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Steven Lehar Steven Lehar is an independent researcher who has made a number of radical proposals on theories of philosophy, psychology, biological vision, and consciousness. His most radical theory is that the solid spatial world that we see around us in visual experience is not the world itself, but merely a miniature replica of that world in an internal representation. This is known variously as the theory of Indirect Perception, Indirect Realism, Epistemological Dualism, and Representationalism. Although this idea is not new – having been first proposed by Immanuel Kant and promoted by Bertrand Russell, Wolfgang Köhler, and the Gestaltists of the Berlin School – the idea has never taken hold to become generally accepted, and remains to this day a minority view. In his paper on Gestalt Isomorphism and his book The World In Your Head, Lehar refutes the most common objection to Representationalism, which is the homunculus fallacy. He further argues for the indirect nature of perception by pointing out the curvature of perceived space, or phenomenal perspective, which is obviously not a property of the external world. For example, when standing on a long straight road, the sides of the road are perceived to meet at a point both up ahead and back behind, while appearing straight and parallel and equidistant throughout their perceived length.
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Steven Lehar Quotes The illusion of perception is so compelling that we mistake the percept of the world for the real world itself. And yet this naïve realist view that we can somehow perceive the world directly, is inconsistent with the physics of perception. If perception is a consequence of neural processing of the sensory input, a percept cannot in principle escape the confines of our head to appear in the world around us, any more than a computation in a digital computer can escape the confines of the computer. We cannot therefore in principle have direct experience of objects in the world itself, but only of the internal effigies of those objects generated by mental processes. The world we see around us therefore can only be an elaborate, though very compelling illusion, which must in reality correspond to perceptual data structures and processes occurring actually within our own head. I propose that the global synchrony observed in the EEG recordings, and now in the synchronous activity of cortical neurons, is exactly what it appears to be, i.e. it is a manifestation of a global harmonic resonance that pervades the entire cortex, and that this resonance subserves a computational function which is central to the principle of operation of the brain. The purpose of this resonance is to set up a pattern of standing waves, and these standing waves serve a function which is normally ascribed to spatial receptive fields in neural network models, i.e. as a mechanism for encoding spatial patterns in the brain both for recognition and for perceptual completion. An extraordinary variety of intermediate theories have been proposed over the centuries, in an attempt to place phenomenal experience partially inside, and partially outside the head, but in neither place explicitly. From Descartes' dualist mind as a non-spatial entity with no defined location in space, to Malebranche's perceived colors which are in the mind, but also somehow in the external object, to the sense data of the critical realists that are experienced, but which do not, or may not exist, to Davidson's notion of supervenience, of which the mind / brain relation is the only example in the known universe. All of these explanations propose to make an exception in the laws of nature just to accommodate the special case of conscious experience. The only alternative which does not entail suspension of the normal laws of nature is epistemological dualism. This theory explains how the phenomenal world can appear external to the body while at the same time actually being in the head. It explains how different individuals can each have their own unique perspective on a commonly viewed object. And it offers the only plausible explanation for those most troublesome phenomena of dreams and hallucinations, as well as for the data of mental imagery and neglect syndrome, which no longer require heroic efforts of denial to account for their manifest properties. All of these phenomena follow naturally from the indirect view of perception.
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