p. 133-134
Matters are made worse by the fact that the eyes move almost continuously. Several times a second they jitter and bounce; they also make saccades and micro-saccades-that is, sharp, ballistic movements. As a result, the projection of an object you perceive to be still in facts jumps around on your eyeball, and when you track a moving object, its image stays still on your retina while that of the stationary background races across your eyes. Again, in order to explain how we manage to experience a stable visual world, we need to suppose, it seems, that the ability is achieved at some later stage in the processing of the original retinal information.

p. 142
The world is not a construction of the brain, nor is it a product of our own conscious efforts. It is there for us; we are here in it. The conscious mind is not inside us; it is, it would be better to say, a kind of active attunement to the world, an achieved integration. It is the world itself, all around, that fixes the nature of conscious experience.

p. 143-144
The retinal image is an image in a mathematical sense; it is a projection or a mapping. The retinal image is not an image in the sense of a picture – or, if it is, this is entirely accidental. How it looks, or how it reads, plays no role in its performance of its neurophysiological job description. Once we appreciate that the retinal image isn’t something that we see, we lose a grip even on what it means to say that it is upside-down. Upside-down, one must ask relative to what? Who’s to say what counts as upside-down in the head relative to the tasks faced by the nervous system?
[...]
Again, we don’t experience the retinal image; we don’t experience any image , in that sense. We experience the world.

—

Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin, Wiley-Academy 2005

p.21
The technologically expanded and strengthened eye today penetrates deep into matter and space, and enables man to cast a simultaneous look on the opposite sides of the globe. The experiences of space and time have become fused into each other by speed[...], and as a consequence we are witnessing a distinct reversal of the two dimensions -a temporalisation of space and a spatialisation of time. The only sense that is fast enough to keep pace with the astounding increase of speed in the technological world is sight. But the world of the eye is causing us to live increasingly in a perpetual present, flattened by speed and simultaneity.

p. 35
Perhaps, freed of the implicit desire of the eye for control and power, it is precisely the unfocused vision of our time that is again capable of opening up new realms of vision and thought. The loss of focus brought about by the stream of images may emancipate the eye from its patriarchal domination and give rise to a participatory and empathetic gaze. The technological extensions of the senses have until now reinforced the primacy of vision, but the new technologies may also help ‘the body[...] to dethrone the disinterested gaze of the disincarnated Cartesian spectator’.

p. 40-41
Sensory experience become integrated through the body, or rather, in the very constitution of the body and the human mode of being.[...] Our bodies and movements are in constant interaction with the environment; the world and the self inform and redefine each other constantly. The percept of the body and the image of the world turn into one single continuous existential experience; there is no body separate from its domicile in space, and there is no space unrelated to the unconscious image of the perceiving self.
[...]
A walk through a forest is invigorating and healing due to the constant interaction of all sense modalities. [...] The eye collaborates with the body and other senses. One’s sense of reality is strengthened and articulated by this constant interaction.

p.65
The forest enfolds us in its multisensory embrace. The multiplicity of peripheral stimuli effectively pull us into the reality of its space.

—

Lawrence Weschler, True to Life. Twenty-five years of conversation with David Hockney, University of California Press 2008

p. 4
“I mean, for instance, wide-angle lenses!” Hockney exclaimed as we stood that afternoon on the deck overlooking his pool. “after a while I bought a better camera and I tried using a wide-angle lens because I wanted to record a whole room or an entire standing figure. But I hated the pictures I got. They seemed extremely untrue. They depicted something you never actually saw. It wasn’t just the lines bending in ways they never do when you look at the world. Rather it was the falsification – your eye doesn’t ever see that much in one glance. It’s not true to life.”

p. 6
Hockney led me back into a the studio and picked up a magazine, thumbing randomly to an ad, a photograph of a happy family picnicking on a hillside green. “See? You can’t look at most photos for more than, say, thirty seconds. It has nothing to do with the subject matter. I first noticed this with erotic photographs, trying to find them lively: you can’t. Life is precisely what they don’t have – or rather, time, lived time. All you can do with most ordinary photographs is stare at them – they stare back, blankly – and presently your concentration begins to fade. They stare you down. I mean, photography is all right if you don’t mind looking at the world from the point of view of a paralyzed cyclops – for a split second. But that’s not what it’s like to live in the world, or to convey the experience of living in the world.

p. 10
“[...]Looking at you now, my eye doesn’t capture you in your entirety, but instead quickly, in nervous little glances. I look at your shoulder, and then to your ear, your eyes (maybe, for a moment, if I know you well enough and have come to trust you, but even then only for a moment), your cheek, your shirt button, your shoes, your hair, your eyes again, your nose and mouth. There are hundred separate looks across time from which I synthesize my living impression of you. And this is wonderful. If, instead, I caught all of you in one frozen look, the experience would be dead – it would be like…it would be like looking at an ordinary photograph.”

p. 66
“[...] For perspective to be fixed, time has stopped and hence space has become frozen, petrified. Perspective takes away the body of the viewer. You have a fixed point, you have no movement; in short, you are not there, really. That is the problem. Photography hankers after the condition of the neutral observer. But there can be no such thing as a neutral observer. For something to be seen, it has to be an account of the experience of that looking. In that sense it must deeply involve an observer whose body somehow has to be brought back in.”

p. 68-69
“[...] For instance, in the old Newtonian view of the world, in Newtonian physics, it’s as if the world exists outside of us. It’s over there, out there, it works mechanically, and it will do so with or without us. In short, we’re really not part of nature; it virtually comes to that. Whereas modern physics has increasingly thrown that model into question and shown it cannot be. Mr. Einstein makes things more human by making measurement at least relative to us, or anyway, to some observer; the supposedly neutral viewpoint is obliterated. There can be no measurement without a measurer. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is, of course, highly technical and specialized. It deals with a paradox in particle physics, showing how if you attempt to measure the velocity of a given particle you won’t be able to identify its exact location and vice versa. Previous to this, of course, science believed that given enough technical advancement, it would eventually be able to measure anything, but Heisenberg showed that this was not just a problem of not yet having the right measuring devices but that the problem was inherent in the nature of physical reality itself. The old conception of scientific inquiry had gone on as though we could measure the world as if we weren’t in it. Heisenberg showed that the observer, in effect, affects that which he is observing, so that some of those old borders and boundaries begin to blur, just as they do in cubism.
[...]
There’s that famous phrase of Gombrich’s about the triumph of Renaissance perspective – ‘We have conquered reality’ – which has always seemed to me such a Pyrrhic victory, again, as if reality were somehow separate from us and the world now hopelessly dull because everything was known and accounted for. These physicists, by contrast, were suggesting a much more dynamic situation, and I realized how deeply what they were saying had to do with how we depict the world, not what we depict but the way we depict it.”

—

Book review by Anthony Campbell. Copyright ©; Anthony Campbell (1999), http://www.acampbell.ukfsn.org/bookreviews/r/damasio.html

Antonio Damasio, “DESCARTES’ ERROR – Emotion, reason, and the human brain”, Papermac, London 1994, ISBN 0 333 65656 3

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Antonio Damasio Quote:

Even in the small world of brain science [in the 1860s], two camps were beginning to form. One held that psychological functions such as language or memory could never be traced to a particular region of the brain. If one had to accept, reluctantly, that the brain did produce the mind, it did so as a whole and not as a collection of parts with special functions. The other camp held that, on the contrary, the brain did have specialized parts and those parts generated separate mind functions. The rift between the two camps was not merely indicative of the infancy of brain research; the argument endured for another century and, to a certain extent, is still with us today.

http://machineslikeus.com/People/Damasio_Antonio.html

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More here: http://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/damasioreview.html

And if you’re in Amsterdam this Friday: http://www.spui25.nl/spui25/programma.cfm/D0514303-1DC6-41CB-A39C33AB93215736

Although I have the utmost respect for scientific research and am personally fascinated by the field of neurology, recently I find myself questioning the methods used to gather information about brain activity, namely the measuring of electrical fields or electrical activity in the brain. Not the specific methods themselves, whether one uses electrodes or mri scans to determine brain activity is of no interest to me. Rather the thinking behind the research seems odd. What can one really hope to gather from measuring a certain area of activity? If a subject is stimulated in a certain manner e.g. hit on the finger, told to think of something nice or shown evocative imagery, then specific parts of the brain light up and the more the subject’s finger is hit, the more accurately the area in the brain can be pinpointed. But what does that really tell us?

There’s no metaphor I reject more than comparing the human brain to a computer, but in this particular case I think it is a valid metaphor. Scanning the brain and drawing conclusions from these scans about the human mind or the human experience of the world, is like removing the monitor from a pc, putting electrodes on the outside of the tower and hammering away at the keyboard. Indeed, certain key stroke combinations seem to evoke very specific responses from the tower, and with a little patience we might be able to piece together an idea of the anatomy of the inside of the computer i.e. motherboard, cpu, gpu, hard drive etc. We may discover that repeatedly hitting ctrl+alt+del invokes a specific response, there might even be a sound, but without the screen we can never know if we’re playing a game, surfing the web, photoshopping or have crashed.

It is an old dilemma of neurology, that whatever else it is, it is always the brain examining the brain. But this is looking for sparks and trying to guess their meaning, this is the brain projecting unto the brain.