, NY Bright Air, Brilliant Fire - On the Matter of the Mind Group Selection & Phasic Reentrant Signaling: A Theory of Higher Brain Function in The Mindful Brain G M Edelman & V B Mountcastle MIT Press [1982 Paperback ed][NB: Alt+left arrow will take you back]
2	Changeux, J.P.: Neuronal Man (The Biology of Mind) Pantheon Books' New York, 1985 [NB: Alt+left arrow will take you back]
3	To be strictly accurate, when referring to the brain's model of self we should put the word self in quotes ["self"] because the model is a construct of self, not the real self. The real self is unknowable, it cannot be truly represented for several reasons, not the least of which is the fact of it containing within itself a model of self. Any attempt to "truly" describe the self will fall foul of the recursive inclusion of a model within a model within a model....... Another problem is that in fact all purported *boundaries* of the self as such are arbitrary constructions made for a particular purpose. In the extreme we can each say that this subjective experience of me being me, right here and now, is what it is like to be *the universe* looking at itself from a particular point of view. Yet another problem is that the model of self in the normal person very strictly excludes certain features of the real self because these are not allowed to be acknowledged and expressed within the family and/or wider society of the individual. The spontaneous, natural impulses underlying these excluded features of self cannot be legislated out of existence however and so come into consciousness as ascribed attributes of *others* - that is as unconscious projections.
4	It is worth noting as we pass that *all learning is a spontaneous creative activity of the brain in question*. This has potent implications for any theories about education or child rearing.

Belief and Knowledge

Which is it? Do you believe what you see or
do you see what you believe?

This Page:

Perceiving & Believing

Awareness - Conscious versus Unconscious mental processes

The Primary Paradox

An example

Peter Main's Story

One reason why all this is very important.

Continuous Development

Belief and Knowledge

Which is it? Do you believe what you see or do you see what you believe?

This Page:

Perceiving & Believing

Awareness - Conscious versus Unconscious mental processes

The Primary Paradox

An example

Peter Main's Story

One reason why all this is very important.

Continuous Development

Which is it? Do you believe what you see or
do you see what you believe?