Perception as Faithful Depiction Current scientific theories of perception fall into two main classes: direct and indirect (see fungus gnats yates fulvicin 250mg. Sabra 1978) fungus gnats in yard discount 250 mg fulvicin with visa, typically claim that a goal of perception is to match, or at least approximate, useful properties of an objective physical world (Marr 1982). The physical world is taken to be objective in the sense that it does not depend on the perceiver for its existence. According to indirect theories, the information transduced at sensory receptors is not sufficiently rich, by itself, to determine a unique and correct match or approximation. Therefore the perceiver must infer properties of the world using constraining assumptions. For instance, in the perception of a three-dimensional shape from visual motion, the perceiver might use a rigidity assumption: If the image data could have arisen, in principle, by projection of the motion of a rigid three-dimensional body, 92 Hoffman then the visual system infers that the image data are, in fact, the projection of that rigid body (Ullman 1979). This inference might be couched in the mathematical framework of regularization theory (Poggio et al. Direct theories, which trace their origin to Gibson (1950, 1966, 1979/ 1986), agree with indirect theories that a goal of perception is to match an objective physical world, but argue that the sensory data are sufficiently rich that perceivers can, without inference, pick up true properties of the world, especially affordances, directly from these data. The debate between direct and indirect theories raises interesting issues (Fodor and Pylyshyn 1981, Ullman 1980). But what is pertinent here is that both agree on this: A goal of perception is to match or approximate true properties of an objective physical environment. This hypothesis is widespread and rarely questioned in the scientific study of perception. For instance, Stoffregen and Bardy (2001) state: We analyze three hypotheses about relations between ambient arrays and physical reality: (1) that there is an ambiguous relation between ambient energy arrays and physical reality, (2) that there is a unique relation between individual energy arrays and physical reality, and (3) that there is a redundant but unambiguous relation, within or across arrays, between energy arrays and physical reality. The first hypothesis is endorsed by indirect theories, and the second by some direct theories. They conclude in favor of the third hypothesis, viewing it as an extension of standard direct theories. Nowhere do they question the assumption of faithful depiction that is shared by all three; nor do any of the more than 30 commentaries on their article. They reject, for instance, "the seemingly sensible idea that the purpose of vision Conscious Realism and the Mind-Body Problem 93 is to perceive the world as it is. They simply recommend rejecting a version of the hypothesis that focuses exclusively on the present stimulus and the present state of the physical world. The purpose of vision is to perceive the world, not just as it is, but as it has been. Our perceptual systems do not try to approximate properties of an objective physical world. I propose that perception is like a multimodal user interface (Hoffman 1998, 2003). A successful user interface does not, in general, resemble 94 Hoffman what it represents. Because it simplifies, rather than resembles, a user interface usefully and swiftly informs the actions of the user. The features in an interface usually differ from those in the represented domain, with no loss of effectiveness. A perceptual user interface, simplifying and reformatting for the niche of an organism, gives that organism an adaptive advantage over one encumbered with constructing a complex approximation to the objective world. The race is to the swift; a user interface makes one swift by not resembling the world. This is not what textbooks or most perceptual experts say and therefore invites spelling out. You find the icon for the file, click on it with your mouse, drag it to the recycle-bin icon, and release. Of course what goes on behind the icons is quite complex: A central processor containing millions of transistors executes binary commands encoded as voltages in megabytes of memory, and directs the head on a hard drive to change the magnetic structure of a disk revolving thousands of times per minute. Fortunately, to delete a file you do not need to know anything about this complexity.
Natural selection prunes perceptual systems that do not usefully guide behavior for survival anti fungal infection tablets 250 mg fulvicin with amex, but natural selection does not prune perceptual systems because they do not approximate objective reality (see fungus gnats larvae control order fulvicin 250 mg visa. The perceptual systems of roaches, we suspect, give little insight into the complexities of objective reality. The same for lice, maggots, nematodes and an endless list of 112 Hoffman creatures that thrived long before the first hominoid appeared and will probably endure long after the last expires. Perceptual systems arise without justification from random mutations and, for 99 percent of all species that have sojourned the earth, without justification they have disappeared in extinction. The perceptual icons of a creature must quickly and successfully guide its behavior in its niche, but they need not give truth. Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness. It is, one must admit, logically possible that the perceptual icons of Homo sapiens, shaped by natural selection to permit survival in a niche, might also just happen to faithfully represent some true objects and properties of the objective world. But this would be a probabilistic miracle, a cosmic jackpot against odds dwarfing those of the state lottery. But this last response might not go far enough, for it grants that natural selection, understood within a physicalist framework, can shape conscious experience. Natural selection prunes functional propensities of an organism relevant to its reproductive success. But the scrambling theorem proves that conscious experiences are not identical with functional propensities (Hoffman 2006). Thus natural selection acting on functional propensities does not, ipso facto, act as well on conscious experiences. A non-reductive functionalist might counter that, although conscious experiences are not identical to functional properties, nevertheless conscious experiences are caused by functional properties, and thus are subject to shaping by natural selection. The problem with this, as we have discussed, is that no one has turned the idea of non-reductive functionalism into a genuine scientific theory, and the failure appears to be principled. Thus the burden of proof is clearly on those who wish to claim that natural selection, understood within a physicalist framework, can shape conscious experience. Understood within the framework of conscious realism, natural selection has no such obstructions to shaping conscious experiences. In particular, as discussed before, the phrase real world could mean the real worlds of our sensory perceptions, whose existence is observerdependent. Or it could mean a world that is objective, in the sense that it is observer-independent. Similarly, when this objection speaks of the physical world, it presumably assumes a physicalist ontology, with physical objects and properties that are observer-independent. If there is no observer-independent physical world, then there is no reason to build schemas of it. This might be counterintuitive to a physicalist, but it is not logically self-contradictory. With these provisos, we can now address the main question of this objection, which is why criteria of efficiency and usefulness should control the user interface. There is a reality independent of my perceptions, and my perceptions must be a useful guide to that reality. This reality consists of dynamical systems of conscious agents, not dynamical systems of unconscious matter. So if my sensory systems are to be efficient, they must dramatically simplify this complexity, and yet still provide a useful guide. Evo- 114 Hoffman lutionary considerations suggest that they might be functionally similar, since we are of the same species. This is the reason this paper sometimes employs the phrase "species-specific user interface". But evolutionary considerations also suggest that our interfaces will differ slightly in function, since random variations are essential for the operation of natural selection.
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This finding suggests nematodes for fungus gnats purchase 250mg fulvicin with visa, in the case of the paired-associate task anti fungal anti itch cheap fulvicin 250mg with amex, that the perirhinal cortex may contribute more to performance than the hippocampus. The effects of separate and combined lesions can be studied within the same species and the same tasks with an eye towards revealing qualitative, distinct effects of hippocampal lesions and lesions of perirhinal or entorhinal cortices. It remains possible that there is no simple division of labor between these regions, and that differences in function may be better understood as 96 J. If so, distinctive contributions of different structures may be difficult to reveal by behavioral measures. Damage limited to the hippocampal region produces long-lasting memory impairment in monkeys. Preserved recognition in a case of developmental amnesia; Implications for the acquisition of semantic memory. Rats with lesions of the hippocampus are impaired on the delayed nonmatching-to-sample task. Neurotoxic hippocampal lesions have no effect on odor span and little effect on odor recognition memory but produce significant impairments on spatial span, recognition, and alternation. Recognition impaired and association intact in the memory of monkeys after transaction of the fornix. Under what conditions is recognition spared relative to recall after selective hippocampal damage in humans? Hippocampectomy impairs the memory of recently, but not remotely, acquired trace eyeblink conditioned responses. Acquisition of post-morbid vocabulary and semantic facts in the absence of episodic memory. Differential modulation of a common memory retrieval network revealed by positron emission tomography. Impaired recognition memory on the Doors and People Test after damage limited to the hippocampal region. Effects on visual recognition of combined and separate ablations of the entorhinal and perirhinal cortex in rhesus monkeys. Nonrecurring-items delayed nonmatching-to-sample in rats: a new paradigm for testing nonspatial working memory. Object recognition and location memory in monkeys with excitotoxic lesions of the amygdala and hippocampus. Three cases of enduring memory impairment following bilateral damage limited to the hippocampal formation. Remote spatial memory in an amnesic person with extensive bilateral hippocampal lesions. Retrograde amnesia: a study of its relation to anterograde amnesia and semantic memory deficits. The neurology of memory: quantitative assessment of retrograde amnesia in two groups of amnesic patients. Profound amnesia following damage to the medial temporal lobe: a neuroanatomical and neuropsychological profile of patient E. Topographic organization of the reciprocal connections between the monkey entorhinal cortex and the perirhinal and parahippocampal cortices. Lesions of the perirhinal and parahippocampal cortices in the monkey produce long-lasting memory impairment in the visual and tactual modalities. Priming of semantic autobiographical knowledge: a case study of retrograde amnesia. Knowledge of New English vocabulary in amnesia: an examination of premorbidly acquired semantic memory. Lesions of rat perirhinal cortex exacerbate the memory deficit observed following damage to the fimbria-fornix. Lesions of the hippocampal formation but not lesions of the fornix or the mammillary nuclei produce long-lasting memory impairment in monkeys.
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