I : Information for Vision p. 1-7
Monday, February 2nd, 2009…impossible goal–a complete understanding of perception. At a minimum, such an understanding wants, first, a description of what is perceived and, second, an explanation of how we perceive it, even act on it.
Gibson? need to look up more of his work
**Visual perception is the study of the mapping from perceptible external objects, through optic information that represents them, to the observer who uses that information for his or her purposes. Geometry is the vehicle of this instillation. Not only is geometry useful in describing the object, encoding it in equations for the purposes of description by the experimenter, but also, I suggest, observers can decode that information along lines which demonstrate that the human visual system is a sophisticated geometry-analyzing machine.
**Information is shaped by the mutuality of the perceiver and environment.
**Information, I claim, is found in the geometric relations of parts of objects to each other and to their surrounds. Rules of geometry govern these relations presented to a perceiver, and it is the discovery of those rules papplicable to visual perception that is a major psychological task.
**Nonetheless, some questions of a metaphysical nature show more promise from an approach rooted in empirical psychology…What is the nature of information such that it informs us? This question is at the intersection of psychology, philosophy, and artificial intelligence. An answer to it is, I contend, a necessary beginning to any account of perception.
sense data - unanalyzed sensations from sense organs as sent to the central nervous system