The Externalization of Perception

In his book, Signs of Meaning in the Universe, Jesper Hofmeyer talks about how in the phylogenesis of animals, the role of the genome has shifted from directly anticipating how to detect and respond to the environment (by specifying structures that will detect and respond to specific aspects of the environment in specific ways), to simply specifying means of perceiving and acting that will be flexible, as well as an organism that will be able to learn from its world how to act adaptively using its abilities of perception and action. Using this idea, we can look at how this process has taken shape within the comparitively recent history of human development over the last 40,000 years. Within this period there is a definite trend affecting human perception: The externalization of the perceptual process. In other animals, the perception of things in the environment is an internal process that occurs within the organism's nervous system. When a deer sees a lion in its field of vision, the process of recognition occurs largely within the nervous system, which makes use of the pattern of light to interpret the scene. It is possible to see the deer react to the lion once it has been interpreted as such, but it is not possible to see the process of interpretation itself which occurs completely within the nervous system. In contrast, it is possible to see human beings perform externalized processes of perception. Examples include a person counting a set of items, or a research team collecting data about a population. In the latter example, computers may even be used, in which case the perceptual process is in fact distributed throughout the environment and only overseen by the human being.

Inextricably connected to the development of new (externalized) ways of perceiving is the development of new things to perceive that, in different ways, overtaxed internal systems of perception. The first way that existing internal perceptual systems were overtaxed was by the proliferation of vast numbers of perceivable things that occurred as a result of linguistic distinctions. This proliferation overtaxed the memory and forced certain parts of the process of perceptual recognition to be stored externally. Of the many thousands of bird species in the world, I know only a small number of them, and of these I know virtually nothing more than their appearance. Despite this, if I see a strange bird I can learn a good deal about it if I consult a guide to wildlife.

The second way that the overtaxing of internal perceptual abilities led to the development of external forms of perception was the development of new things to perceive that were not suited to the existing internalized perceptual abilities. The latter are well suited to perceiving discrete objects in the environment, and to a limited extent, things that are distributed spatially or temporally. As spatial and temporal distribution increases, internalized perceptual processes become increasingly unfeasible. However, externalized processes of perception, combined with language allow for the perception of widely distributed things like population density, or its change over large amounts of time.

With externalized processes of perception, what we are able to perceive is a function of how we use our body to perceive things about the environment. The world that we live in (that we perceive ourselves to live in) is partly a function of how we act. Learning how to perceive new things in the environment is therefore an incredibly fruitful open-ended endeavor.