Israel Rosenfield, in his review of Oliver Sacks‘s The Mind’s Eye:
The creation of a coherent environment out of chaotic stimuli is one of the brain’s primary activities. There are no colors in nature, only electromagnetic radiation of varying wavelengths (the visible spectrum is between 390 and 750 nanometers). If we are aware of our “real” visual worlds we would see constantly changing images of dirty gray, making it difficult for us to recognize forms. Our visual stimuli are stabilized when the brain compares the variations in the different wavelengths of light; the consequence of these comparison is what we perceive as “color.” The brain creates a sense of “color constancy”; no matter the lighting conditions—bright sunlight, filtered sunlight, or artificial lighting—colors remain more or less the same. This phenomenon is not fully understood. But colors themselves are not in our surroundings. Brains therefore create something that is not there; and in doing so they help us make sense of our environments.
Rosenfield is concerned with color perception, but the implications are clear: we have little right to talk about “reality” when our notion of it is a creation of our own biology.
In his first Duino Elegy, Rilke writes: “we are not really at home / in the interpreted world”; he’s right, of course. And maybe what we call “modernism” is little more than an expression of the anxiety our “interpreted world” inspires.
Post-modernism? The post-avant? All the other “posts”? They are nothing but an attempt to force upon the reader deeper drafts of contingency. But these writers forget the “real” issue”: we have successfully evolved (to the extent that we can claim success) based on “the creation of a coherent environment out of chaotic stimuli.” Maybe our art should do what our brains have developed to do—”help us make sense of our environments,” that is, to produce ever more useful, more coherent interpretations of the world.
I think the way I would put it is that the brain organizes a coherent <i>perception</i> of reality. And it may be that, in the largest sense, the "reality" that our brains perceive isn't really there (wherever "there" is), or not in any absolute sense.<br /><br />I would say, though, that since we ourselves are a part of the reality our brains perceive (or at least we
yeah<br /><br />I hate it when I or thou or them <br />impose a will-full theory on natural<br />practice<br /><br />it just strikes me as contrapuntal to The Calculus<br />&<br />any sinusoidal wave-length theory mathematically<br />defined?<br /><br />tricks and gimmicks best left with magicians'<br />smoke-and-mirrors
Joseph,<br /><br />that's still a hot topic in philosophy: particularly in 'identity theory'. Where does the "I" (the coordinator of experience) reside? Dennett's book on consciousness tries awfully hard, for example, to debunk the Cartesian theatre idea but even at his best, and most elegant, there's no shaking off the idea that reality is the "creation of a