The Interface Theory of Perception

[Telecaster]

Some food for thought: http://www.psychonomic.org/featured-content-detail/interface-theory-of-perception-future-of-science-o

-Dave-

[Rob C]

David, these sorts of propositions work because the writer says that they do.

Fortunately, it's just gone eleven at night here, and I'm getting bug-eyed looking at the screen. I say fortunately, because that means that my exhausted mind is now protected by a reality filter that screens out the over-complex, the chimera kind of stuff that isn't really going to make sense at all, other than to the fresh mind, to which it appears (at first trawl) that perhaps it can, this thus forcing that fresh mind into an avenue to nowhere. Knackeredness, on the other hand, saves you...

;-)

Rob C

[Diego Pigozzo]

Some food for thought: http://www.psychonomic.org/featured-content-detail/interface-theory-of-perception-future-of-science-o

-Dave-

I'm sorry to say, but it's just nonsensical babbling.

Suffice to analyze this sentence:

How could evolution favor veridical perception if the truth doesn’t help make babies?

Does it matter, for someone to have babies, to have a "veridical perception" of an approching tiger?

Hardly someone that have the false perception that the tiger is a butterfly will end up with having babies.

[Diego Pigozzo]

That false perception and a fear of butterflies…

Possibly.

Reading the link I'm amazed by how close these guys came to realize they are just babbling:

How could evolution favor veridical perception if the truth doesn’t help make babies? It can’t unless it does so accidentally (i.e., it's a spandrel), which is highly unlikely given the complexity of our perceptual systems, or unless truth and fitness are monotonically related.

That's their problem: they don't see that truth and fitness are indeed monotonically related (up to the point where the cognitive load became too high).

[PeterAit]

Some food for thought: http://www.psychonomic.org/featured-content-detail/interface-theory-of-perception-future-of-science-o

-Dave-

This guy raises ignorance to a whole new level.

[Tim Lookingbill]

More useless information. Movin' on.

[Isaac]

That's their problem: they don't see that truth and fitness are indeed monotonically related (up to the point where the cognitive load became too high).

So you agree with them, but your problem is that you don't understand how quickly the cognitive load became too high.

[amolitor]

Huh? This isn't even a debate, this is pretty much basic.

I mean, straight off, our color perception is clearly just as postulated. We don't see color "truthfully", although we certainly think we do. There's tons of physical colors that produce exactly the same perception, the point is that we distinguish colors well enough to be useful. It's well established that what we think of as "perception of the real world" is in fact largely an invention of our brain. This isn't really something about which there's any question.

Worrying about what ultimate causality is doesn't strike me as particularly useful, and it's not really a psychological question.

[amolitor]

Just to laboriously drag it back to photography, because I can, the authors argue that what we "perceive" is not in fact a particularly accurate representation of the real world, but a set of metaphors that model the real world sufficiently well for survival and reproduction.

Arguably, this is why photographs work at all. They are manifestly not copies of what they depict, and yet we're able to somehow connect the flat piece of paper with the girl. Without quite a lot of flex in our perceptual systems that wouldn't happen.

[Telecaster]

Just to laboriously drag it back to photography, because I can, the authors argue that what we "perceive" is not in fact a particularly accurate representation of the real world, but a set of metaphors that model the real world sufficiently well for survival and reproduction.

Arguably, this is why photographs work at all. They are manifestly not copies of what they depict, and yet we're able to somehow connect the flat piece of paper with the girl. Without quite a lot of flex in our perceptual systems that wouldn't happen.

Yes, this is basically what I find worthwhile about the piece. But note that this summary isn't the actual paper. It does, though, include a link to a PDF of the paper.

I don't find anything controversial in the proposition that our perceptual systems are tuned for survival & reproduction rather than any kind of objective accuracy. As to whether or not the authors have identified the means by which this works: dunno. We shall see…

-Dave-

[amolitor]

I skimmed the actual paper which is a few clicks away. It smacks slightly of non-math people trying to get math-y, which rarely goes well, but it did seem more legit than a lot of this stuff.

They had to get pretty math-y in order to write some programs to simulate things. But I suspect the simulations are more interesting than actually reflective of reality.

[Diego Pigozzo]

So you agree with them, but your problem is that you don't understand how quickly the cognitive load became too high.

Sorry, I totally disagree with them since I know when cognitive load become too high (that is, when the time to make a decision is a danger to your survival).

[Diego Pigozzo]

Just to laboriously drag it back to photography, because I can, the authors argue that what we "perceive" is not in fact a particularly accurate representation of the real world, but a set of metaphors that model the real world sufficiently well for survival and reproduction.

Arguably, this is why photographs work at all. They are manifestly not copies of what they depict, and yet we're able to somehow connect the flat piece of paper with the girl. Without quite a lot of flex in our perceptual systems that wouldn't happen.

From what I read, what the authors said is that what is perceived is completely devoid of any accuracy (not just "non particulary accurate").
They make the example of the graphic interface of modern operating systems, where the objective qualities of the file icon has no relation with the objective qualities of the file itself.

[Rob C]

All too late:

"Ce n'est pas une pipe."  -------   Magritte.

Rob C

[PeterAit]

Can you guys please come and have your discussion here at my house? Maybe the original author can come too. I will provide chairs and snacks, but you have to sit in my garden. Once you're done, I won't have to spend money next Spring to have manure delivered for fertilizer.

Seriously, though, I don't know that I have ever seen such a blatant bunch of pseudo-intellectual and pseudo-scientific claptrap. In fact, I am half-convinced that the whole thing is a set-up.

Really, folks - THINK!

[BJL]

I'm sorry to say, but it's just nonsensical babbling.

Suffice to analyze this sentence:Does it matter, for someone to have babies, to have a "veridical perception" of an approching tiger?

You are missing the point: the image we get of the tiger does not have to be (and is not) anywhere close to completely accurate or "veridical"; it just has to serve the purpose of telling us that we need to run away.

Color vision is an obvious example: our eyes ignore infrared and ultra-violet (while some other animals see far more into the ultra-violet, so that is not a physiological or evolutionary impossibility), and lump all intermediate wavelengths of light into the three bins of the so-called primary colors.  For that alone, our vision is a "cartoon" of reality.  Optical illusions and proven patterns of errors in the recall of eye-witnesses reveal other ways in which the visual processing system "falsifies" the data -- probably because natural selection has determined that this processed version is more useful than the raw data.

Photoshop has nothing on our eyes and brains when it come to lack of that "veridical" virtue!

[amolitor]

I am thinking. Why don't you knock off the insults. It's not like we're arguing Canon vs Nikon.

[amolitor]

Actually, it gets worse than just color.

We tend to think that we're perceiving something a bit like a continuously running HD movie.

This is false. Our actual awareness comes in fits and starts. Our visual cortex (at least) edits our memory to create the illusion of continuity out of a fairly jittery and wildly incomplete set of blurry pictures. Our total awareness, our attention if you will, the gestalt of touch/taste/smell/vision/sound that we suppose informs us about the world, is woefully sporadic. Even when it's genuinely working, it is focused on a much smaller area than we think. Ask a pickpocket about human awareness, about "attention".

Our sensorium gives us a model of the world as if seen through a cardboard tube with a nylon stocking stretched over the far end. We build the notional HD movie out of that. The wonder is not that the HD movie is sometimes wrong, the wonder is that it is ever right.

They're talking about veridical perception, which as I think they're formulated it is really about 1-to-1ness with reality. It doesn't matter if what we actually perceive when we are confronted with a tiger, the point is that we reliably perceive tigers AS tigers, and we don't perceive other things as tigers. Clearly we don't. A photograph of a tiger isn't perceived as a tiger per se but there's definitely some tigerness in there someplace. We don't perceive it as merely a glossy piece of paper (which the tiger probably would).

The ideas of umvelt and umgebung have been around for ages. The conceit is, sometimes, that this only applies to animals but humans, being somehow special, perceive things as they truly are. This sort of exceptionalism is laughable.
 

[Isaac]

Count how many times the players wearing white pass the basketball.

[Rob C]

I am thinking. Why don't you knock off the insults. It's not like we're arguing Canon vs Nikon.

Canon v. Nikon! That's a gas; thought you'd be sophisticated and reach for the Atomic Bomb and compare olde Leica and Contax!

;-)

Rob C