Sweet. The Mazda is back in commission. Dead starter motor, which is kind of what I suspected. Fords (yes, my Mazda is a Ford), thankfully, are cheap to work on. Between Thanksgiving travels and me dithering a bit about whether it was worth fixing it, I’ve been carless for two weeks. I know, shocking. It’s been enjoyable, though. Without a car I had to plan a little more: bring the bassoon into work on rehearsal days, decide where to meet people earlier than 10 minutes before it’s time to meet. Still, now that the rain has started I’m glad to have wheels, and getting the thing fixed is sort of like getting an (almost) free car all over again!

All sorts of weird synchronicity in the past few months, and a few real reality-benders. I think it was in my discussions with Andro on form and function that I first came up with the idea that concepts influence percepts. In other words, without the concept of a car, it’s not possible to perceive “a car”. We’d see the shape, the color, and hear the sound of the engine, but the brain wouldn’t bind those sensations together into a single percept. That was back in August. Then in September I saw What the Bleep Do We Know. Maybe because I saw it with Monica, who’s an artist and tuned into these sorts of perceptual things, it’s stuck with me in an uncanny way. It makes the same point, although a bit clumsily – concepts are necessary for percepts.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the past few months thinking about art and music in that paradigm, trying to understand (with art in particular) how the form of an object can be represented in a two-dimensional arrangement of paint, in a medium that behaves nothing like the “real thing”. I spent a memorable hour (seriously) in front of Matisse’s Femme Au Chapeau hoping to figure out how my poor brain was turning this utterly incongruous assemblage of colors into, well, a woman with a hat. I’m no draftsman, unfortunately, but I do have some skill with photography. The first chance I got to explore this idea, though, was up at Tahoe with Tom’s Yashica. The Yashica is an eminently personable camera, and it really rewards you for sitting there with your subject, fiddling with the focus and composition.

The reason most people take bad pictures, incidentally, is that they don’t look at what they’re photographing. You see a pretty tree and you snap it, but you didn’t LOOK at the whole frame long enough to see that there was a Wal-Mart behind the tree. Medium format cameras like the Yashica, with their big focusing screens and limited number of exposures, are a good way to break the “point and shoot” habit. And you’ll realize, as you force yourself to examine your composition, what your brain is filtering out. It’s a LOT.

What I realized then is that the problem of perception is that it’s bound up in time. And by problem I mean both the problem that perception is meant to solve, as well as what the limitations are on perception. The function of perception is to provide you (or any animal) with enough information to react to danger or to something you need. That’s an inherently time-limited process: you need to know what’s out there NOW. But often there isn’t enough information in any given instant to know what’s in your environment. So your brain builds up, through experience, models of objects to which it can fit what you’re seeing now, models in turn which are constructed from our time-bound interaction with the actual objects….

More on this later; I’ve got enough here for my next Colossus essay, if not a whole book. It’s trippy stuff, and totally alien to the Enlightenment view of a rational, stable external reality. The final piece of synchronicity was that last night I wanted to look up a passage on the transience of beauty that I had read in St. Augustine’s Confessions over four years ago, and as I was flipping through my copy I discovered that most of this “cutting-edge” neuroscience occurred to Augustine back in 400 A.D. He talks about “carnal” (i.e. physical, animal) perception being limited by time, about how “life” (or consciousness) discovers and assigns meaning to blind physical matter, and about how the mind is constantly creating a reality which includes itself. In other words, a philosophy of mind and aesthetics that we moderns are only beginning to scratch at.

I often have the problem that most of my grand ideas have already been thought of. In this case I’d already read the book, but not knowing anything about neuroscience at the time, none of these ideas occurred to me. I wonder how long and in what form “non in tempore, sed cum tempore, Deus creavit” has stuck with me….