Perception As Internalization

 

Perception As Internalization

 

We have become accustomed to thinking of perception as a type of causal relation, sharing its logical (metaphysical) features. As earthquakes cause buildings to collapse, so external objects cause experiences to occur. Cause and effect are external to each other; neither is contained in the other. But this picture fails to accommodate the fact that perception internalizes its object in roughly the sense in which the mind internalizes a surrounding language or culture or moral system.  When you see an object that object is external to you but it comes to play the role of an internal object in your mind: it comes to “live” in your mind, to be part of the mind’s landscape, to operate as a mental constituent. For example, your perception of your mother produces an inner object that has a particular significance for you, a particular potency. The external object becomes an intentional object, an object for you. Thus it is natural to speak of a process of internalization, as psychologists often do. In general when you sense an external object an act of internalization occurs, the upshot of which is that something is added to your mental resources. Perception, then, is not just a cause-effect relation, but something more intimate. The external object becomes part of the perceiver’s mental world, not merely the trigger of the experience it leads to. We should therefore not model the perceptual process on typical causal sequences; rather, there is an act of internalization that transcends the usual causal relation (this is not to deny that causation is part of the picture).

            In any process of internalization some sort of boundary must be crossed, as in the membrane of a cell through which nutrients may be absorbed. So the mind must have a boundary that is crossed when an object is internalized. Presumably it is not a spatial boundary, under any conception of space that we can understand. There is a point at which an object passes into the mind (though this passing is not a form of travelling through space). We have no clear idea of what such a boundary consists in (or of), but it must exist if it is correct to speak of perceptual internalization. At one time the object existed outside of the boundary; at a later time the object has become part of a mental landscape. The mind has the capacity to include things within its boundaries. Perception is the most basic way this happens. It doesn’t happen in the case of innate or pre-existing mental contents: here there is no transition from outer to inner, since there was no act of internalization. The word “perception” should be taken in a broad sense: the mind can perceive and internalize music, one’s own body (proprioception), moral codes, universals, and works of art, among other things. How this happens, and how the brain underpins it, is not easy to understand (it might even be a deep mystery), but it evidently occurs, and it is essential to the nature of perception. One might think of it as a process of de-alienation: the alien other becomes one’s own. This is a richer operation than any envisaged by a purely causal account of perception.

            Brentano had the idea, not merely that mental states have objects, but that these objects are internal to their identity (“intentional inexistence”). We can add to that insight the thought that perceptual intentionality arises by a process of internalization. The external object is internalized in perception thereby becoming an inner intentional object. What that external object is exactly is a matter for further decision: is it the material thing itself, much of which is imperceptible to the perceiver, or is it limited to aspects of the object that can be perceived (or are being perceived)? Perhaps the internalized object should be identified with certain of the properties of the external physical thing—aspects of objects not whole objects. When you are perceptually acquainted with a table, say, the internalized entity is really an aspect of the table, i.e. a subset of its properties. Strictly speaking, then, internalization acts on universals (or whatever you think is immediately presented when an object is perceived). In any case, we have this rather mystifying act of internalization that converts a non-mental entity into something native to the mind. Perceiving is thus more than merely an external object causing an experience; it essentially involves internalizing the object in experience.[1]

 

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[1] It is strange that the philosophy of perception, from the sense datum theory to the causal theory, has not recognized the centrality of the notion of internalization, given that it is such a natural intuitive way to think of perception. Isn’t it obvious that when you see something that thing comes to be an item in your inner world—part of your Dasein? It enters your memory and imagination, forming a constituent of your world-view. Such “object relations” (to use Melanie Klein’s phrase) are the stuff of psychology. Learning itself is really a matter of internalization (empiricism says that all knowledge arises by internalization).

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  1. Giulio Katis
    Giulio Katis says:

    Very well put. The mind does not merely internalise sense data as representations of objects _in itself_ (as we might describe for what is happening with an AI), but also as objects _for itself_. Presumably this is related to the mind’s capacity to create the sense of subject vs object. On the point of internalising qualities of an object, rather than the object itself: I have recently been asking myself about the relation between the mind’s capacity to create the sense of subject vs object and its capacity to create a distinction between the qualities of an object and the idea of the object itself as bearer of those qualities. Is one capacity more basic than the other? I can see arguments both ways, but I suspect it is not the right question in that one capacity I assume cannot exist without the other. Both of these capacities seem tied up in your idea of internalisation. Perhaps these are two different but related aspects of what it means for an object to “exist for me”?

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  2. Giulio Katis
    Giulio Katis says:

    Is the boundary through which internalisation occurs fixed and inert, or is it constructed, flexible, bridging past and present, or even transparently reflective? And could such a boundary be understood as constructed (though not necessarily arbitrarily so) without slipping into idealism i.e. without implying all reality is subsumed by some uber-mind? For example, when I notice that my thoughts have gone off on some rambling discourse, in that process of internalisation is my mind drawing a boundary between the thought process and itself, with the past thought process now internalised as an object for my present mind? When I perceive work as “work vs my life”, is my mind creating, or moving a pre-existing, boundary as part of the internalisation? When we perceive other sentient beings (embodied minds), though many of the qualities we associate with that other mind is for us “over there”, is there not also a recognition (as per your previous post “My Mind”) that the object has for us something that is “in here” (i.e. a recognition that partially negates the boundary, as when I look out the window but also see my reflection). Though some concept of boundary seems appropriate in this context, as you suggest, the concept of spatial boundary seems inadequate to the task.

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