The myth of the perceiving body

[Magical Realist]

The body does not perceive anything. The eyes do not see. The hands do not feel. The ears do not hear. They have to be constructed as perceiving inside the brain. The body has to be constructed as conscious by the brain. But by itself it is little more than an unconscious machine being affected by external stimuli. Think about your eye for a second. All it's doing is focusing light on your retina. But the retina doesn't "see" this light. It isn't like some magically conscious surface that visualizes the image inside of itself. It is little more than cells that are being electrically stimulated by light. Like the leaf of a tree or a solar panel. But electrical stimulation of retina cells isn't seeing. It's all happening in the dark at this point, a stream of impulses waiting to be visualized as a scene inside the brain. The same is true for the nerves in your hand. The hand is not a conscious "thing" that feels the things it touches. The hand is not even "there" as a passive receiver of stimulation until AFTER the brain locates it as an attached extension of an identified-with body. THEN and only then does the hand SEEM to be feeling the outside world like it had awareness of its sensations independently of the brain. The mind constructs the body as a sort of animistic machine that is a subjective and passive experient of the world, situated in a landscape sensorily accessible to it yet simultaneous to it. In reality, and to the brain, it is nothing but a construct translated out of the machine language of varying electrical impulses.

[C C]

Even an arbitrary aggregate of non-dark matter is at least a "receiver" or potential absorber of environmental energies. But there's no systemic organization and memory in such for sorting, re-arranging and ultimately identifying / understanding the original primitive information as a construct of events, objects, a world.

Perhaps the most important idea Kant ever dispensed to the public was the "concepts without intuitions [appearances] are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind" bit. For in that is the germ of explaining cognition, and how even the cognition-less universe could be more manifestation-rich than what it seems to be when minus the "non-blind showings" engineered by a brain. As some scientists are beginning to realize, the looming spectre of the hard problem can probably only be satisfactorily resolved via some allowance of pan-protophenomenalism in natural methodology. Global micro-qualitative affairs occurring without stored patterns / functions around to merely supply the simple apprehension that "something is there" [as opposed to not even nothingness].

[Yazata]

The body does not perceive anything. The eyes do not see. The hands do not feel. The ears do not hear.

Mine do.

If I want to discover what's under my couch (scary!) I'll feel around under there with my hand.

They have to be constructed as perceiving inside the brain. The body has to be constructed as conscious by the brain.

I think that part of the problem is figuring out what we mean when we use words like 'perceive', 'see', 'feel', 'hear' and 'conscious'.

But by itself it is little more than an unconscious machine being affected by external stimuli. Think about your eye for a second. All it's doing is focusing light on your retina. But the retina doesn't "see" this light.

If 'seeing' is a bunch of data-processing tasks, as I suspect it is, then what the retina is doing is a big part of it. While it isn't 'seeing' all by itself, it's certainly contributing its part.

Perhaps we should say that 'seeing' isn't any single thing and it isn't located in any single place. It's located in the thing seen. It's located in the light that travels from it to us. It's located in our eyes and optic nerves. And it's located in all kinds of functions taking place in our brains; extracting geometical features such as shapes, curves, edges, corners figure-ground relationships and so on, associative functions that seek to identify these features as some kind of object seen before, motivational functions that result in our processing information about our own awareness of and reaction to visual information, and more.  

It isn't like some magically conscious surface that visualizes the image inside of itself. It is little more than cells that are being electrically stimulated by light. Like the leaf of a tree or a solar panel. But electrical stimulation of retina cells isn't seeing. It's all happening in the dark at this point, a stream of impulses waiting to be visualized as a scene inside the brain.

I don't know... I'm getting the impression that the inner TV-monitor model is cropping up again, the idea that there's some inner representation of everything being displayed somewhere in our brains, where a little spiritual eye looks at it and finally (and only then) sees it. So we arrive at the idea that the world isn't lit up with light at all, there's only photons there. There isn't any light in the optic nerves either, just nerve impulses. So light must be a quality of that inner representational screen. A quale, in other words.

I'm inclined to think that's a fundamentally flawed and misleading model of perception that leads no end of philosophers astray.

[Magical Realist]

I don't know... I'm getting the impression that the inner TV-monitor model is cropping up again, the idea that there's some inner representation of everything being displayed somewhere in our brains, where a little spiritual eye looks at it and finally (and only then) sees it. So we arrive at the idea that the world isn't lit up with light at all, there's only photons there. There isn't any light in the optic nerves either, just nerve impulses. So light must be a quality of that inner representational screen. A quale, in other words.

It's not like that at all. Different components of vision such as contour, movement, bright/dark contrast, 3D depth and color get processed in different regions of the brain. So again we must leave behind this overliteralized metaphor of the eye seeing something in front of it. The brain constructs the visual scene out of various synaptic firings in different brain regions ending up with us experiencing ourselves as part of the 360 scene of our world. It's less like a theater to an audience and more like a virtual reality stage in which we are part of the scene ourselves instead of being outside of it. We are not so much seeing as being the seeing itself, which is why we experience the seen world as paradoxically INCLUDING our bodies as well. IOW, a world visually manifest to us even before the light of it reaches our retina. This sensory immersiveness extends to the other senses as well such as kinaesthetic sense of motion, proprioceptive muscle flexing/relaxing, heat/cold/ and the sense of balance against gravity.