https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=6lHu3Z1O9Q4
The empirical viewpoint is in some sense that what you know, you know as a consequence of sense data. And the problem with that proposition is that there is mystery embedded inside the axiomatic presupposition of sense data. So, behavioral psychologists believe that animals, and they tried to model animal behavior using these a priori theory, the animal reacted reflexively to a stimulus. So that’s a deterministic machine hypothesis. And that always bothered me, partly because animals don’t do that. So for example, if you train a rat to run down a maze, it’ll learn how to run down the maze. And then if you bind the legs, back legs of the rat, and you put its rear end on a wheeled chariot, it will propel itself through the maze on the wheels. And obviously it didn’t learn that reflexively because there aren’t that many wheeled rats. And they just don’t have that kind of experience. And so the rat’s perfectly capable of modifying what it learned in this hypothetically deterministic manner to react to an entirely different set of challenges and come up with exactly the same solution. There was an old behaviorist joke that under controlled laboratory conditions, an animal will do exactly what it damn well pleases. And I like that very much. And the problem with the behaviorist theory of stimulus response was the axiomatic presupposition that the stimulus was given. That you just look at the world and there’s the stimulus right in front of you. That takes no effort. And you merely respond reflexively to it. And that’s so wrong that it’s almost incalculable because it turns out that perceiving the world is so complex that in some real sense, not only do we not know how we do it, but it looks impossible. And part of the reason that it’s impossible, and this is why, this is again why empiricism is an incomplete theoretical account of the genesis of knowledge, is that there are literally, or close enough to literally, an infinite number of ways to look at anything. And that’s because everything is not only complex in and of itself, at the microcosmic level, almost beyond imagination, but that everything is also situated in a context which is actually a determining element of the nature of the thing. And the context, expanded enough, actually takes everything into account. And so that makes perception a very weird phenomenon. For another reason, I was always amused, for example, when I traveled with my family when I was young, on our summer vacations, we used to do things like get out and look at the border between Canada and the United States. And that’s a very weird thing to do because you can actually do it and you can step across it. People treat that as if it’s magic in some sense because part of us knows that that border is not there. It’s not a part of the objective world. And yet, well, and yet it is because there you are standing beside it. And then if you look at aerial views, you can see the farmer’s fields and exactly where the border is. And so things like borders between countries inhabit this weird space between the objective and the subjective that’s a magic space. And it actually turns out that almost everything we perceive has that degree of magicality about it. I’ve thought also about such things as people’s proclivity to go to museums, maybe in Nashville, for example, or Memphis, to go look at Elvis Presley’s guitar. And you think, well, what exactly are you looking at when you go look at Elvis Presley’s guitar? Because first of all, it’s a mass produced guitar. And so why not just look at another guitar? And you think, well, that’s not the same thing. It’s like, well, why isn’t it the same thing? Because it’s not. And the reason is, is that the guitar is not merely something, and this is the thing you perceive. It’s not merely something made up of the guitar atoms, let’s say, and the guitar molecules. It’s also an artifact that was embedded in a context across a period of time. And that embeddedness of that artifact is part of what you perceive when you see an artifact like a celebrity, something a celebrity owned or the relic of a saint, let’s say. And you can say, well, that’s all an overlay on top of perception, and that would be fine, except that’s wrong. There’s no data, so to speak, that support that viewpoint. That’s not how perception works. Perception is unbelievably complicated. So we see regularities of being, and some of those impediments and affordances is the technical term we tend to perceive as objects. But we also see the possibilities of being. But the problem with that is that the world of objects, potentially relevant objects, and the world of possibility is vast beyond our comprehension. And so then we have another problem that emerges as a consequence of that, which is a key and signal problem. And the fact that it has been solved precipitously and carelessly, hastily, is actually the reason for the culture war that’s raging today. And that is that we have to prioritize our perceptions. We have to prioritize our perceptions to get access to the sense data that hypothetically informs us. We have to see the world through a system of value. And why would I say a system of value? Well, a system of value is a system of priorities, right? Because to value something is to make it more important than other things that it’s being compared to. And why do you need a hierarchy of perceptual priority in order to see? And the answer is, well, you can’t see everything at once. And so you can only see one thing at a time. And which thing? And the answer is the thing you think is most important to see at that moment. And then the question is, well, and this is the question, why is that the most important thing to see at the moment? So imagine this is true in the auditory domain, in the tactile domain, all sensory domains. And you think that perception is a passive action and that we act upon the consequences of our perception. And this is just not true at all. There’s no level of the analysis of perception neurophysiologically where you can separate action from perception. So, for example, when you’re looking at the world, although you don’t know this, your eyes are moving back and forth very, very quickly. They have to move. If they stop moving for more than a tenth of a second, you go blind because you saturate the neurons that you’re using to perceive so intensely with the repetitive stimulation that they just shut down. And so at a micro level, your eyes are vibrating like mad. And then there are saccades above that that are still unconscious that are less rapid and wider. And then voluntarily, you have voluntary eye fields in the frontal cortex. You move your eyes voluntarily to point to what you want to see. And you do that because the center part of your vision is exceptionally high resolution. Each center vision foveal neuron is connected directly to 10,000 neurons in the primary visual cortex. And then each of those 10,000 is connected to another 10,000. It’s very expensive neurophysiological real estate. And if all of your vision was as intensely high resolution as your fovea, which is a very small part of your retina, you’d have to have a brain like an alien.