Minds and Brains: 2.0

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Once we have taken seriously the notion that our human consciousness is crucially constituted by the presentation of salient features of an external environment, our investigation into human nature opens up dramatically as we examine just what has been salient to humans as civilization as developed over time. In this section, I will be exploring the ramifications of Julian Jaynes’s theory of linguistic consciousness in terms of Heideggerian externalism. By following Jaynes in claiming that the development of complex, metaphorical language is a necessary step towards full-blown human consciousness, I wish to argue in support of Jayne’s thesis that the internal mind-space of modern, intentional consciousness is an analog of the external environment.

An analog is a model, but a model of a special kind. It is not like a scientific model, whose source may be anything at all and whose purpose is to act as a hypothesis of explanation and understanding. Instead, an analog is at every point generated by the thing it is an analog of (my emphasis). A map is a good example (Jaynes, 1976, p. 54).

The concept of analog can be grasped easily in terms of the Gibsonian theory of externalist realism we have been discussing. The question then becomes, if human conscious is an analog of the environmental patterns of salience as presented to our nervous systems, then what happens when the external stimulus information specified includes language and metaphor? Would not everything change? “…metaphors increase enormously our powers of perception of the world about us and our understanding of it, and literally create new objects (my emphasis)[1]. Indeed, language is an organ of perception, not simply a means of communication” (Jaynes, 1976, p. 50). Heidegger would concur. Seeing the world in terms of language allows for radically different specifications of stimulus information as related to pragmatic coping.[2] Furthermore, language opens up the possible spatialization of the world around us through the development of an analog “I” which can “look out” onto the world. Through a deeply embedded container metaphor, the internal mind-space of modern human consciousness becomes operative and allows for more complicated behavioral processes in response to novel situations and stressful environment contexts.[3]

All of this orients us towards a theory of consciousness that allows for psychological development within a relatively short evolutionary timeframe. This has drastic implications for when we place a date on the evolution of modern consciousness, contrary to the traditional view of it lurching slowly over the course of many millions of years. If Jaynes is right that language provides for radically different salience patterns in the environment to catch our attention[4], and that such new perceptual powers would necessarily lead to the development of advanced cultural pragmatics (see note 36), then we are necessarily forced to date the development of language closer to when archeological evidence indicates signs of civilization emerged. Subsequently, if it turns out to be true that the advent of full-blown consciousness can only emerge after the metaphorical and narratization powers of humanity have sufficiently developed, we can then place the full maturation of human consciousness at a relatively later point of time than orthodox theory as supposed. A more detailed discussion of the historical record and evolutionary/neurological plausibility of this theory[5] is beyond the limited scope of this paper, but needless to say, Jaynes does much to provide a truly interdisciplinary theory of human psychohistory and The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind deserves a place as one of the most challenging works of the 20^th century, upsetting much dogma, and in the words of one reviewer, “rendering whole shelves of books obsolete.”

[2] Andy Clark discusses this fact in the third chapter of his new book, Supersizing the Mind. He claims that the “linguistic scaffold” has three interlocking effects. “First, the simple act of labeling the world opens up a variety of new computational opportunities and supports the discovery of increasingly abstract patterns in nature. Second, encountering or recalling structured sentences supports the development of otherwise unattainable kinds of expertise. And third, linguistic structures contribute to some of the most important yet conceptually complex of all human capacities: our ability to reflect on our own thoughts and characters and our limited but genuine capacity to control an guide the shape and contents of our own thinking” (Clark, 2008, p. 44). I am in debt to Clark for his many insights and cool scientific references concerning pragmatic externalism.

[3] “Let us consider a man commanded by himself or his chief to set up a fish weir upstream from a campsite. If he is not conscious, and cannot therefore narrative the situation and so hold his analog “I” in a spatialized time with its consequences fully imagined, how does he do it? It is only language, I think, that can keep him at this time-consuming all-afternoon work. A Middle Pleistocene man would forget what he was doing. But lingual man would have language to remind him, either repeated by himself, which would require a type of volition which I do not think he was capable of, or, as seems more likely, by a repeated ‘internal’ verbal hallucination telling him what to do” (Jaynes, 1976, p. 134)

[4] Gibson sometimes speculated that the brain in some way “resonates” with the external environment (for a refreshingly original account of Gibsonian resonance in terms of Bergsonian temporal dynamics, see Robbins (2006) ). Accordingly, for there to be linguistically framed environmental salience patterns  understood by humans so effortlessly, then there must be a corresponding neurological adaptation that goes along with it. As Jaynes speculates, the lateralization of language in the cortical hemispheres  through the development of the two, interconnected language centers in the left hemisphere (Broca’s and Wernicke’s) is a good candidate for the neural substrate of externalist, language-infused cognition.

[5] For a brief synopsis of the growing neuroscientific evidence to support Jaynes theory, see Olin (1999) and Sher (2000).

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In this article, I aim to first critique the standard epistemological situation as given in traditional philosophical frameworks as being radically hostile to ecological perspectives on the human situation. Then, utilizing philosophical work done in the 20^th century, I will lay out an alternative sketch of our epistemological relationship with the environment in which our knowledge concerning the external world is direct and relational. I will then argue that this perspective on epistemology can help frame the environmentalist perspective and give credence to the notion of ourselves as being deeply embedded into the particular environments we inhabit; socially, cognitively, and emotionally.

The Standard Framework and its Problems

If you look at the history of philosophy, you will see a long tradition of separating our essential human nature from the external, physical environments we live in. By proposing that, epistemically, we are shut off from the real world, and subsequently have to build up a systematic mental representation from “given” sensory inputs, philosophers have barricaded themselves within a “veil of ideas.” From this epistemic situation, it follows naturally that there is an internal realm different in kind from the external world of physical worlds and public behavior. To account for the difference between inside and outside, philosophers constructed the notion of a mind that is distinct from the physical environment.

In my mind, this stipulation of mental life as distinct from physical life has created a philosophical atmosphere that breeds contempt for environmentalist endeavors. If we take this standard framework seriously, it alienates our true nature from the ecological niches we inhabit. If, so goes the standard theory, we are epistemically shut off from the external world, then whatever makes us essentially human – be it mind, soul, spirit – is not of the world, and our humanity becomes defined in terms of thinking and not being; that is, being in a physical world. This, at least, was Martin Heidegger’s great critique of cognitivist philosophical schemes: they cut us off from the environment and stipulate a go-between mental representation in its stead, and then from this axiom, go on to conclude that what makes us human is not the fact that we are embedded in a familiar world, but rather, separated from this world by our thoughts.

The Ecological Alternative

The epistemic alternative to the standard framework involves a perceptual theory in which the knowledge we have concerning the environment is much more direct. Not direct in the sense that perceptual knowledge somehow avoids going through different brain filters, but rather, in the sense that there is no representational mediation between the environment and our perception of it. In contrast to this representational framework, the ecological perspective is much more pragmatic in that our perception is tied up with behavior and opportunities for behavior. For example, when perceiving a chair, we do not have a sensation input and then infer that the chair is for sitting, but rather, we directly see that the chair is available for sitting. James Gibson, considered the founder of ecological psychology, dubbed this aspect of perception affordances.

Thus, according to this ecological theory of perception, we are not estranged from the environment epistemically, but rather, intimately entangled with it due to our pragmatic orientation with our ecological niches. In our homes and our cars, our offices and our places of play, we are at home epistemically. Our knowledge concerning the external environment is immediate and direct; it guides us toward different behaviors which enable pragmatic know-how. So in the case of perceiving a chair, our epistemic situation – due to developmental learning and years of experience – is that of familiarity. We know what a chair affords, and this knowledge guides our behavior so that we may cope with the environment sufficiently.

Implications for Environmental Philosophy

The philosophical implications of this ecological framework can be extended from philosophy of mind to philosophy of the environment. While this new epistemological framework provides a clear motivation for abandoning traditional dualisms between mind and world, subject and object, it also provides a backdrop for modern thinking in regards to issues surrounding the environment. When perceptual theories take seriously our epistemic embeddedness within an environment, we arrive at a position readily adapted for environmentalist concerns. By placing the essence of humanity into an ecological niche cashed out in terms of pragmatic coping, we get rid of the traditional bias against seeing ourselves as somehow tied up with the physical world. This philosophical perspective enables a conception of humanity that is intimately connected with the surrounding environment.

Subsequently, once a philosophical system takes into account the profound interrelationship between ourselves and the environment, the philosophical problems surrounding environmentalism fade. Thus, from the ecological perspective, a motivation to preserve the environment naturally emerges. Because we no longer feel estranged from the environment, but rather, wrapped up in it due to our everyday coping, the environmentalist urge to reach out and protect the environment becomes another way of reaching out to ourselves, or at least, to an aspect that is just as important to defining humanity as humanity itself. In other words, the ecological perspective implicitly incorporates a conception of humanity that is at odds with the idea that what makes humans human is not our attachment to the environment, but rather, our detachment form it.

By divorcing itself from this theory of detachment, ecologically oriented philosophy offers a reconceptualization of humanity that has the potential to change the way we perceive ourselves as related to the environment, allowing for a newfound enthusiasm concerning environmentalist issues. By taking our minds out from the abstracted space of Reason, ecological theory puts humanity right back into the social, cultural, pragmatic milieu that structures our experience and guides our behavior. This conception of ourselves is at odds with our traditional Western intellectual heritage, but I believe that our species as a whole is ready and waiting for just such a theory to come along and encourage rampant environmentalism as a way of protecting something that is not just apart from ourselves, but profoundly intermingled with us as humans: the environment.

In the same vein, even the notion of intentionality, the directedness of mental life towards objects, depends upon the subject being distinct from the object. Without this metaphysical gap, there could be no epistemological intuition guiding our inherited supposition of dualism between subject and object. Spelled out in such plain terms, one might feel this is a strawman, but nevertheless, the metaphysical implications of such language are clear.

But, hear me out, if the fundamental division between self and world rests merely on a philosophical assumption, why should we not explore the implications of an alternative ontological framework? Historically, this alternative has been called “being-in-the-world.” I won’t go into the details right now, but I think I’ve discussed it elsewhere several times. Nevertheless, important for my purposes here, the human being is still capable of separating himself from the world, despite his fundamental orientation of ontological familiarity, through the use of conscious thought – which is representational. The ontology of thoughts seems clear: subject and object. According to the Heideggerian perspective, the ontology of people is not so clear cut.

So, with this alternative ontological framework of being-in-the-world in mind, what sense can we still make out of the notion of qualia? There is an experience of the world. We can strip this experience of its existential import through deliberation. We can think to ourselves about our own experience and contemplate what it is like to see the world. In such deliberation, we might think of ourselves as a separate – mental – entity that stands alone in the world of objects and people. After such contemplation, we might try our hand at constructing an ontology that includes ourselves as separate mental entities, and the world of objects that we reach out to through intentional consciousness. We would be basing our ontology, supposedly, on the phenomenology of experience – gathered through our very own cognitive contemplation upon experience as philosophers.

The mistake here would be to take this contemplation-driven ontology and immediately claim, “This is it! This is the way things are!” From a Heideggerian perspective, one could just as well claim from the start that there is no ontological wedge between subject and object, saying that instead, subject and object are replaced by being-in-the-world. If you fail to do this, and instead press on with a dualistic ontology, the language of phenomenology results in a subject intentionally directed towards an external world, which impinges its sensory data upon our minds, giving us the famous first-person experience of “qualia.”

By challenging the ontological assumptions implicit in this representationalist perspective, we can dismantle the philosophical scaffolding which supports the very notion of qualia, and subsequently, all of the derivative non-sense which has swollen contemporary philosophical journals.

Perhaps, if we are interested in spelling out the ontology of our total personality, and not just the conceptual web of belief in our heads, we should attempt to do phenomenology from a non-Cartesian perspective. After all, why should we expect an analysis of cognition, as distinct from a phenomenological understanding of absorbed coping, to reveal to us an ontology that gives due justice to the total phenomenon of our embodied, enacted situation?

As an atheist and has a naturalist, I do not feel the “sensus divinitas” of Calvin and the reform epistemologists. To feel otherwise, would be to beg the question against naturalism and the naturalistic interpretation of divine phenomenology. I say this because such a subjective argumentation for the presence of God in man’s heart is the only escape from the rationalistic perspective, a perspective which rules out the proposition “God exists” as meaningless. What is left is a shell of experience, filled with meaning for those surrounded by Christian imagery and symbolization, but empty for those of us who reject the divinity surrounding such religiosity. For us, it is impossible to have faith in the propositions of God’s existence, for our rationality compels us to reject metaphysical speculation in the same way that we reject Zeus, Ra, and the Invisible Pink Unicorn. We see Christian belief in terms of psychology and irrationality, despite the attempts of Christian theologians to present their system of beliefs in terms of “rational epistemic rights” and other philosophical cop-outs. For atheists, it isn’t the rational coherence of a system which compels us to believe in it, it is the truth which drives our search for knowledge and understanding.

Some would say this is a faith in science and a faith in the finite, yet hungry, man as man. But this is not my faith. My faith cannot be described in terms of a single propositional object, such as “science.” No, this will not do at all, for my faith is an ultimate concern with my own being, my life as lived through a physical body in a physical environment. I am nothing but the motion of matter and yet I am more than this, because I have an experience, an experience which is rich phenomenologically. Through this experience I have understoodd the essential importance of existence, as a human, as a philosopher, an atheist, a friend, and a lover. I live my life with a dynamic faith which places my ultimate concern in the hands of the present moment, a moment which jumps through time and space, compelling me forward towards my death.

Such a perspective might sound morbid for the Christian who has visions of heaven, but my bliss will be in the silence of non-being, satisfied with a life well lived. This faith of mine is rooted in physicality, in the reality of my own being, situated and embodied. It doesn’t require knowledge, it only requires existence, which is the essence of man.

I am taking a class this semester called “faith and reason” and we are exploring the relationship between truth, rationality, and faith. The first book we read for the class was Christian existentialist-theologian-philosopher Paul Tillich’s The Dynamics of Faith. In this work, Tillich provides an existentialist definition of faith that I believe is compatible with atheism. How is this possible? Allow me to elucidate on Tillich’s refreshing idea.

Tillich essentially defines faith as an “ultimate concern with the infinite[or unconditional. I prefer "infinite."]“. Thus, if you are an atheist you can still have “faith” granted that you are ultimately concerned with something that is not finite. What does this seemingly mystic definition mean? Surely, it is too abstract and mystical to be of any relevance to a scientifically oriented atheist such as myself (that, granted, has many philosophical leanings) What does Tillich mean here?

First of all, in order to understand what Tillich means by faith, it is important to understand what he doesn’t mean. He doesn’t equate faith with a cognitive belief structure or propositional knowledge-based faith, such as “I believe in God because I have faith that God exists.” This is not true faith for Tillich because only the cognitive aspect of the human being is concerned in such a faith. As an existentialist, this is unacceptable because “ultimate concern” deals with the total personality and not just a limited aspect of the human being, namely theoretical and reflective cognition.

Utilizing Heideggerian terminology, I think ultimate concern can be conceptualized in terms of ontological comportment by a Dasein. That is to say, as ontologically oriented creatures, human beings comport themselves towards that which defines their being, which is their own individual existence. I am a life to live. Such a conception of humanity differs from the Cartesian tradition’s emphasis on self-consciousness and mental gymnastics, instead focusing on how we are engaged with the world in our own personal lives. Furthermore, we care about our lives: our being is an issue for us and in this sense, Tillich seems to be echoing Heidegger in his insistence that the most critical aspect of our total personality is our ultimate concern with the infinite.

So what is the infinite if not some metaphysically abstract mumbojumbo? Well, ultimately its a metaphor so take it as you will, but I think its useful to view the infinite in terms of the reductionist/holist debate. I see the infinite as that which can’t be reduced to the finite, i.e. the infinite is wrapped up in that which can only be captured in holistic vocabulary. Such as what? Well, for one, our ontological being, which is social in nature, can’t be reduced to the physical motions of matter which supports our constitution, but rather, resides in an existential matrix that is spread out ontologically amongst a community of involved and engaged language users. It is this matrix which provides the significance missing in crudely naturalistic conceptions of the human world.

So, the infinite, is transcendent in that it goes above and beyond the concrete realm holistically, but nevertheless, remains grounded in the physicality of reality. It is this conception of infinite that I think is useful for the atheist in coming to terms with Tillich’s existentialist theology.

So how does an atheist utilize Tillich’s definitions to provide existential perspective to his life? Well, for starters, one can appreciate that mostly everyone is ultimately concerned with something, whether that something is a child, their work, or a nation/idea/etc. However, for Tillich, all these concerns are idolatrous in that they aren’t concerned with the infinite. How does Tillich get around this? Well, as a Christian he is concerned with the religious symbolism of God as an unconditional infinite Ground of Being. While I can make this work in my own mind, I fear that in our day and age, such terminology will never be socially useful because it would be annoying to try and explain in existentialist terms what you mean by “ultimate ground of being” everytime you mention that you have faith in God. So what should a good philosopher-atheist do? Take the Heideggerian path: situate your ultimate concern in terms of what you are already concerned with as an ontological being: your own being, your own life and how you live it, engaged and embodied in the world.

[To be continued]

Proximally and for the most part we are immersed in the word. The importance of this observation is hidden from the philosophical tradition, because it has been focused on the self-consciousness and moral accountability, in which we experiences ourselves as distinct from the world and others. Heidegger’s phenomenological approach to the self focuses first on a basic form of self-disclosure: I am what matters to me. Seen thus, I cannot disentangle myself from those around me and the world in which I live. In a phrase, we are being-in-the-world.

Thus, according to Heidegger, the philosophical tradition since Descartes has been fundamentally misguided on what it means to be a human. We are not res cogitans, locked behind the theater of our head, looking out at the world from behind a subjective veil, but rather, we are fundamentally familiar with the world. This familiarity is the basic constitution of being-in-the-world, and thus, the basic constitution of humans. If I understand Heidegger right, self-consciousness, intentionality, and all those phenomena of modern philosophy are, if anything at all, residual and derivative from the more basic familiarity with the world. They result when we are in a reflective mood, stepped away from the world, utilizing the modern cognitive faculties evolution has given us. Otherwise, we “reside amidst” the world.

This might all sound like phenomenological mumbo-jumbo, and I agree that it can sound kind of arbitrary, but if you understand Heidegger’s reaction to the western “History of being”, as he calls it, you will realize that this mumbo-jumbo is really a sophisticated methodology for getting at the root phenomena of human activity. By dismissing the subject-object paradigm as irrelevant for phenomenology, Heidegger recasts the subject matter of philosophical inquiry and sets the stage for fruitful hermeneutic interpretation. And that is all Heidegger essentially is, an interpretation. He didn’t really “get at” the phenomena in any systematic way, due to the circular constraints of interpretation, but I feel like that merely makes his philosophical project open and dynamic, as opposed to stale and rigid. He acknowledged the circularity involved in trying to uncover the ontology of being, but this is no matter, because humans already have a “pre-ontological” understanding of being. It is the goal of phenomenology to articulate this pre-ontological understanding into a conceptual form in order to uncover the salient features of the phenomena of being.

Heidegger is satisfied with mere “descriptive phenomenology” for a simple reason: to look for anything else, would be to presuppose a form of psychologism, which states that the structure of meaning is a real, causal property of minds and/or the world. However, if this isn’t the case, and meaning isn’t going to be uncovered in any “deep structures”, or combinatory semantics, then all that can be done with meaning is description. To do otherwise, would be to try and complete some form of constructive theorizing. Meaning isn’t something “produced” by minds, which can be understood by general theorization, but rather, meaning-structures are latent in experience, and the only proper way to get at their ontology is through some sort of interpretation. That interpretation doesn’t necessarily have to be Heideggerian, but Heidegger did a pretty good job of laying down the essential phenomena of being, at least when it comes to human Daseins. And for that I am grateful.

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We can respect, in the minimal sense of tolerating, those who hold false beliefs. We can pass by on the other side. We need not be concerned to change them, and in a liberal society we do not seek to suppress them or silence them. But once we are convinced that a belief is false, or even just that it is irrational, we cannot respect in any thicker sense those who hold it—not on account of their holding it. We may respect them for all sorts of other qualities, but not that one. We would prefer them to change their minds.

Most bloggers that I have seen commenting on the Blackburn paper seem to disagree with him on this particular point, and I thought I would share my opinion. To start off, one blogger said:

This is where I take issue with Blackburn’s stance. Blackburn cannot respect a person who holds a false belief, because he operates under the assumption that if someone believes something different than he does, then she must be wrong.

I think Lindsey completely misses Blackburn’s point in the quoted paragraph above. He wasn’t saying that he doesn’t respect religious people, but rather he can’t respect someone in a “thicker sense”. I take this thicker sense to mean that he can’t respect someone for holding an irrational belief, not that he can’t respect them at all. After all, he says: “We may respect them for all sorts of other qualities, but not that one.” On this point I agree with Blackburn and I can’t understand the antagonism towards this paragraph. If someone told you that they believed a celestial teapot was orbiting Jupiter and it was impossible to verify that it existed, would you respect that person for holding that belief? No, you would think it was irrational to hold such a belief and for precisely that reason, you could not respect them for holding the belief. This doesn’t mean that you don’t respect them for other reasons, such as being moral or intelligent in other areas of inquiry. It is just that on that particular matter, you wouldn’t respect their specific philosophical beliefs and I think the analogy holds for the belief in God.

Let me come right out and say it, as an atheist, I think that it is irrational to hold a belief in any sort of deity. I think that atheism is the default position on whether or not there are any Gods and therefor it requires some intellectual leap, whether provided through indoctrination or some more subjective thought process, to believe in a god. I believe that either way, this thought process is erroneous and irrational, leading to a belief that is very likely to be false. This is why I have to disagree with blogger Lindsey when she says:

Personally, I respect a person (and the part of that person) who I think legitimately came to believe what she did, or is being sincere and honest about what she believes and for what reasons she believes. That sort of belief I can respect, regardless of whether or not I agree with it. It’s the type of respect I have for my atheist and agnostic friends. I don’t agree with them, but I don’t have to. I recognize that they have some good reasons to believe what they do (even if those reasons doesn’t sway my own beliefs). That’s the type of respect that is important to have. It’s about appreciating how a person came to have her set of beliefs, and how she lives out those beliefs. Is she being honest with herself? Is she living out her beliefs with integrity? That is what counts.

Going back to the celestial teapot, one of my favorite examples, does it make sense to respect the “part of the person” that believes in something that can’t be verified in any way? Clearly, it is irrational to believe in the teapot, so why should I respect the part of the person responsible for instilling them with an irrational belief? The only way to counter Blackburn’s point here is to argue that believing in a deity is rational, and I think you will inevitably fail in this regard, for numerous reasons. As I said above, atheism is the default position when it comes to believing in a god, and any deviation from the default must be seen as irrational.

There is, of course, a difference between tolerating an irrational belief and respecting it. Obviously, I tolerate people who believe in irrational metaphysical beings, but I don’t see any reason why I should respect those beliefs, in the sense of intellectual respect. If I sincerely believe that it takes an irrational thought process to come to believe in something, how can I respect that process in the 21st century?

In summary, I can respect a theist for many different reasons, but I can’t respect them on account of them holding an irrational belief. The only way that I could respect someone on account of their holding a belief in a deity, is if they provided an account of their intellectual thought process that wasn’t grounded in subjectivity or irrationality. This is a debate I would willingly have, so if anyone wants to argue that believing in a deity is not irrational, go ahead. Until I am convinced otherwise, I will agree with Blackburn.

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So what am I looking at when I perceive the world? Ideas in my head or real objects? James Gibson proposed a solution that he thought solved these dualistic paradoxes when he came up with the concept of the ambient optic array. Light is bouncing all around the environment, reflecting information about surfaces and textures, eventually settling into invariant “visual angles”. It is the information in this ambient optic array that we perceive. We don’t perceive the world. We don’t perceive representations in our head, projected onto a Cartesian theater. We directly pickup information from the invariant visual angles of light in the ambient optic array.

This is a mind/body/world system. It embedded and embodied. It is confusing to talk about sense-data stimulating the retina, and the brain “perceiving” this data, as if it was projected onto our cortex and the mind just mysteriously “reads” the data. This leads to conceptual muddles such as mind/body dualism and the representational theory of perception. Gibson thought it made more sense to talk about a ecologically embedded perceptual system picking up information directly from the environment. The distinction between this information pickup and the representational theory of perception is subtle. The difference lies in the fact that with the representational theory there is this impossible divide between between “internal” world of the mind and the “external” physical world. Somehow information crosses this metaphysical gap. Gibson thought it was much more parsimonious and evolutionarily sound to talk about perception in terms of direct pickup by a holistic agent in the environment. The information in the ambient optic array is structurally isomorphic to the firings of the nervous system, which is embedded in a whole body, capable of moving about in the world. By utilizing this ecological approach to perception, Gibson was able to drop the conceptual muddle of a “mind” perceiving ideas driven by the sense organs, but rather, a Self perceiving the environment through invariant structures in the light reflected in the environment. This is why the phenomenology of perception always puts the environment “out there”, in the world, as opposed to “inside” the internal chambers of the mind.

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