Lecture 3Cognizing Space 1: Nonconceptual content

and the impression of space

1 Introduction: Where we stand2 The problem of the nonconceptual experience of space 3 The role of conscious experience in the study of perception

3.1 The experience of perceived space

4 Nonconceptual content and the experience of space4.1 What is the problem of spatial representation?4.2 The experience of space

5 The genesis of our Sense of Space: 5.1 Internalizing by incorporating visuomotor experience:

Poincaré’s insights 5.2 Do we pick out spatial locations in a unitary frame of reference? 5.2.1 The coordinate transformation function and as-needed translation 5.2.2 Do we encode the location of empty places?

Plans for the Ames distorting room

The Ames distorting room

Question: Is “how things look” ever cognitively penetrable?

If you don’t “see” your wife/husband as changing size when walking across the Ames room, while strangers do change size, what does that tell you about the experience of seeing?

If you “see” nonexistent things under hypnotic suggestion, what does that tell you about the experience of seeing?

If your experience of seeing the world is panoramic and finely detailed what does that tell

you about the content of your experience in relation to what goes on in visual perception?

Is the panoramic experience a resultof a nonconceptual representation?And if so, is the content of that representationavailable in principle for conceptualization?

What is the problem of spatial representation?

We are so familiar with space and also with certain ways of thinking about it (inherited from Euclid and from Déscartes) that formulating the problem is a large part of the problem itself We find it natural to think in terms of points and lines,

but we do not ever actually see points or lines Jean Nicod explored other primitives with which to

build a Euclidean geometry that would be more compatible with the type of data we actually sense

An important (and essentially modern) way of posing the problem was provided for us by Henri Poincaré and I will spend some time discussing his view of 3D space

The genesis of our ‘sense of space’Poincaré’s insight: The 3D space that we sense is

intimately tied to our ability to act toward things located in it (including navigating through it) This includes our multimodal perceptions of objects and of our

own bodies It assumes we can distinguish between sensing locations and

sensing other qualities, and between independent movements of objects and movements that we produce

The problem of frames of reference. In our causal connection with space do we pick out spatial locations in a unitary frame of reference? The case for massively-multiple frames of reference The case for as-needed coordinate transformations of locations of

sensory objects (instead of location encoding in a uniform frame of reference)

Sense of spaceThis notion will play an important role in the

last lecture so it is important to distinguish sense of space from an internal space of any kind

A sense of space is what enables us to orient to perceived things, even when we are not conscious of what the things are – e.g., they may be proprioceptively sensed ‘things’

What we orient to is what we index (I have referred to nonvisual indexes as Anchors) Note: We never know what we are indexing

since indexing is nonconceptual!