Topic: | Re:Re:Stopping the world and know-nothing state |
Posted by: | Eric Robbie |
Date/Time: | 08/04/2005 18:44:42 |
A correction: I was confusing David Marr, the computation-theory-of-vision psychologist, with Alan Marr, an NLP Practitioner and teacher of singing, who happens to live near me. Apologies all round. There is, of course, an interesting notion raised by your question: suppose we say that the experience you have of the world at speed is exactly what the world is 'affording' you. That is, it really is the case that bits of of your 'visual field' have all sorts of 'weird' things going on in them. - such as, the rate of expansion of elements from the centre out to the periphery being variable - sometimes slowing down, sometimes speeding up - even while the speed of other bits does not change; - such as the fact that elements of the 'array' seem to be moving in a non-linear fashion - that is, they seem to be moving in a bent or curved fashion; - such as, as well as bits of the array moving faster than other bits of the picture, your sense of time as measured by the passage of bits that do seem regular - that's all screwy, then maybe that is exactly what you are perceiving. Pure 'affordances'. And the eye and brain - which otherwise work flat out to 'stabilize' and regularize the image (yes, even the 'image' of moving) in 'normal' driving - either just can't keep up. Or else, they 'lose it', and they just let you see 'what's happening'. Supposing we did say that, then what would we call it? For sure, the stabilized image would be called First Attention by the authors of WITW, and the label you put on the experience - 'driving at speed'/'freeway hell'/'motorway driving' would be f2 in their terminology. (Strictly speaking, the result of an f2 transform.) But what would you call the direct perception? (Other than, perhaps, 'direct perception'?) What I understand people like David Marr to have said is that, yes, most of the time, we are arranging 'whatever comes in from out there' into some kind of stabilized image. He called it 'two and a half dimensional' computation. And he and others like him say that even 'simple' viewing is a matter of this computation. And that, as far as they're concerned, the funny aberrations of what you describe - fast driving - are just a sign that of the computation 'machinery' not quite keeping up with the 'computation' (kinda like a slow screen refresh on an Apple Mac running Photoshop when you don't have enough cache memory). But still I can't help thinking ... maybe ... but maybe ... there is no 'slow refresh' in people. Maybe sometimes what you get is that: you get to see what comes before 'First Attention'. ER. |