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Action in Perception (Representation and Mind)

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Finally, after all these years, we're starting to unlearn duality. There aren't two planes of reality, the physical and the mental. There are not two regions of the cosmos, the heavenly and the terrestrial. There isn't me over here, and the world over there. There's only the world, which happens to include me: the real world, the only one there is. It's where we live. The 21st century is the perfect date to begin exploring our new (same old, beautiful) world. These are a few of the rapturous thoughts this book evokes in your present reviewer. 'Action in Perception' is really fun, really smart, and really deep. It's about a completely new way to think about what perception is. Noe suggests that we don't perceive IN ORDER to move around in the world; perception just IS moving around in the world. One of his many beautiful examples goes like this (I paraphrase). Here are two trees, one closer to me, one farther. I experience them as more or less the same height. But WHY would I experience it this way, given that the closer tree takes up so much more of my visual field than the far one? Answer: The far tree doesn't look as tall as the near tree IN SPITE OF the fact that it crosses a smaller part of my visual field -- it looks as tall as the near tree BECAUSE it crosses a smaller part of my visual field, and this is just what I would expect, having experienced HOW the "apparent" sizes of things tend to CHANGE as I move through the world. The structure of the world is not stored in a 3D model in my brain -- why would I need such a model, when the world itself is out there for me to look at whenever I want to? -- what I hold onto (or, in some cases, am born with) are what might be called physical heuristics: patterns of how the shapes around me tend to change as I move. I believe this table to be rectangular not DESPITE the fact that its "apparent" shape changes as I walk around it, but BECAUSE its "apparent" shape changes as I walk around it -- in a specific pattern with which I am familiar. That pattern of geometric transformations is how I RECOGNIZE a rectangular surface. I'm probably not conveying these examples very well, but if the ideas I've been babbling about here sound at all intriguing to you, you will enjoy this book tremendously.

Noe convincingly makes the point that perception (especially vision) is not anything like what a camera does. Vision is an activity of the whole organism, and what we see are meaningful affordances, not "snapshots" of scenes. He makes much of the "hidden gorilla" experiments demonstrating change blindness to illustrate that we do not see everything that is there, only what we expect, want, and need to see. Easy to read, mind-stretching ideas. However, he is ultimately, like Gibson, a physicalist and a realist, appealing in the end to a neurological homunculus, as all physicalists must. So there isn't much to push the philosophy of perception. Gibson said all this in 1966 and 1979. But for a concise, empirically based definition of perception as action, this is it.

"Noë provides a persuasive account of the "enactive" approach to perception, according to which perception is not simply based on the processing of sensory information, or on the construction of internal representations, but is fundamentally shaped by the motor possibilities of the perceiving body. ... Noë puts the brain back into the body, and the body back into the world. ... The action, for enactive theorists, is not in the brain; it is the organism as a whole acting in the environment that must be treated as the site of perception. ... After reading
Noë, any account of perception purely in terms of brain representations seems rather washed out." (Shaun Gallagher, Times Literary Supplement).

To perceive, according to Nöe, is to understand the relation between our sensory data and bodily skills. To perceive an object in the world, say a cube, we must possess knowledge of how our visual input would change were we to move in relation to the object, and sense-data without such sensory-motor knowledge is blind (or, at the least, not compatible with our phenomenological experience of the world). In this way, our perception is fundamentally and inseparably tied to our embodiment. Although a controversial claim, Nöe makes the case with care and rigor, drawing on neurological evidence for experiential blindness and addressing likely and stated objections from philosophy.

The book is written in a manner that non-philosophers will grasp its main arguments, though philosophers and cognitive scientists concerned with understanding the nature of experience are the intended audience. The only criticism I find is that it does not attempt an account of how its ideas can be captured in a computational framework, though I suspect cognitive modelers will follow in the path set out by this book.

Noe's book is both a serious contributor to the contemporary phenomenological project, and a delight to read. A combination that's no common accomplishment.

Action in Perception is a book that points out a way of thinking that was developed not recently, but rather thousands of years ago. While many have tried to describe it by calling it " feeling spiritual energy flow through you," the concept itself of doing actions in order to expand your perceptions is something found in the Ancient customs of Martial Arts.

Many Martial Artists may not know this, but the "forms" they do in the western world are not just for "perfection of movement." This is an impossibly, and is not it's true purpose. Rather, the forms are to have the person "feel" their bodie's movement. Overtime, they slowly take away other perception, while told to repetitiously do the same movements, until they can do them perfectly without the usage of sight, sound, taste, and smell. Only their skin detects everybody; the small electrical currents and vibrations given off by the other person.

This is only a surface of what was developed over the perception ideal within eastern culture. When it was brought to the west, these secrets were lost to many, covered in the honor traditions and other stuff that really mean little. But This book shows this way of thought in a western description, and that is why it may help others understand this knowledge once again, in a languege they can understand.