Dear Don,
Yes, indeed, we make discoveries often by mistake.
For me, there is an agony in Gibson that I might compare with the problem of the ONE and the MANY.
That is, for some people, the ancient Greek issues around such questions, are real, urgent and in need of answering.
The Hegelian answer of absolute particularity sounds like a logical joke to many people but for some it is a moment or revelation.
For me, the agony in Gibson, that is NOT addressed in Gestalt understandings, is the primitive realization that experience is DIRECT.
One only becomes aware of this issue when confronted with the scientific evidence of mediation such that, in the case of vision, the school teacher likes to tell students that their eyes see the world upside-down and then the brain turns things up the other way = brain magic. This can be proven in experiments where people wear special glasses such that they see the world upside-down and then, over a period of time, they flip the world, in their brains while wearing the glasses.
So, the innocent people see the world "directly" until they are convinced that "information pickup" is indirect, impure, fabricated by consciousness.
How to get back to the purity of mere seeing/being in the world?
Of course, you never lost that pure picking up of stuff which is what Gibson proves by redetermining the relationship of observer and observed holistically. SEEMING becomes a holistic picking up of information rather than a naughty distortion by consciousness of an unapproachable reality.
PROOF? I can only experience the occluding of one object by the intervention of another object as a holistic experience of directly experienced things/events.
Cheers from Australia which is upside-down anyway, already.
keith
On 5/17/18, 7:15 AM, "PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design on behalf of Don Norman" <[log in to unmask] on behalf of [log in to unmask]> wrote:
(We agreed on all that -- our disagreements were based on the fact that I
wanted to understand the underlying brain mechanisms whereas he argued for
pure "information pickup," without any internal processing. I still don't
understand what he meant by that - and i suspect he didn't either. He
exaggerated in order to make people attend to his main points.)
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