Visual Perception is Vertical: James Gibson's discovery

We resume our series of posts reviewing Dr Wolfgang Smith's 2019 monumental monograph: Physics & Vertical Causation, the End of Quantum Reality. (Angelico Press, 2019, also available on Amazon Kindle)

For further reading on this and related material, see the Philos-Sophia Initiative website.

Houghton Mifflin; First Edition edition (1950)

Today's post will focus on how we ''see''. For many generations, the official view was that the eye is in effect a camera and that what we see is based upon a retinal image. Dr Smith introduces at this point the remarkable empirical research and insight of a cognitive psychologist at Cornell University, named James Gibson (1904-1979). Gibson argued that what we perceive visually is not an image but ''invariants'' in light reflected from the ''ecological environment''. Astonishingly, this terminology corresponds more or less precisely to the terms of Smith's own analysis. The ''ecological environment'' corresponds to Smith's corporeal domain and the ''invariants'' that we ''pick up'' in the act of visual perception are none other than the forms. This means that we perceive not a mere image or effect of that world but the very forms that constitute its reality.



In Smith's own words:

Gibson’s discovery ... amounts thus to a scientific refutation of the Cartesian doctrine: specifically its epistemology, which affirms that the object of perception constitutes a mere phantasm or “thing of the mind.” Even as Heisenberg’s physics has demonstrated that there exists actually no such thing as a Cartesian res extensa, so has Gibson’s discovery toppled the second pillar of the Cartesian edifice: the misbegotten notion of res cogitans.

1979. Available via Amazon Kindle

Accordingly, visual perception cannot be understood by merely looking at the retina and neurons in the brain. They are indeed part of a process but when I see an apple, for example, my visual perception is more than the sum of the various parts of the process. Smith points out that this ''more'' is none other than the ''soul.''

Scientists, such as Francis Crick, had noted that they had been able to see how the brain's neurons and particular processes can take a picture apart but were unable to see how they put it together as an identifiable entity. Smith then concludes this particular section with an elegant simplicity.

The soul is ontologically not subject to the bounds of space. The soul can therefore be present to each cell in the body, not in some fragment of itself, but in its entirety. This ubiquity of its wholeness is therefore the ''more'' referred to in the preceding paragraph. Apart from transcending the bounds of space, however, the soul transcends the bounds of time. This was revealed in Gibson's experiments comparing perception of still scenes with moving scenes. He concluded that we perceive motion not ''moment by moment'' but all at once - the only way that motion can be perceived. Were it to be otherwise, we would not see motion but a succession of images.

Visual perception, therefore, constitutes a vertical act, transcending time and space; it is effected by means of the soul which does in truth have access to eternity.