I’ve written many times before about the idea of “affordances”, as first developed by James J. Gibson.
Gibson came up with the idea to try and make sense of how perception works. Today, most people’s model of how humans visually perceive the world can be summarised as: ‘light is taken in by the eye and processing happens in the brain to create a representation of the world’. While most are satisfied with this description it is in fact incomplete.
No matter how specific your mechanical description - you could get down to a precise articulation of every neuron that fires - there is an unbridgeable gap between that description and the perception itself that emerges as meaningful and real for a person. (I wrote more about this in the introduction here)
Gibson introduced the idea of affordances to try and solve this issue. In the language of affordances: there is a fit between the environment and the animal. Some surfaces are walk-on-able, others fall-off-able, some items afford grasping, others afford throwing and so forth. For Gibson it is this formal structure, the affordance, not the light data that constitutes the fundamental unit of perception.
This essay is unfortunately too short to satisfactorily prove this framing for how perception operates to a scientifically minded person. To do that you need a description of how the environment could relay the information of an affordance as well as the empirical evidence to support this view. Luckily, Gibson wrote one of the most astounding scientific works ever to capture this full paradigm. However, I can here talk about why this matters.
According to Max Weber, we live in a disenchanted world. Starting with Galileo, and gaining momentum with Newton and Laplace, we have come to see all the processes of the world in terms of objective causal models. Changes in state akin to rolling balls down inclined planes.
Today our resulting perspective is scientific, secular and rational through and through. We believe that everything is ultimately determined by these lifeless processes without an inherent meaning for us.
This is even true of many modern religious people. Evangelical groups that promote Intelligent Design are approaching the world with the same scientific and rational belief system they simply replace the facts with a set derived from their particular religious heritage. This perspective contributes to our failure to take beauty seriously, our sense that our lives are meaningless, and the inability to find shared political ground in a higher purpose.
If the idea of affordances is right, it would offer a way fundamentally flip our worldview using the very scientific perspective that we hold so firmly.
Instead of looking out into a lifeless and mechanistic world, meaning and relevance would be the primary substance of perception. Our primary understanding of a cup as a ceramic object containing atoms in liquid phase would be invalidated. We could again take the common sense view that it is a vessel with a graspable handle which contains something drinkable. Instead of seeing a room filled with furniture we would see a space filled with possibilities for action. Our world would be re-enchanted.
Thanks to Casey Li for reading a draft of this essay
Links
The Covid Fudge Factor
A really lovely piece of citizen data analysis and journalism looking at reported covid cases, excess mortality and the implied ‘fudge factor’ or the degree to which countries misled about the impact that covid had on their nation. In conclusion the author makes a compelling case around whether or not the Australian and New Zealand lockdowns were in fact justified.
Creativity Requires Optimism and Twitter should be in the Truth Business
As we watch the drama unfurl with Elon Musk’s Twitter I keep reminding myself about why he has been so inspiring to so many in the first place. SpaceX and Tesla (and PayPal) have been nothing if not creative. “If you're making something that doesn't exist, you must believe that it can.”
I have qualms with a lot of Curtis Yarvin’s views about the world but there are some gems in this most recent piece on what a truly bold vision for Twitter would look like. One quote to give the gist of the piece:
The new Twitter management has three ways to work with truth: to ignore truth; to outsource truth; and to insource truth. The normal strategy is the second. The obvious alternative strategy is the first. The most visionary strategy is the third.