Varieties of Presence by Alva Noë

Author:Alva Noë
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Tags: Psychology, Philosophy, Mind & Body, General, Cognitive Psychology & Cognition, Metaphysics
ISBN: 9780674062146
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2012-02-05T21:00:00+00:00

6  On Over-Intellectualizing the Intellect

The World Available from Here

A c c o r d i n g to an old and tired idea, the scope of experience is fixed by what projects to our eyes, or to the sensory periphery of our bodies. Experience, then, is something that happens inside us as a result of our being so affected by the world around us. I reject this way of thinking about experience and its scope. We see much more than projects to the eyes. We experience what is hidden or occluded (the tomato’s back, for example); we experience the nature of things (what they are—telephones, say, or other people); we perceive emotion and meaning (the intensity of a person’s concentration; what she is saying).

Of course, there are constraints on what shows up for us in experience; and these constraints have to do with our physical, embodied, spatial relations to things. But it is impossible even to begin to make sense of what shows up in terms of a one-way causal influence of the things around us on our nervous system, as I have argued in Out of Our Heads (2010).

Instead of thinking of what we experience as fixed by the way the world projects to us, giving rise to events of consciousness inside of us, we should think of what is experienced as what is available to a person, as what is available to a person from a place. The seeing does not happen in the head. Rather, the experience is achieved or enacted by the person. We do it in the world. The scope of experience is a matter of what is available to us. And what is available to us depends on not only what there is, but also, crucially, on what we can do. What we can do depends in turn on understanding, know-how, but also on tools and technology (pictures, language, the telephone, the pencil), and on where we find ourselves and what environmental or social resources are available to us.

What is available is that to which we have access, and the ground of access is knowledge, understanding, and skill. Mere sensory projection is neither necessary nor sufficient. It is understanding that brings the world into focus for perceptual consciousness.

Transformations of the Understanding

One of reason why art matters to us, I think, is that it provides opportunities for us to recapitulate this basic fact about ourselves: understanding and skill enable us to bring the world into focus for perceptual consciousness.

Consider what sometimes happens when you encounter an unfamiliar art work. Every song on the new record (for example) may sound more or less the same, each coming across flat, or unengaging. Every painting in the gallery presents its face to you, but only as a face in a crowd, with no discernable features. Sometimes we encounter the work, but it is as if we don’t see it, or can’t see it, or don’t see any meaning in what we see.

But suppose you don’t give up.

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