Affordances and Awareness ✍️
What we perceive and why
Summary
This week an essay on affordances and why we perceive what we do. I've written about affordances before but a conversation earlier in the week made me want to try another take on them. I also didn’t have a full book to review but there is a recommendation for a great essay.
Affordances and Awareness
It is a bit of a tautology but it is worth considering that we must always perceive the world in relation to ourselves. Our perspective shapes what the world can be. When you look at the kettle in your kitchen you do not see all the kettles in the world, equally you do not see the far side of the kettle from where you are standing, nor the atomic components of the metal coil that allows it to heat up the water.
This perspective dependancy is part of the reason why it's not possible for our perception to be the result of 'processing' raw inputs later like a computer. Such a system would imply either a processor component that lives inside the brain which begs the question of where that processor's processor lives1 or the possibility of our really being a perspective-less agent able to then determine specific perspectives, but a constrained agent without perspective is absurd2.
If we wish to avoid this infinite regress or an appeal to some perspective-less machine, we have to say that we not only perceive the world from a particular frame but that what we perceive contains real content defined in relation to us. Another way to put this might be that when you look at something you do not see specific patterns of light devoid of content and later determine what it means. Instead the objects are presented concomitant with their meaning in relation to you. When looking at a chair you do not see colour and line and later piece it together instead you see, directly, a ‘sitting place'3. This is the idea of affordances.
Affordances make up the 'stuff' of the world and allow us to navigate it successfully. There is another, more mysterious, aspect of perception however, the 'why' we see what we see. How do we come to perceive the things that we do? i.e. what determines what enters our consciousness?
Speaking about or trying to define consciousness is always risky, but one thing that can be said - hopefully without generating too much opprobrium - is that the content of consciousness is bandwidth constrained. In other words there is only so much that can be held in the mind at any one time4. When we perceive something it is essentially a choice of what the bandwidth will be taken up by.
It is likewise intuitive to us that consciousness plays some role in determining our future actions. If the world is made up of affordances then it seems reasonable to think that what we perceive affords some opportunity or risk. Both opportunity and risk imply uncertainty so, in part, this would mean we are choosing to fill the bandwidth of consciousness with the places where the affordance structure - how we can interact with the world - are not yet perfectly clear5. In short, consciousness is a kind of focus where our capabilities have not yet fully mapped our environments.
When you look at the world you see the things that you could do, these are your affordances. When a set of affordances rises to awareness it means that they are on the edge of your existing capability structures. Each moment of awareness is a chance to learn a new way of interacting with the world. Pay attention!
I have no full book review this week but I did read Religion & Morality by Tolstoy. Two Quotes: “the essence of religion [is] the answer to the question, Wherefore do I live, and what is my relation to the infinite universe about me?” and “He may be as unaware of the possession of one as of the other, but neither without a heart nor without a religion can man exist”. If this seems like something that would interest you I highly recommend it. Like all of Tolstoy’s religious writings it is perhaps a touch polemical but undoubtedly profound.
More formally this is known as a homunculus argument
This is not to say that there are not satisfying non-dualist arguments to be made here. Only that in a worldview where we take ourselves to be distinct agent the idea that we could be free from perspective doesn’t make sense.
This answers the question of what you perceive but leaves open the question of the mechanism for ‘collecting’ that content, or in other words an understanding of what exactly the retina is doing. For example, we know that it contains neurons associated with lines and colour etc. and this must fit into our understanding of perception somehow. James J. Gibson presents one potential way of understanding what is going on in The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. His argument is detailed but to give a flavour of it, the most important thrust is to change the question from “What is the retina doing?” to “What is the retina, in an eye, as part of a head, on a body, supported by the ground doing?”. We do not simply have a bundle of neurons but a whole perceptual system.
This also accords with our experience. Once you have fully mapped your capabilities to the world you can act without bothering with perception. All of us have had the experience of doing a routine, like returning home from work, on autopilot only to realise 20 minutes later that we hadn't been aware of anything we had done.