No Time to Move: Motion, Painting and Temporal Experience

This paper is concerned with the senses in which paintings do and do not depict various temporal phenomena, such as motion, stasis and duration. I begin by explaining the popular – though not uncontroversial – assumption that depiction, as a pictorial form of representation, is a matter of an experiential resemblance between the pictorial representation and that which it is a depiction of. Given this assumption, I illustrate a tension between two plausible claims: that paintings do not depict motion in the sense that video recordings do, and that paintings do not merely depict objects but may depict those objects as engaged in various activities, such as moving. To resolve the tension, I demonstrate that we need to recognise an ambiguity in talk of the appearance of motion, and distinguish between the depiction of motion and the depiction of an object as an object that is moving. Armed with this distinction, I argue that there is an important sense in which paintings depict neither motion, duration, nor – perhaps more controversially – stasis

Vision, Action, and Make-Perceive

In this paper, I critically assess the enactive account of visual perception recently defended by Alva Noë (2004). I argue inter alia that the enactive account falsely identifies an object’s apparent shape with its 2D perspectival shape; that it mistakenly assimilates visual shape perception and volumetric object recognition; and that it seriously misrepresents the constitutive role of bodily action in visual awareness. I argue further that noticing an object’s perspectival shape involves a hybrid experience combining both perceptual and imaginative elements – an act of what I call ‘make-perceive.

Egocentric Spatial Representation in Action and Perception

Neuropsychological findings used to motivate the “two visual systems” hypothesis have been taken to endanger a pair of widely accepted claims about spatial representation in visual experience. The first is the claim that visual experience represents 3-D space around the perceiver using an egocentric frame of reference. The second is the claim that there is a constitutive link between the spatial contents of visual experience and the perceiver’s bodily actions. In this paper, I carefully assess three main sources of evidence for the two visual systems hypothesis and argue that the best interpretation of the evidence is in fact consistent with both claims. I conclude with some brief remarks on the relation between visual consciousness and rational agency

Does Visual Spatial Awareness Require the Visual Awareness of Space?

Many philosophers have held that it is not possible to experience a spatial object, property, or relation except against the background of an intact awareness of a space that is somehow ‘absolute’. This paper challenges that claim, by analyzing in detail the case of a brain-damaged subject whose visual experiences seem to have violated this condition: spatial objects and properties were present in his visual experience, but space itself was not. I go on to suggest that phenomenological argumentation can give us a kind of evidence about the nature of the mind even if this evidence is not absolutely incorrigible

Making sense of a world of clicks

In a recent article O. Ulfbeck and A. Bohr (Foundations of Physics 31, 757, 2001) have stressed the genuine fortuitousness of detector clicks, which has also been pointed out, in different terms, by the present author (American Journal of Physics 68, 728, 2000). In spite of this basic agreement, the present article raises objections to the presuppositions and conclusions of Ulfbeck and Bohr, in particular their rejection of the terminology of indefinite variables, their identification of reality with "the world of experience," their identification of experience with what takes place "on the spacetime scene," and the claim that their interpretation of quantum mechanics is "entirely liberated" from classical notions. An alternative way of making sense of a world of uncaused clicks is presented. This does not invoke experience but deals with a free-standing reality, is not fettered by classical conceptions of space and time but introduces adequate ways of thinking about the spatiotemporal aspects of the quantum world, and does not reject indefinite variables but clarifies the implications of their existence.Comment: 15 pages, LaTeX2

Displaying 3D images: algorithms for single-image random-dot

A new, simple, and symmetric algorithm can be implemented that results in higher levels of detail in solid objects than previously possible with autostereograms. In a stereoscope, an optical instrument similar to binoculars, each eye views a different picture and thereby receives the specific image that would have arisen naturally. An early suggestion for a color stereo computer display involved a rotating filter wheel held in front of the eyes. In contrast, this article describes a method for viewing on paper or on an ordinary computer screen without special equipment, although it is limited to the display of 3D monochromatic objects. (The image can be colored, say, for artistic reasons, but the method we describe does not allow colors to be allocated in a way that corresponds to an arbitrary coloring of the solid object depicted.) The image can easily be constructed by computer from any 3D scene or solid object description

Worlds apart: Pictorial semantics in the left and right cerebral hemispheres

The dominant view in neuropsychology fails to consider that the hemispheric "functional division of labor" in terms of language versus non-language reflects but one dimension of hemispheric differences. That is, specialization of language in the left hemisphere and of spatial orientation in the right represent only specific aspects of the general underlying hemispheric meaning systems. Indeed, we have found that there can be two full-blown meaning systems, one in the left and one in the right, which can operate separately and simultaneously in the normal brain.