Nice try David, but you missed the mark.

I happen to be in complete agreement with your thoughts.  Sorry to
disappoint you.

On Wed, May 16, 2018 at 7:29 PM, David Sless <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:

>
>> This may or may not help:
> The difference between you and Gibson, as I see it, are profoundly
> philosophical. To use the vernacular of professional philosophers: you view
> the world through the lense of empiricism, Gibson, in his latter work,
> viewed the world through the lense of realism. Put VERY simply, you look to
> empirical evidence for the proof of whether or not something exists. Gibson
> looks to what he regards as the reality of the environment in which we live
> to define what exists.
>

​These are not incompatible views.​

>
> I will add just a small bit. Instead of seeeing us as independent from our
> environment, Gibson sees us as creatures of our environemnt, evolved over
> time to deal with the enevironment in which we move, avoid harm, collect
> food, make things etc. To do these things as succesfully and as
> economically as possible our ancestors, back to single cell organisms,
> progressively internalised the consistent characteristics of the
> environment through which we moved in such a way that we did not need to
> constantly anaslyse the environment, but rather internalised its
> characteristics. To use a modern metaphor, the charcteristics of our
> environment (affordances) are hard wired into us, but not at the plastic
> neurological level, but at the biological structural level. Our eyes, as an
> example, are the way they are and where they are in our anatomy not because
> of neurological features, but because of the way they have evolved in a
> REAL environemnt to deal with that environment. Gibson thus moved from
> Empiricism to Realism.
>

​I  firmly agree with and believe the words you give to Gibson: it is what
i believe as well.​

>
> This marks out a significant and radical difference between what I surmise
> is your way of thinking and that of Gibson. You seem to be asking for a
> 'mechanism' such as information processing to explain how we percieve.
> Gibson is saying, there is no mechanism, it's just the way we are because
> we have been formed by our environment: look to the environment for an
> explanation, not into our brains.
>

​Once again, I see no contradiction here. We evolved to intgeract with our
environment (which includes other organisms).  I agree with you.  However,
I now want to know what brain structures do and how they work -- they are a
result of evo0lution, but still, they must be qccomplishing some funcgtion
-- Iwangt to know what those are.  (And  sciewnce is making huge progress)

>
> Of course, the weekness of Gibson's view is that you stll have to explain
> how you 'look to the environment'.
>

​yup. my point precisely.​

>
> I don't know if Gibson was familier with Heidegger or Wittgenstein which
> might have helped him push the argument further, but his views are
> predicated on the theory of evolution which provides pretty powerful
> grounds for his argument.
>

​I don't know either, but i can assure you i am familiar with them (and
other philosophers)​

>
> I hope this helps. It does, at least help me explain to me why you and
> Gibson could not agree.
>

​We actually agreed more than any one of us wanted to admit to the other.
Gibson once said that -- and his wife, Eleanor (also a famous psychologist)
scolded him.


Don

Don Norman
Prof. and Director, DesignLab, UC San Diego


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