Perception as Indeterminacy in Action

If we let go of the ‘pictures in the head’ metaphor, like pushing away from a boat as swimmers, and dispense with the redoubled mental image, thereby dissolving the enmity between materialism and idealism, we encounter a strange problem. If the eye, the optic nerve, the brain, the shaft of light, the atmosphere, the sun and the earth, are all connected together, then why do we only “see” what is in front of us? This may seem a bizarre question (asking why I can’t see the center of the sun when I look at a pen) but needs answering. If we are to dispense with the localized “photographic theater” and instead claim that perception takes part directly in the universal play of matter/images, then we need to explain why it is that the world appears to be so, well, theatrical. Why is there, for each body, a localized collection of events surrounding it seemingly divorced from (though no doubt nestled within) a wider universe?

Bergson’s formula for the Subject within the world of matter is as a “center of indetermination”, with this indetermination being measured by “the number and rank of their [an organism’s] functions” (1990, p.36). The connections between ‘bits’ of matter spread spatially out, through the exertion of forces, but also temporally, through the compulsion of causality, as well up and down through the layers of emergence and reduction. Natural laws describe these movements (expressible in elegant formulas). At certain points of this homogenous and centerless universe of matter, there a centers of indetermination. That is to say, regions where the formulas get messy.

Simple, single cell life is barely indistinguishable from the chemical processes that it shblurps out of, at least in regard to its range of action. If it can do anything at all, this merely involves a predictable expanding and contracting based on the contact of the cell wall with (delicious or dangerous) objects beyond it. That is, we are dealing with virtually no indeterminacy, or at least as much indeterminacy as is befitting relatively well understood bio-chemical reactions. However, mammals, in being mobile, and possessing sensory systems that make use of the speed and distance of light refraction, expand out in their possibility for affecting and being affected by other objects, in a “cone” proportionate to their possible activity and reactivity. This now increases the indeterminacy involved in any environment they’re placed in; both because mammalian behavior is more varied and complex, and because that which can influence and motivate it is expanded out further and further, and into higher and higher registers and levels of discernment.

The eagle swooping down from the sky to grasp a tiny mouse in a field involves a level of discernment and distance in action far, far beyond the single cell expanding when it chemically reacts with a nutrient medium. It also involves a greater level of indeterminacy; will she or won’t she glimpse that tell tale shimmer in the grass below, and which muscles in which sequence will spring into gear against which air currents and which wind directions, before snatching which part of the mouse, which will flee in which direction?

For Bergson, as for Dennett, the mystery of perception comes back to action, or more specifically virtual or nascent action (Bergson), or dispositions to act (Dennett). Both are incrementalists, seeing in the human being’s rich perceptions of the world merely a more complex degree of thing compared to the single celled organism’s reflexive contractions and expansions, tied to our rich complexity of possible action. In that simple organism, perception and action are indistinguishable — the cell wall encounters some chemical composition and is compelled to withdraw or expand through a series of chemical reactions. But how does the human nervous system encounter things? By what is it affected? And then, what action results from such an encounter? As we rarely encounter things through touch, instead greeting them well in advance by being affected by the perturbations they cause in refracting light rays, a simple action-reaction formula is insufficient. As our sensory experience expands out, on the back of light propagation, so does the range of actions that our body can reasonably employ in response to objects, further and further away. Our interest in things goes further afield.

I throw a ball to you. You see it move through the air as your raise your hands. The world “tunnels” around the ball, and your hand grasps at just the right moment to catch it. There’s a thwack in the palm of your hand that slowly fades. Now the ball is in your hand. The ball has traveled from one hand to another across a space. That happened. One of those hands was yours, and it was connected to a set of eyes that were being jiggled by the light waves being refracted from the surface of the ball as it moved through the air. Your body was brought into relation with the ball, was affected by it, before it even left my hand, such is the wonder of vision. Once the ball was flying towards you, it became incumbent upon your body to do something in response to the moving object that it was already in relation to: the ball became a problem for your action. However, that action is not a simple cellular contraction or expansion, but a complex host of timed responses, each one variable; in their sum they become indeterminate.

The ball is now following its fixed aerial course, in line with the elegant laws of nature, but it is hurtling towards (and affecting via the medium of light) a massively complex system of nerves and muscles and neurotransmitters; it is entering a zone of indeterminacy. Most indeterminate of all is the position and movement of that hand that answers to the ball. The precise level of indetermination before the ball lands, while the outcome “collapses”, corresponds to the perception of the ball in flight, that “tunneling”. The question placed upon the hand by the ball causes your body to sever its ties, via a focusing of sensitivity, from all of the other objects around it. In fact, this indetermination, of which precise movement will be carried out in response to the path of the ball, simply is the perception of the ball.

“our perception of an object distinct from our body, separated from our body by an interval, never expresses anything but a virtual action.” (Bergson, 1990, p.57)

Or, as Dennett puts it:

“When you say “This is my quale [pure perception]” what you are singling out, or referring to, whether you realize it or not, is your idiosyncratic complex of dispositions. You seem to be referring to a private, ineffable something-or-other in your mind’s eye, a private shade of homogeneous pink … but what it turns out to be in the real world in your brain is just a complex of dispositions” (1991, p.389)

So, why does the world appear so theatrically constituted? Because the nervous system, and its action-response work, is given problems in line with its possibilities of being affected, for example, by light. This light is turned into action — sometimes automatically, and thus without perception (i.e. walking), sometimes down indeterminate paths (i.e. threading a needle), perception being this indetermination.