Minds on Monday: Seeing and Doing - New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science 08/02/12 12:19

New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

What we see as a species depends on what we do as a species. This was the teaching of
the visionary (though often a little too much so) Estonian physiologist Jakob von
Uexküll (1864-1944). Uexküll posited that the world sensorily revealed to an organism,
its Umwelt as he called it, consists of environmental features constructed (or selected, as
I would prefer to say) for their relevance to the organism’s behaviour and survival.

A honey bee, for example, divides flowers into “broken forms” such as crosses and stars
and “compact forms” such as circles and squares. This is significant because bees collect
pollen from open flowers, which have broken forms, not from buds, which have com-
pact forms. I think Uexküll meant to say that these two forms are directly perceived—
i.e., not simply indicated by a more complex featural substrate. Looking at the objects
pictured above, the bee visually experiences just a simple differentiating quale, which I
represent by X and O. (It’s actually quite implausible that bees see just a differentiating
quale: after all, flowers have evolved special colour markings to attract bees. But per-
haps Uexküll wasn't much concerned about direct perception and qualia.)

Perception is species-specific. Take colour vision. It is now generally believed that this
perceptual capacity in primates co-evolved with the colour of fruits and berries. Mon-
keys live on fruit; fruit-bearing plants depend on monkeys for the dispersal of their
seed. It is therefore advantageous for monkeys to be able to find fruit, and advanta-
geous for plants (of a certain sort) to have their fruit be findable by monkeys. So fruit
evolved toward red or yellow colours to stand out against green foliage. Monkeys co-
evolved an extra cone-cell that enables red and yellow to be sharply differentiated from
green. When monkeys scan a scene, red fruit perceptually “pop out” from the back-
ground of greenery, thus reducing search time (particularly where there is a high spatial
frequency of colour variation). Colour vision evolved for a very special purpose, and its
characteristics are correspondingly special purpose. It is good in "dappled and brindled"
scenes, as John Mollon (an originator of the co-evolution hypothesis puts it.)

Primate colour perception is quite specific: its space of similarities is shaped by the use
to which it is put. And it’s not just that primates are more sensitive to some colours than
to others. It’s also that the similarities and differences between colours evolve in a way
that is dictated by their way of life in a specific environment. Birds, which evolved
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Minds on Monday: Seeing and Doing - New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science 08/02/12 12:19

colour vision independently of primates—they have no common ancestor with colour

vision—are different again. They use colour not only in the search for food, but also for
mate selection and navigation. Since short wavelengths are scattered more than long,
the sky is bluer in directions perpendicular to the sun. (Light in that direction is scat-
tered light.) Inhabiting, as they do, a three-dimensional environment without land-
marks, birds use shades of blue for directional orientation. Then again, many fish use
yellow filters to enhance blue-green contrast. It is not colour that we need to perceive as
such: rather, certain colour contrasts in objects of practical interest.

Nor is perceptual specialization restricted to colour or to secondary qualities.

Conspecific “voice” recognition is important in communicative species, among

whom humans mark an extreme. Our ability to make speech sounds (which, by the
way, comes at the cost of a gullet more prone to choking than that of apes) would
be useless if not matched by our ability to decipher these sounds. And vice versa.
We can’t easily decipher bird song; birds cannot differentiate our vowels and con-
sonants.
Humans are bad at estimating vertical dimensions, but better at horizontal size and
distance along the ground. It’s dubious that birds suffer from this distortion. This,
of course, has to do with our respective means of locomotion.

None of this should obscure the range of activities that animals undertake. Unfortunate-
ly, though, it often does. Uexküll and Gibson focussed on the sensory guidance of the
body. Proud of their departure from conventional wisdom, they forgot the defining con-
tribution of the senses—to learning and deliberation. The Uexküllian Umwelt and Gibson-
ian affordances are environmental features directly relevant to bodily actions—a bird
sees a branch of a tree or an electrical cable as affording it a perch and a cornfield as af-
fording it nourishment. But the defining characteristic of a sense modality is that it con-
tributes to consciousness. So, for example, vestibular information concerning bodily posi-
tion is usually not counted as sensory because it operates largely outside of conscious-
ness and does not contribute to learning or deliberation.

Vestibular and proprioceptive information operate outside of consciousness and outside

of the organism’s choice. Suppose you are hungry and see a restaurant on top of a hill.
You may choose to climb the hill, or you may decide it’s not worth the effort. If you do

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Minds on Monday: Seeing and Doing - New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science 08/02/12 12:19

climb the hill, your body posture and movements will adjust to the terrain without your
explicit choice or calculation. It is characteristic of senses such as vision and audition
that they act in the former way: they present information that is held for unforced and
optional decisions (which is not to deny that they also contribute to some that directly
control the body.

You see a red apple. Gibson says you see an affordance: it’s eatable. But in its redness
you also see an indication of ripeness. Will you infer it is ripe? That depends on other in-
dications: perhaps you think it only looks red, or that it has been painted red. Either
way, the sensed redness is an epistemic affordance: it allows you to learn from experi-
ence and to apply previously acquired knowledge.

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