The Dispatch of Naive Realism

             What is at issue here is the epistemological status of everyday perceptual experience. Commonsense is unequivocal over the matter; what we directly apprehend is external Reality itself. Yet the accumulated findings of neuroscience make it abundantly clear that any such epistemological doctrine is false. What we seem to experience as the real World (including that proximal part of it as our own bodies) is, in fact, nothing of the kind, but rather an entirely vicarious construction which –in one way or another- is either within or offset from the brain. All that we directly apprehend are the goings-on of the Cartesian theatre –to which we ourselves are contributors. We are normally unaware of the deception because of the timely way in which the sensory and praxial innervations maintain a correspondence between the vicarious interior and the real-World reference to which it points, and to which it is connected. .

  We start, then, with this great paradox inherent in simple mundane everyday perception:

O On the one hand is the overwhelming conviction that the directly given apprehension of the world around us -including our own bodies- is of that world itself and physical body that we inhabit.  We seem to be in direct conscious possession of that body that we both sense and control with an immediacy that bypasses the mediation of neural channels.  Our sense of vision seems to reach forward out of our eyes, to interface with what we see -though we are denied a matching direct manipulative praxial competence. 

O On the other hand there is abundant scientific evidence proclaiming that that all such experience, including the images of our own bodies are actually brain-limited, that is locked away from that world for which it is surrogate.  The real World outside lies beyond direct conscious access.

        Each of us believes himself to live directly within the world that surrounds us, to sense its objects and events directly and without mediation precisely.

         I assert that these are perceptual illusions ....

        Each of us lives within the universe -the prison of his own brain. Projecting from it are millions of fragile sensory nerve fibers, in groups uniquely adapted to sample the energetic states of the world around us; heat, light, force, and chemical composition. That is all we ever know of it directly; all else is logical inference.

             Let us start, then, with figure 1, depicting a man inspecting a piece of real estate. Put yourself in his place, imagine you are standing in his shoes. I now ask you, "Where is the brain which is supporting your present perceptual experience (of the house)?" You will almost certainly point to your head. I now ask you to "visualize" in your mind's eye just where your brain is and to add this as a part of the perceptual experience you are currently having; perhaps figure 2 conveys the internal structure of his augmented percept. The illustration is essentially a triple collage composed of:

                  If you believe this latter is the locus of your actual brain, you are wrong! For an authentic depictment of where your physical brain really is, see figure 3. This vertiginous anamorphic shift in brain location from where it seems to be to where it truly resides is, perhaps, the most striking single contrast between naive realism and perception as it truly is.

                         The Vertiginous Dilemma of the Brain’s Locus

              Entrapment into this vertiginous illusion comes about because of the highly polarized nature of the inner perceptual tableau. The part of the percept, which is closest to home, is the interior of the head; this is the region from which the psyche seems to take its origin. Yet the evidence of the neurosciences compels the belief that the physical brain is, in a sense, exterior to the whole of the perceptual scene. The trap is now sprung; the experience of the resulting infinite cycle resembles nothing so much as a self-swallowing snake (depicted in figure 4) and is all too apt to bring further attempts to confront the illusion of naive realism to a permanent halt. The scene is in-the-brain, is in-the-scene, is in-the-brain, is in- . . . , etc., etc. A final contributing factor here is the form, which the image of "own brain" takes in the perception of the body. The brain tends to be thought of as it is revealed upon the dissecting slab or operating table, as something seen from the outside, whereas the actual dependence of mind upon brain is orthogonal to this, the mental fields converging upon the neural processes within the brain through a private dimension which is beyond perceptual reach.

/  Proceed to Chapter  /