Seeing is like painting

Andy Clark, Being there: putting brain, body, and world together again:

Velasquez, Las Meninas

Seeing, according to Noë (2004), is like painting. Painting is an ongoing process in which the eye probes the scene, then flicks back to the canvass, then back to the scene, and so on in a dense cycle of active exploration and partial, iterated cognitive uptake. It is this cycle of situated, world-engaging activity that constitutes the act of painting. Seeing (and more generally, perceiving) is likewise constituted, Noë claims, by a process of active exploration in which the sense organs repeatedly probe the world, delivering partial and restricted information on a need-to-know basis. This cycle of situated, world-engaging, whole animal activity is the locus, on Noë’s account, of genuine cognitive interest, at least for perceptual experience. According to such a view, “Perception is not something that happens to us or in us, it is something we do” (Noë 2004, 1). Let’s call this the Strong Sensorimotor Model (SSM) of perceptual experience.

The SSM does not merely claim that you need an active body as a platform for perceiving. Rather, the interesting claim is that skillful bodily action and perception are in some sense intimately entangled or intermingled. The starting point here is the correct and important observation that perception is active:

Think of a blind person tap-tapping his or her way around a cluttered space, perceiving that space by touch, not all at once, but through time, by skilful probing and movement. This is, or at least ought to be, our paradigm of what perceiving is. (Noë 2004, 1)

Expanding on this, Noë adds that

all perception is touch-like in this way: perceptual experience acquires content thanks to our possession of bodily skills. What we perceive is determined by what we do (or what we know how to do); it is determined by what we are ready to do . . . we enact our perceptual experience: we act it out. (2004, 1, emphasis in original)

An important implication of this, according to Noë, is that appeals to internal representations (if such there be) cannot tell the whole story either for painting or for seeing:

The causally sufficient substrate of the production of the picture is surely not the internal states of the painter, but rather the dynamic pattern of engagement among the painter, the scene and the canvass. Why not say the same thing about seeing? Seeing, on this approach, would depend on brain, body and world. (2004, 223)