Gibson and Time: The Temporal Framework of Direct Perception

Abstract

The serious import of Gibson’s statement warning that physics “abstractions” of space and time “are not appropriate to psychology,” has not been understood. Underlying the space and time of physics is a largely unexamined metaphysic, what can be termed the “classic” (or spatial) metaphysic. This metaphysic is what Gibson implicitly rejected. His concept of direct perception, and necessarily then, direct memory, rely on, in fact, require, an alternative metaphysic of space and time for their understandability – what can be termed a “temporal metaphysic,” a framework which was explicitly developed by Bergson in Matter and Memory.

Notes

1 See, for example, Bergson’s exchange in Revue Philosophique in 1924 with physicist, Andre Metz (Gunter, 1969, pp. 123–135). And note, in appeals to “accelerations” (hence to the General Theory) to explain these time-retardation effects, you are not “confirming” SR but rather confirming an explanatory apparatus supposedly in the General Theory, one that does not exist within SR.

2 Natasa Rakić (1997), in an analysis of the logic of the Minkowski schema that should have been given far more weight, demonstrated its failure to preserve simultaneities and causal relations that simply must be the case (in reality, as discussed here, the consequence of simultaneous flows). Diplomatically, in a strained concession, she calls SR, “an ontological theory, but not a temporal theory.”

3 For reasons soon more apparent, I am treating “being specific to” as equally applicable to the brain. This is evident in Gibson’s (1966) description of perceptual activity wherein he envisions the brain continuously adjusting, tuning to the invariants, seeking the highest fidelity reception relative to the (dynamic) information, i.e., symmetrically, the invariants specifying the event are equally defined over this resonant, attuning activity. See also Shaw and McIntyre (1974) principle of cognitive symmetry where, “An organism achieves the highest degree of knowledge of its environment (i.e., has ecologically relevant knowledge of it), when there exists a persistent symmetry between its psychological states and its environment” (p. 83).

4 I must note here the brilliance of Bob Shaw as intrinsic to this development. Circa 1972, during a visit to U of Minnesota by Pribram, Shaw discussed holography in his seminar, reversing Pribram’s “brain as a hologram” conception and arguing that the brain is in fact within a (universal) hologram, and acts as the reconstructive wave. It was this that made me suddenly realize what Bergson was saying in the obscure Chapter 1 of Matter & Memory. Shaw developed this (he had a large set of notes on it), but eventually quit pursuing this, telling me that he and R. McIntyre had determined they did not like the implied mode of “information pickup.” This is still a curiosity to me; as one reads this paper, I doubt one can see anything but support of Gibson’s resonance model with the information pickup implied.

5 A fact Charles Steinmetz knew well when trying to formalize principles required for the construction of N. Tesla’s AC motor (The Theory and Calculation of Alternating Current Phenomena, 1900), up to that point nearly non-replicable (they were burning up) because of the precise nature of the metals involved – a knowledge for a period of time apparently peculiar to Tesla.

6 “Redintegration” is a term coined by Christian Wolff in his Psychologia Empirica (1732), where part of a present event retrieves a whole past event – a rustle in the grass redintegrates an experience of encountering a snake. An event is a structured pattern, as Klein (1970) restated things, and the pattern can be recalled by reinstatement of a constituent part of the original pattern. Obviously, Gibson is the prime descriptor of these event patterns (Robbins, 2006b); it is the invariance structure of a present event (E’) that cues/redintegrates a past event/experience (E) with similar structure, or, E’ = > E.

7 Carello and Turvey (2020) argue for avoiding the use of “image” in the process of perception. As far as a required retinal image or for construing the image as a “copy,” certainly so, but here I would argue Bergson is more correct. An image, he argued (1896, Chapter 1), is always a subset of the field, an aspect of the whole. Even just the “cup” on the kitchen table, as an image, is not the famous “thing-in-itself,” this thing-in-itself cup being a far richer object, only existing via its relations with and within the entire field. Everything presented to us is under the aspect of an image – the “brain” is an image, so is a “neuron,” an “atom,” cups, molecules, and yes, an event – a disturbance in the external field – such as coffee stirring. In this understanding, we are not, we cannot, be specifying the actual event – the coffee stirring in all its richness; we are specifying the event as an image of a transformation in the whole. This is to say, unless you are a “point” in Bergson’s holographic field, responding to, reflecting the influences of all other points in the field and influencing all other points, your experience will be of some aspect or part of the field – an image. The holographic field – a massive interference pattern – is itself non-image-able (as is true, it can be argued, of the optic array); the only way to specify an aspect – an image – being via a reconstructive wave. This is equally to say that the problem of image specification in perception is an optical problem, a problem of physics, albeit one that must be solved within the framework of the temporal metaphysic.

8 Bergson’s (1907, pp. 10–22) discussion of entropy and time expands Gibson’s (1975, pp. 295–296) view on the irreversible transformations that are ubiquitous in the environment – the breaking of eggs that cannot be reversed, the collapse of a river bank, where the time-less (better duration-less) time-reversible equations of physics fail to be useful in the ecological case.