Ecological psychology and split-brain research.
I will begin these notes with an extensive quote from Costall (1995 p.467) as follows:
According to the American humorist Robert Benchley, there are two kinds of people - those who think the world can be divided into two kinds of people and those who don’t … there are two kinds of psychologist - those who know they are committed to some form of dualism and those who don’t.
Certainly, there are more than two kinds of dualism. There are the dualisms of the mental and the physical; of the knower and the known; of mind and body; mind and behaviour; organism and environment; of quantity and quality; of fact and value; of subjective and objective; of individual and society; of natural and conventional; and of biology and culture – to name but a few. Together these dualisms appear as a problem special to psychology because each cuts right through the discipline. Yet psychology, as a modern, academic discipline, did not create these dualisms, but was created by them. Once physical science had promoted its methodology (of atomism, mechanism and quantification) to an exclusive ontology, psychology was a pretty obvious mistake waiting to be made - an essentially derivative science modelled on physics, yet having as its subject the very realm that physics rendered utterly obscure.
Costall says that ‘… one of the most fundamental issues of modern psychology …’ is ‘… the reality of meaning.’’ ibid. p. 468)
I like the phrase ‘… psychology was a pretty obvious mistake waiting to be made’ inordinately. However, I obviously also feel that it overstates the case somewhat or I shouldn’t be writing this book. Costall was writing a paper based on the ideas of James Gibson who first wrote about ‘ecological psychology’ (e.g. Gibson 1986). Ecological psychology is all about what Gibson called ‘… the complementarity of the animal and the environment’. (ibid. p. 127). For the purposes of this discussion we are ‘the animal’.
Gibson writes that what we actually experience is ‘affordances’. We do not experience things as things per se but as whatever they ‘afford’ us. We make meaning, rather than identify stuff. ‘To see things is to perceive what they afford’ (ibid. p. 240). Perception is an active process; it is a creation of the individual, a construct formulated within a wide-ranging perceptual system. Perception is ‘... an achievement of the individual, not an appearance in the theater of his consciousness’ (ibid. p. 239). (Actually the idea of the ‘theatre of consciousness’ arose with Descartes. He thought there must be a conscious mind, sometimes conceived of as a tiny homunculus, watching what was going on in the mind & hence the world, as if in a tiny neurological theatre. ‘We’ must be looking at ‘it’. This Cartesian dualism is rejected by modern thinkers in psychology. There is no little person watching the drama in this theatre; there is no theatre; the drama and the mind are not separate, they are now regarded as a single entity.)
‘The inputs of the special senses have the qualities of the receptors being stimulated, whereas the achievements of the perceptual systems are specific to the qualities of things in the world, especially their affordances’ (ibid. p.246). Some of these ‘qualities of things’ relate to persistence and change. We ‘... extract the invariants of structure from the flux of stimulation, while still noticing the flux’ (ibid. p. 247) Our perceptual systems do not passively match incoming data to stored memory data, we appreciate affordances, invariances and transformations in input/output feedback loop systems which may involve swathes of our brain, and many and various centres there, in our proactive search for meaning in our environment.