I wrote a post sometime back that tried to sort out the relation between percepts and concepts.
Here’s the link to that post: https://jzmcgowan.com/2024/03/13/percept-concept/
The issue in that post was the relation of percepts (information taken in via the five senses) to concepts (the categories by which we identify what a percept has given to us). Mostly (although not entirely) that post assumes that the percept comes first, followed by the judgment (assignment) of the appropriate concept. The puzzle, in part, was that this kind of temporal sequencing is not experienced in most cases. The percept and the concept arrive together. I see a tree. I don’t see some amorphous set of sense impressions and then decide they form a tree. The percept comes already conceptualized, categorized.
There are cases where percept and concept are pried apart. And many artists, especially since the Romantics, strive hard to separate the two, to overcome our habitual associations and expectations. To break the crust of habit, the received categorizations of culture, is one of their top artistic goals. Thus, “difficult” poetry strives to slow the reader down, to use words in unfamiliar ways so we have to puzzle out the meaning instead of simply swallowing it at one gulp. The same for many modern paintings or music. A moment of confusion, of disorientation, is deliberately created.
However, according to what has become the reigning orthodoxy in current consciousness studies, I was working with the wrong model of perception. The new orthodoxy says 1) percept and concept cannot be pried apart, but even more consequently, 2) that concept always precedes percept. Here’s is Andy Clark’s description of the current consensus: “the world we experience is to some degree the world we predict. Perception itself, far from being a simple window onto the world, is permeated from the get-go by our own predictions and expectations. It is permeated not simply in the sense that our own ideas and biases impact how we later judge things to be, but in some deeper, more primal, sense. The perceptual process, the very machinery that keeps us in contact with the world, is itself fueled by a rich seam of prediction and expectation” (The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality, Pantheon Books, 2023, p. 17). “Every time we make sense of our worlds through perceptual encounters, we do so by means of both the incoming sensory signals and a rich invisible stream of knowledge-based predictions” (22).
This vision does seem very close to the classic pragmatism of Peirce and William James. We move through the world in a kind of semi-somnolent habitual gliding. Not closely attending, we walk, see trees, eat food, carry on conversations that move along predictable paths. In the ordinary course of events, very little surprises us, brings us up short. All unfolds almost entirely as expected. It takes pretty dramatic deviations from the expected to break through, to make us question what we have casually assumed to be the case. Inquiry (in the pragmatist parlance) begins from doubt. We must set about trying to figure out what we have seen, what is happening, when things don’t go as expected.
Andy Clark is sunnily optimistic about all this. But it is easy to see how it could be given a pessimistic spin, as a writer like Flaubert (with his fierce hatred of received ideas) does. That we process the world through our expectations explains confirmation bias and our bog-stupid inability to alter our expectations and prejudices (this latter word the exactly precise one for this state of affairs) in light of new evidence, new percepts. We quite literally do not see what is in front of us; we see what we expect to see.
In Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, he reports on an experiment in which the subjects are shown playing cards. The trick is that the cards have the spades and clubs colored red, and the hearts and diamonds colored black. Over 80% of the subjects will identify a 6 with black hearts as either a 6 of hearts or a 6 of spades. Less than 20% will say: that’s a six with black hearts. And increasing the time subjects were given to view the cards did not substantially change the results. We look at something quickly, make our judgment of what it is, and move on. Anomalies are hard for us to see.
Of course, it is hopeful that a certain percentage do recognize that something is awry, that what perception is offering does not match what was expected/predicted. Clark sees humans as self-correcting animals, adjusting their judgments as we go along. His model is basically one in which “errors” in prediction are registered—and then serve to alter expectations.
Clark’s reliance on a virtuous feedback loop becomes clear when he turns to an account of action. (Again, his account chimes with classic pragmatism.) “[S]uccessful action involves a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Predicting the detailed sensory effects of a movement is what causes the movement to unfold. By making prediction the common root of both perception and action, predictive processing (active inference) reveals a hidden unity in the workings of the mind. Action and perception form a single whole, jointly orchestrated by the drive to eliminate errors in prediction. . . . In other words, the idea of a completed action is what brings the actual action about” (70-71). We are guided by our vision of consequences; we then act to bring the desired consequences about.
The feedback loop comes into play in terms of what Clark calls “precision weightings.” “Various estimates of precision alter patterns of post-synaptic influence and so determine what (right here, right now) to rely on and what to ignore. This is also the way brains balance the influence of sensory evidence against predictions. In other words, precision variations control what bits of what we know and what we sense will be most influential, moment by moment, in bringing about further processing and actions. Expressed like that, the intimacy of precision and attention is apparent. Precision variation is what attention (a useful but somewhat nebulous concept) really is. . . . [A]ttention is the brain adjusting its precision-weightings as we go about our daily tasks, using knowledge and sensing to their best effect. By attending correctly, I become better able to spot and respond to whatever matters most for the task I am trying to perform. Precision estimation is thus the heart and soul of flexible, fluid intelligence” (50).
Although he doesn’t say this, Clark has here added “purposes” to expectations and predictions. We attend to (notice) the elements of a situation relevant to our current purposes. And we adjust our understanding of those situational elements (attain more precise readings of the situation) in response to the feedback received as our purposes are attained or thwarted. So the senses (perceptions) do have their role to play; they do provide information about the situation. But what information is taken in and how it is processed (evaluated) is guided by the prior purposes/expectations.
Clark invokes William James briefly at this point—and accepts that this account reverses common-sense notions of the causal sequence: i.e. that we see something first, then act upon it; here, by contrast, we see something by virtue of the fact that we are looking for it in relation to our purposes/expectations. Attention is influenced more by what we expect to see or are specifically looking for than by what is actually present in the world we encounter. But the ability to shift attention, to move toward a more precise apprehension of the actual situation is “the heart and soul of flexible, fluid intelligence.”
A corollary of this view is that situations, in almost all cases, contain more elements than any perceiver/agent takes in. Attention is selective; we simply do not see what is neither expected nor relevant to our purposes. William James constantly stressed this “more”: the fact that our knowledge is almost always incomplete. Again, it does seem that many artists are dedicated to bringing more of a situation into view–or, at least, at bringing what has not been seen, what had been neglected by common sense (a loaded term), to our attention.
Clark does not take up the issue of just what is required to break through the crust of expectations. He only briefly considers the problems of entrenched prejudices, of failures to apprehend the real—or even the problem of bad judgments about the actual affordances of a particular situation. He does talk of “disordered attention” (51) and “aberrant attention” (52) and considers clinical ways of intervening to redirect attention in such cases. To my mind, however, he is over-optimistic about the ability to shift our incoming biases.
Clark also takes a very individualistic stance on the nature of our preconceptions and expectations. He sees them as the product of individual experience much more than of socialization (however you want to conceive of the process by which individuals are provided with a set of cultural expectations and beliefs.) And he doesn’t address the problem of the loss of flexibility as one ages. At what point are the individual’s expectations hardened to the point where they are very hard to revise, to un-fix.
So I have posed two questions: 1) how strong does the disconfirmation of expectations have to be to actually break through and garner attention? What kinds of shocks actually move us to doubt and inquiry (as conceived in the pragmatist model)? And 2) at what age are expectations mostly entrenched and thus resistant to revision? An open mind is a wonderful thing in part because it is so rare.
And just as open minds are rare, so are true idiosyncratic individuals. There is no reason to deny individual variations, but behavior and beliefs also, to a very large extent, clump. We are all strongly influenced by our closest fellow humans, adopting their styles, beliefs, values, habits etc.
William James famously wrote “the trail of the human serpent is over all.” I will admit that acknowledging the conceptual overlay through which all perceptions are processed depresses me. I am enough of a Romantic that I want, along with William Blake, to throw open the doors of perception. I don’t deny that the available evidence speaks strongly in favor of the new orthodoxy about how we process the world. I just want to be among the twenty percent who see red spades.
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