Something I found really interesting was a description of Ernst Mach’s thoughts about sensations (I’m not sure about the rest of his philosophy, but it would be interesting to research). He was opposed to analogies between mind and machine, instead posing the idea that bodies are formed by sensations. We tend to think about our bodies as if they were concrete forms, rather than being constantly in flux; but our cells are ceaselessly renewed, matter is consumed, transformed, expelled, chemical reactions are continually taking place… from day to day, even from minute to minute our bodies are composed of different matter. Mach argues that it is the sensations, which we think of as fleeting, that are the tangible elements which actually form the transient body. Sensations are grounded in physics, in the laws which govern our world. Space, colour, sound, gravity, time, all these are elements which exist as part our environment, help to shape our bodies and also our minds. So actually what he is saying, is that we are not like machines or computers, which produce sensations, rather we are produced by the sensations we experience… P263 (I hope this makes sense as I try to think through it myself)
As Ings describes throughout the book, over the history of evolution, vision has developed and adapted to each creature’s specific survival needs. For example, humans are rare among mammals in having three coloured vision (but not other vertebrae, which often see several more dimensions of colour). The reason for this poor colour vision in mammals is that they evolved primarily from nocturnal ancestors. This includes humans, which accounts for our unusually good night vision. As our ancestors made the switch to daylight living, their eyes developed new ways of seeing colour, and in fact went through several such evolutions. The result is that our colour perception is not a simple straightforward system, rather it consists of imperfections, idiosyncrasies and compensations, which tell the story of our evolution. P256-8
We see a particular way because eyes developed in response to the demands of our environment, and every creature sees the world differently. Which makes one realise that it is our interaction with the world that has formed the way we perceive it.
How differently do we perceive the same world from, say, a fly?
Can we trust our vision?
Are we actually seeing what is really there?
Maybe there is no correct way to see the world, every type of eye sees something different, they are all reacting to the same world in different ways. Our relationship to the world is not given, it is formed through continual, complex transactions with our environments.
So you and I probably don’t experience a particular environment in exactly the same way, but we can be pretty sure we experience it similar way, due to the fact that we share the same biology. We experience it in a similar enough way that we can generally agree about what we perceive and relate to each other's experiences (which is important…) but at the same time I am not seeing exactly the same colour in the sky that you are. I can only imagine what you see through the context of my own vision.
It reminds me of the lecture that Elizabeth Grosz gave at RMIT earlier this year, where she talked about art in relation to sexual selection. (Although I must go back and look at her writing, it’s getting a little hazy…)
She talks about the way an animal co-evolves with its Umwelt (environment, surroundings, milieu) which is the world provided by its sense organs. The world exists for each living creature as it is framed by their perception, the limit of which is like a horizon line (she uses the analogy of living within a soap bubble). The world as a whole is not fully accessible to any living being, we can only ever experience a fragment, which is only as complex as the organs we have to perceive it.
She conveys all these ideas in a way that makes them much easier to visualize…
...
Anyway, on another topic, Ings describes a trip he made to north of Finland, where he was shocked that the colours of the sunset were all wrong in comparison to his native London:
“The sky was no longer the sky I recognised. It was neon. The pink edging of the clouds was an artificial hot pink. Where I expected orange there were flushes of peach and cherry red. The sky itself had a slight violet cast.” P217-8
This phenomena has to do with the molecules which make up the atmosphere (which is what makes the sky appear blue rather than the endless black of outer space.) Because the sun’s rays pass more obliquely through the atmosphere in Finland, the sky appears bluer, because the shorter blue wavelengths of light are scattered by the air molecules. As the sun sets, it passes even more obliquely through the atmosphere, and only the longest reddish-orange wavelengths reach us. The closer one gets to the equator, the less blue the sky appears, because the light rays reach earth at a more direct angle, passing through less atmosphere, which means that fewer light rays are diffracted and we see a whiter light.
I want to test this phenomena out, now that I’m a little further from the equator than I usually am, but, as far as I could see today, the sky appeared to be relatively grey and uncoloured. I suppose it is being filtered through too many layers of cloud, or maybe I’m not quite far north enough yet.
Here are some pictures of the sunset glimpsed every now and then as I walked through Berlin this afternoon.
Sunset occured at 15.52.
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