56
4 The Animal Sensorium
we hear, and the subjective way they sound to us, are biological constructs.
The broad sweep of different sounds that we discern, each with its own sensed
quality, is a basic component of our Sensorium.
Humans and other primates are, above all, visual creatures. The sense of sight
is primary for us, and it is largely through vision that we conceive the world.
When you think of objects such as a tree, a carrot, a house, a chair, or even an
atom, it is in terms of its visual appearance that you conceive it. Meanings are
especially vivid when presented to us visually. When we understand something,
we often say “I see”. The very word idea comes from a Greek root for seeing.
(So does our word theorem, because a theorem is something you must see in
your mind in order to understand.)
As discussed in Chapter 1, what we have the experience of seeing is not
the optical array projected on our retina. (It’s a good thing, too, because the
projected image on the retina is distorted and constantly jiggling and moving.)
The optical image (such as it is) goes no further than the eye. After that,
it is taken apart, and different abstract features of the image (form, color,
movement, depth) are analyzed in different brain areas. Aspects of the image
go through a great many way stations in the brain, and at the end of this
process a visual representation is induced in consciousness. This representation
is presented to the mind in the visual idiom which evolution has fashioned for
living creatures.
The visual image would be incomprehensible to us if it weren’t especially
coded in a way that we are innately prepared to understand. Most importantly,
the visual array is presented to the mind in terms of shapes. As already noted,
the external universe does not come pre-segmented into detached individual
objects: Rather, the mind divides the world into objects to make it intelligible.
Likewise, shapes are the mind’s way of grasping individual material things
and giving each an identity. Shapes, just like colors, “look like something”
to us: They have an appearance, a quality with which they appear, or present
themselves unto the soul, just as a note of a musical instrument does.
In order to understand that shapes are what objects look like to us—and are
not something that exists independently in the physical world—is extremely
difficult: The reason is that half-consciously, and by lifelong habit, we are
fully committed realists, and it is almost impossible to pry away from us the
conviction that if we see something, it’s because exactly that thing—with its
appearance and coloring just as we see it—is what is there. We are compelled
by nature to believe that the way objects look to us is what they actually look
like. However, outside of us objects don’t look like anything because to look
like is mental, not physical.
We do not recognize shapes on the basis of carefully articulated descriptions,
but spontaneously as unified Gestalts. It would be possible, hypothetically, for
4 The Animal Sensorium
we hear, and the subjective way they sound to us, are biological constructs.
The broad sweep of different sounds that we discern, each with its own sensed
quality, is a basic component of our Sensorium.
Humans and other primates are, above all, visual creatures. The sense of sight
is primary for us, and it is largely through vision that we conceive the world.
When you think of objects such as a tree, a carrot, a house, a chair, or even an
atom, it is in terms of its visual appearance that you conceive it. Meanings are
especially vivid when presented to us visually. When we understand something,
we often say “I see”. The very word idea comes from a Greek root for seeing.
(So does our word theorem, because a theorem is something you must see in
your mind in order to understand.)
As discussed in Chapter 1, what we have the experience of seeing is not
the optical array projected on our retina. (It’s a good thing, too, because the
projected image on the retina is distorted and constantly jiggling and moving.)
The optical image (such as it is) goes no further than the eye. After that,
it is taken apart, and different abstract features of the image (form, color,
movement, depth) are analyzed in different brain areas. Aspects of the image
go through a great many way stations in the brain, and at the end of this
process a visual representation is induced in consciousness. This representation
is presented to the mind in the visual idiom which evolution has fashioned for
living creatures.
The visual image would be incomprehensible to us if it weren’t especially
coded in a way that we are innately prepared to understand. Most importantly,
the visual array is presented to the mind in terms of shapes. As already noted,
the external universe does not come pre-segmented into detached individual
objects: Rather, the mind divides the world into objects to make it intelligible.
Likewise, shapes are the mind’s way of grasping individual material things
and giving each an identity. Shapes, just like colors, “look like something”
to us: They have an appearance, a quality with which they appear, or present
themselves unto the soul, just as a note of a musical instrument does.
In order to understand that shapes are what objects look like to us—and are
not something that exists independently in the physical world—is extremely
difficult: The reason is that half-consciously, and by lifelong habit, we are
fully committed realists, and it is almost impossible to pry away from us the
conviction that if we see something, it’s because exactly that thing—with its
appearance and coloring just as we see it—is what is there. We are compelled
by nature to believe that the way objects look to us is what they actually look
like. However, outside of us objects don’t look like anything because to look
like is mental, not physical.
We do not recognize shapes on the basis of carefully articulated descriptions,
but spontaneously as unified Gestalts. It would be possible, hypothetically, for