Varieties of Presence

Alva Noë, Alva Noe?, Alva Noe?, Alva Noe?, Alva Noe?

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780674068513
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Mente e corpo in filosofia

The world shows up for us—it is present in our thought and perception. But, as Alva Noë contends in his latest exploration of the problem of consciousness, it doesn't show up for free. The world is not simply available; it is achieved rather than given. As with a painting in a gallery, the world has no meaning—no presence to be experienced—apart from our able engagement with it. We must show up, too, and bring along what knowledge and skills we've cultivated. This means that education, skills acquisition, and technology can expand the world's availability to us and transform our consciousness.Although deeply philosophical, Varieties of Presence is nurtured by collaboration with scientists and artists. Cognitive science, dance, and performance art as well as Kant and Wittgenstein inform this literary and personal work of scholarship intended no less for artists and art theorists, psychologists, cognitive scientists, and anthropologists than for philosophers.Noë rejects the traditional representational theory of mind and its companion internalism, dismissing outright the notion that conceptual knowledge is radically distinct from other forms of practical ability or know-how. For him, perceptual presence and thought presence are species of the same genus. Both are varieties of exploration through which we achieve contact with the world. Forceful reflections on the nature of understanding, as well as substantial examination of the perceptual experience of pictures and what they depict or model are included in this far-ranging discussion.

1

Conscious Reference

IT IS not controversial that we perceive only what there is. We do so, however, only when a further condition is met: we only perceive what there is when it is there. Perceptual presence—being there for us to perceive—is not merely a matter of existence or proximity. It is a matter of availability. And what fixes the scope of what is available, beyond mere existence or proximity, is understanding. By understanding I mean conceptual knowledge, but also more practical forms of knowledge including what I will call sensorimotor knowledge. To see an object, it must be there for us, and to be there for us, we must, in some sense, know it.

Presence as Absence

I begin with vision, and with a somewhat paradoxical claim: Vision is not confined to the visible. We visually experience what is out of view, what is hidden or occluded.

The metaphor that has guided thought about vision is that of depiction, projection, and the camera obscura. I reject this metaphor.¹ We do not see the world insofar as it projects to a point.

Examples of hidden presence are ready to hand.

For example, you look at a tomato. You have a sense of its presence as a whole, even though the back of the tomato (for example) is hidden from view. You don’t merely think that the tomato has a back, or judge or infer that it is there. You have a sense, a visual sense, of its presence.

In what does the visual sense of the presence of the hidden parts of a thing consist, if it does not consist in the fact that we see them? This is the problem of perceptual presence—or better: the problem of presence in absence. The object shows up for visual consciousness precisely as unseen.

Philosophers may find themselves unconvinced that this is a problem. Some will insist that we don’t really experience the visual presence of the occluded parts of the things we see. At best, we think we do. I demur: It is bedrock, phenomenologically speaking, that the tomato looks voluminous, that it looks to have a back. Which is not to say that we take ourselves to see the hidden parts of things before us. The thing that needs explaining is not that we mistakenly take ourselves to see something that we don’t see. The puzzle is that we take ourselves to have a sense of the presence in perception of something that is manifestly out of view.

Other philosophers have a converse sort of worry; they deny that it is true to say, when you see a thing, that you only see the facing part of it. Such a claim, they urge, distorts the character of visual experience. We see tomatoes, after all, not tomato parts! We live among objects, not sense data!

A simple observation suffices to meet this worry. To appreciate the phenomenon of perceptual presence there is no need to insist that we only see the face of the tomato. We need only admit that we can’t see the tomato’s back. How can the tomato’s back show up in experience when we manifestly do not see it?

Scientists are not nonplussed by this question and may think they have the answer. We see what the relevant neurophysiology represents. We visually experience the presence of a voluminous furrowed ovoid if that is what the nervous system represents. End of story. But that can’t be the end of our story. It is definitely a relief to know that neurophysiology gets into the act; it would be upsetting if there were no traces in neurophysiology of important differences in our experience. The trouble is this: neurons speak only one language, that of the receptive field. And there is no way to say “presence in absence” in the receptive-field idiom. Neurons can modulate the strength of their activity to signify the presence of a feature in their receptive field; they signify the absence of a feature by failing in any way to modulate their activity. What they can’t do is fire in such a way as to signal that a hidden feature is present.

A somewhat more promising line of empirical research was initiated by Nakayama, He, and Shimojo (1990). They turn away from neurophysiology and argue that the visual system plays the odds. We see whatever is judged most likely to have produced the image we receive. If you are presented with a cube in such a way that you can only see one of its faces head-on, you won’t have a visual experience of a cube. The odds are just too low, the system reasons, for your relation to a cube to have projected that image. When you take up a low-odds angle on a thing, in this way, the system (the visual system that is) lets you down. A striking feature of this account is that it lays importance on such facts as that perceivers have a perspective on what they see; that how things look varies as the perspective changes; that how things look carries all sorts of information about what one is looking at.² But what a theory such as this does not explain is how the fact that the visual system represents a cube (or that there is a cube) causes you to experience the cube in just the way you do, that is, with just the right presence-in-absence structure. It is this fact—a fact that the theory treats as brute—that needs explaining.³

The problem of perceptual presence is very general. Under this heading we can group the so-called perceptual constancies.

Consider the color of an unevenly lit wall. You experience the uniform color across the surface of the wall despite variations in brightness across its surface and despite the fact that variations in brightness make for local differences in color. The actual color of the wall, like the back of the tomato, is hidden from view, and yet you experience it. It shows up in your experience.

Or take a look at the window. You see the rectangular shape of the window even though, from where you stand, the window’s profile is not rectangular but trapezoidal. There is a sense, then, in which you can’t see the actual rectangularity of the window; it is present, but out of view. You have a visual sense of its presence even though it is hidden from view.

Finally, consider a different kind of phenomenon: your sense now of the busy detail in the room before you. You have a sense of the presence of lots of people and color and detail. Of course, it is not the case that you actually see everyone in sharp focus and uniform detail from the center out to the periphery. We know that isn’t true. It doesn’t seem as if it’s true. You no more directly see all the detail than you see the underlying color of the wall or the back of the tomato. And yet you have a perceptual sense of its presence.

These features of the world—the tomato’s body, the wall’s color, the window’s shape, the detailed environment—fall within the scope of your perceptual awareness despite the fact that they are, in a straightforward way, out of view, or concealed, or hidden, or absent. They are present in experience—they are there—despite the fact that they are absent in the sense of out of view. They are present precisely as absent.

In what does the sense of the presence of these hidden features consist, in what does their visual presence consist, if not in the fact that we actually see them? This problem of perceptual presence is a basic and pressing problem for the general theory of perception.

What stands in the way of our comprehension of the phenomenon of perceptual presence is our reluctance to admit the deep amodality of perceptual consciousness. Let me say something more about this surprising and underappreciated amodality. The back of the tomato, the wall’s color, the detail in the room, the window’s shape—these are all hidden from view. They are present as absent; they are amodally present. And we suppose, optimistically, that at least the face of the tomato, the wall’s apparent colors, this or that piece of detail, the window’s profile—all these at least are given unproblematically. They are simply present.

But stop and look again, for example, at the face of the tomato. You can’t comprehend the whole of it all at once in your visual consciousness. You focus on the color now, but in doing so, you fail to pay attention to the shape, or to the variations in brightness across the surface. You focus now on this portion of the tomato’s surface, but only at the price of ignoring the rest of it. You can no more achieve perceptual consciousness of every aspect of the tomato’s front side all at once than you can see the tomato from every side at once. Indeed, no perceptual quality is so simple that it can be consumed by consciousness. (The idea of simple qualia is a myth.) Experience, in the large, and in the small, is complex and manifold; it is always an encounter with hidden complexity. Experience is fractal in this sense. Perceptual experience extends to the hidden. In a way, for perception, everything is hidden. Nothing is given.

Presence as Availability

Here is the solution.⁴ The fact that we visually experience what is occluded shows that what is visible is not what projects to a point. I propose, instead, that we think of what is visible as what is available from a place. Perceptual presence is availability.

For example, my sense of the presence of the detail in the room before me consists not in the fact that I represent it all in my consciousness in the way a picture might—all the detail spread out at once in sharp focus and high resolution. It does not even seem as if the detail is present in my mind in that way. It seems as if the detail is present in the world, out there, before me and around me. The detail shows up not as “represented in my mind,” but as available to me. It shows up as present—and this is crucial—in that I understand, implicitly, practically, that by the merest movement of my eyes and head I can secure access to an element that now is obscured on the periphery of the visual field. It now shows up as present, but out of view, insofar as I understand that I am now related to it by familiar patterns of motorsensory dependence. It is my basic understanding of the way my movements produce sensory change given my situation that makes it the case, now, even before I’ve moved a jot, that elements outside of focus and attention can be perceptually present.

Likewise, my sense of the visual presence of the tomato’s back—in contrast, say, with that of the tomato’s insides—consists in practical understanding that simple movements of my head and body in relation to the tomato would bring the back into view. It is visually present to me now; but because I understand that I now have a distinctively visual style of access to it. And the basis of this access is my mastery of the ways in which my movements produce sensory change.

The proposal, then, is this: perceptual consciousness is a special style of access to the world. But access is not something bare, brute or found. The ground of access is our possession of knowledge, understanding, and skills. Without understanding, there is no access and so no perception. My emphasis here is on a special kind of understanding that distinctively underwrites our perceptual access to objects and properties, namely, sensorimotor understanding. We can see what there is when it is there, and what makes it the case that it is there is the fact that we comprehend its sensorimotor significance. Sensorimotor understanding brings the world into focus for perceptual consciousness.

A surprising and fascinating consequence of the idea that we need understanding to perceive is that it is impossible to perceive real novelty. Schubert hinted at this when he explained why it is not difficult to write great songs. You simply need to come up with new melodies that sound as if they are familiar.⁵ In a way this is a comment about styles; if a work doesn’t make sense against a background of styles, then at best it can only be “ahead of its time.” But the point is deeper and more general. To perceive something, you must understand it, and to understand it you must, in a way, already know it, you must have already made its acquaintance.

There are no novel experiences. The conditions of novelty are, in effect, the conditions of invisibility. To experience something, you must comprehend it by the familiarizing work of the understanding. You must master it. Domesticate it. Know it.

I said before that nothing is given. We might say: if anything is given, everything is. If the front of the tomato is given, then so is the back. And the nature of our access to the front is of a kind with that of our access to the back. The thing (front and back) is there for us, present, in reach. Crucially, to be conscious of something is not to depict it, or to represent it. To perceive something is not to consume it, just as it isn’t a matter of constructing, within our brains or minds, a model or picture or representation of the world without. There is no need. The world is right there and it suffices. At most we can meet the world. Stand with it, up against it. The tomato is right there, front and back, for us to explore.

Once we give up the idea that real seeing is having an object or a detailed scene in all its aspects in focal attention, all at once, we can appreciate more fully what is wrong with the philosopher’s objection raised at the outset about sense data. The worry was that we live among objects, not sense data, and that it is therefore a mistake to think that, when we are perceptually engaged with things, we are also aware of how things look from a particular vantage point. In this spirit, Sean Kelly, for example, balks at the claim that you are aware of the trapezoidal perspectival shape when you see the rectangular window from here.⁶

He allows that you can learn to make yourself see the perspectival shapes of things, but he insists that doing so requires detachment and taking up “the painterly attitude.” And anyway, the fact that we can make the effort to direct our attention to the perspectival shape gives us no reason to think that we are aware of the perspectival shape (how the object looks with respect to shape) whenever we see its shape. It is no easier to see the shape and the perspectival shape, at once, than it is to see the duck in the famous Jastrow figure and the rabbit at the same time. To do that is to commit a nearly impossible feat of divided attention!

Kelly is right that the duck and the rabbit exclude each other; how best to understand that phenomenon is worth careful consideration. It is beside the point here, however. Seeing the window’s shape, and how it looks with respect to shape from here, is not like seeing the duck and the rabbit at once; it is like seeing the duck and the lines on paper at once. And it is easy to do this. But what makes it easy is not that it is a simpler attentional task. What makes it easy is that it isn’t an attentional task at all. Seeing the duck, and the lines on paper, is not a matter of dividing attention between them; it’s simply a matter of having skillful access to them both at once. The world shows up for perceptual consciousness insofar as it is available in the distinctively perceptual way, i.e. thanks to the perceiver’s knowingly and skillfully standing in the right sort of sensorimotor relation to things. Awareness extends to that to which we have access and does not require divided attention. We see the duck, and the lines, the window’s shape, and its apparent shape, just as we see the object and its size, color, shape, etc.

In fact, things are a bit more complicated. It is not enough for perceptual presence that movements of the body can bring now hidden elements into view. After all, movements of the body will bring the hallway outside this room into view, but we would not want to say, without further ado, that the hallway is visually present. Perceptual presence requires a more complicated two-way relation to the perceptual object. Perceptual consciousness is transactional, as Putnam (1999) has put it, following Dewey.

It must not only be the case that the perceiver’s movements produce changes in the character of the standing motorsensory relation; it mus...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Free Presence
• 1. Conscious Reference
• 2. Fragile Styles
• 3. Real Presence
• 4. Experience of the World in Time
• 5. Presence in Pictures
• 6. On Over-Intellectualizing the Intellect
• 7. Ideology and the Third Realm
• Afterword
• Appendix: A List
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index