Excellent Primer on unexplained aspects of vision - Gomez-Marin, Sheldrake

I think Alex Gomez-Marin & Rupert Sheldrake are too late to the party with any attempt to mystify vision now that we have computer vision already in many areas significantly exceeding human capabilities. It seems clear that vision can be explained with a computational process.

If you apriori believe in scopaesthesia, which means you already accept the existence of psychic phenomenas then you can mystify everything you want.

Maybe you have not had this experience yourself?  Most people report they have.  The phenomena is real, real as an experience.  The question is it naturally caused!

I am all about sorting pragmatic stuff, from aesthetics.  Pragmatically, biologically signal transfer lays as a root cause of "vision".  Of course, clear detection lays at the quality of the reproduction of images - but vision and understandings that come with it are not the result of signals.  They are entirely information processing coming from the stimulus in the optic nerve (not the eye directly).

In fact, the phenomena of sensing "eyes on me" as I have experienced it, is totally unconscious, with an impact on the emotions.  I see it exactly like when two people call each other, at the same time.  Is this a belief in the mystical, or just acknowledging common facts of experience.

My take is that a "sixth sense" for danger would be an evolutionary trait that would improve survival?  It is a key affordance in the environment, whether the surroundings are physical or social.  Why wouldn't a detection of danger be deep in the subconscious?  Do microbes sense detect danger (an abstraction)?  It sure seems like they do?

ps..    My simple model of the world has the activity of "understanding meaning" as a key fact of biological life.  And its causal chain is defined in a general manner.

Maybe you have not had this experience yourself?  Most people report they have.  The phenomena is real, real as an experience.  The question is it naturally caused!

I am all about sorting pragmatic stuff, from aesthetics.  Pragmatically, biologically signal transfer lays as a root cause of "vision".  Of course, clear detection lays at the quality of the reproduction of images - but vision and understandings that come with it are not the result of signals.  They are entirely information processing coming from the stimulus in the optic nerve (not the eye directly).

In fact, the phenomena of sensing "eyes on me" as I have experienced it, is totally unconscious, with an impact on the emotions.  I see it exactly like when two people call each other, at the same time.  Is this a belief in the mystical, or just acknowledging common facts of experience.

My take is that a "sixth sense" for danger would be an evolutionary trait that would improve survival?  It is a key affordance in the environment, whether the surroundings are physical or social.  Why wouldn't a detection of danger be deep in the subconscious?  Do microbes sense detect danger (an abstraction)?  It sure seems like they do?

ps..    My simple model of the world has the activity of "understanding meaning" as a key fact of biological life.  And its causal chain is defined in a general manner.

Good post. I was too hasty with my initial reaction to this article (I'm an expert in being too hasty). I did follow Max's suggestion and read it fully. There's definitely some interesting food for thought like this bit:

William James likewise rejected the idea of images or representations inside the brain. He took as an example the reader sitting in a room, reading a book: “[T]he whole philosophy of perception from Democritus’ time downwards has been just one long wrangle over the paradox that what is evidently one reality should be in two places at once, both in outer space and in a person’s mind. ‘Representative’ theories of perception avoid the logical paradox, but on the other hand they violate the reader’s sense of life which knows no intervening mental image but seems to see the room and the book immediately as they physically exist” (James, 1904; quoted in Velmans, 2000, p. 112). As Whitehead expressed it, “sensations are projected by the mind so as to clothe appropriate bodies in external nature” (1925, p. 54). Throughout the twentieth century, a wide range of philosophers, including Bertrand Russell (1948), made similar THE NATURE OF VISUAL PERCEPTION 7 points. Rather than perceiving objects in the external world as re-presented in our heads, we are instead present in the world, actively and directly apprehending such images not as copies but as originals.

Good post. I was too hasty with my initial reaction to this article (I'm an expert in being too hasty). I did follow Max's suggestion and read it fully. There's definitely some interesting food for thought like this bit:
"Rather than perceiving objects in the external world as re-presented in our heads, we are instead present in the world, actively and directly apprehending such images not as copies but as originals."

This is a key line from the article under discussion pointing to direct perception, as per J. J. Gibson.  A. Chemero, who builds on Gibson, is cited by Sheldrake et al.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516471/radical-embodied-cognitive-science/

 Chemero proposes a methodology: dynamical systems theory, which would explain things dynamically and without reference to representation. He also advances a background theory: Gibsonian ecological psychology, “shored up” and clarified. Chemero then looks at some traditional philosophical problems (reductionism, epistemological skepticism, metaphysical realism, consciousness) through the lens of radical embodied cognitive science and concludes that the comparative ease with which it resolves these problems, combined with its empirical promise, makes this approach to cognitive science a rewarding one. “Jerry Fodor is my favorite philosopher,” Chemero writes in his preface, adding, “I think that Jerry Fodor is wrong about nearly everything.” With this book, Chemero explains nonrepresentational, dynamical, ecological cognitive science as clearly and as rigorously as Jerry Fodor explained computational cognitive science in his classic work The Language of Thought.

When energy is released, science can follow and quantify its outcomes as it is absorbed in the environment.  When someone looks at you, with intent, whether or not there is a physical sight-line, real-world probabilities are changing in your informational environment.  Socially its called "reading the room", and some folks are really good at it.  Darwin believed in instinct as an important evolutionary factor.  Is an instinct about being stared at a natural ability that is unreliable.  Maybe, because it is not as needed in modern society.

well ---  that's a "hell, yes" for me.  Summing the system state is not a probing of reality, as a physical entity.  It is a probing of reality that hopes for discoverable informational entities.  The feedback in the results from such a probing, "work" logically!   That, to me at least, is direct evidence that there is process "depth" to the environment containing informational interactions.

(The Vienna folks have published on the extant natural connection of logic and quantum operations.) 

Your words struck me. "No matter where or when".  Manifest physical reality nests in time and space.

On the other hand, the environment of information activity exists backward and forward in time and by its nature presents outside of space. Science methods find information as detectable pasts and futures.  Further, information science details the structures that exist, coherently.   Structured information is useful outside of time and in spaces that existed in the past and in probable future states.

When you speak of dynamics in the realm of the possible, I think of the well-worn idiom, "an idea whose time has come".  I would see a way which takes that literally, with measurements and observations from the informational environment.  Heck, political polls are just an example of data gathering that enables an application of "whose time has come" projection of actual outcomes.

Your first para is quite dense, and as I come at this from a different perspective, so I can't be sure what I'm about to say is what you're getting at, but I suspect it is. I think it's worthwhile laying out my way of understanding your perspective in an effort to improve our shared understanding.

Summing the system state is not a probing of reality, as a physical entity. 

agreed... my understanding is that both nature, and my physical form are the same, they are a result of the processing of 'information' by some shared mathematical object.

It is a probing of reality that hopes for discoverable informational entities. 

I would translate your ideas of 'probing of' and 'hoping for' with a more passive idea to describe a process [of this mathematical object] which transcends spacetime. And that I understand this process as the adding-up of matching patterns, by the mathematical object.

The feedback in the results from such a probing, "work" logically! That, to me at least, is direct evidence that there is process "depth" to the environment containing informational interactions.

I would understand your informational-depth-within-environment as the processing of information by this mathematical object which produces a localized result (our everyday experience), which contains all the processed information in a richly relevant way. 'Relevant' being the way in which this information is organised/ordered into our experience (result), so that everyday objects within our experience, including for example their scale (distance), reflects which matching patterns can/cannot be accessed/manipulated/stored from each [individual] perspective.

I would also add the ability to associate these matching patterns on a scale of repelling <-> attractive - but such terms as attractive/repelling are only relative to ones perspective of the groups shared process of the processed information - the matching patterns themselves are ambivalent/neutral).

Your first para is quite dense, and as I come at this from a different perspective, so I can't be sure what I'm about to say is what you're getting at, but I suspect it is. I think it's worthwhile laying out my way of understanding your perspective in an effort to improve our shared understanding.

I would understand your informational-depth-within-environment as the processing of information by this mathematical object which produces a localized result (our everyday experience), which contains all the processed information in a richly relevant way. 'Relevant' being the way in which this information is organised/ordered into our experience (result), so that everyday objects within our experience, including for example their scale (distance), reflects which matching patterns can/cannot be accessed/manipulated/stored from each [individual] perspective.

I would also add the ability to associate these matching patterns on a scale of repelling <-> attractive - but such terms as attractive/repelling are only relative to ones perspective of the groups shared process of the processed information - the matching patterns themselves are ambivalent/neutral).

Thank you for your thoughts.  Like to hear them.  Maybe definitions would help on my side.

In its simplest form, a definition for the "info environment" should be formed corresponding to the physical environment.  Science must approach both in the context they exist.  Science leaped forward when the categorical sorting of forces, as abstractly different from materials, became clear from better measurement.  A transformational view of their joint activity was bound together by conservation laws in the 18th and 19th centuries.  Methodology then had the context for materials science quantification of physical structure and quantification of energetic outcomes with physics.

The methodology for information science should be the same, but is not.  Like material structures, which were quantified first, informational structure has been presented in a math formality.  Built on probability theory conceptualizations, C. Shannon and other researchers birthed bits and bytes in a well-formed science measurement system.  A system whose engineering success has transformed the world faster than any mechanization.

However, the actions of information science are not intuitively treated.  One reason maybe because there is no simple definition for mind's capabilities.  Messaging is not treated like forces as being foundational in life.  Yet, to the benefit of human wisdom, outside of "hard" science are educational resources devoted to communication, marketing, coding, history, art and linguistics.  My story is -- these subjects are all studied observations of the action of minds.  Minds are creating informational structure that underlies information objects -- just as material structure underlies physical objects.  The energy equivalent, as action, in information science is the reapplication of past and current meanings to future states.  When this happens real-world probabilities change.

The math objects you speak of are real.  The are a sub-category of informational objects just like other sub-categories, such as logical structures, logic gates, DNA/RNA coding, program coding, football rules, works of Bach and Buxtehude, etc     They are real in their info-structure and real in their ability to change probabilities in informational spaces.

My views do not credibly go into the deeps of information science.  They may just see the simple wholeness of its role in reality and how the real challenge is to define what it means to understand something at all.  All the talk about what mind does and what computation cab do - yet no one claims to have a program that understands in layered contexts, like living things can.