Module Overview

The Doors of Perception: Biology, Technology and Culture has been designed to incorporate three principles that are central to the USP philosophy: (1) thinking about important questions in a cross-disciplinary way, by (2) understanding the methodologies by which various disciplines both approach and attempt to make sense of their subject matter, and then (3) inviting students to not only make connections across disciplinary findings responsibly, but also to consider the personal and real-world implications entailed by such a multidisciplinary view.

Specifically, it asks students to both learn about, and to critically consider, the implications of the idea that even our most “immediately confirmable” and “self-evidently veridical” perceptions of reality are, in fact, partial, limited and selective – and are the combined products of our biologies, which both enable and delimit our sensory experience; our technologies, which both expand (and in some cases serve to weaken and supplant) those sensory capabilities, impacting upon their evolutionary trajectories; and our cultures, which constrain and delimit the organization of those sensory experiences into higher-order concepts and ways of interpreting what we “see” before us.

Accordingly, the module proceeds from the assumption that no one academic discipline or approach to inquiry alone can suffice to adequately capture the many cross-cutting and constitutive factors of what it is to be a simultaneously physical, biological, psychological and social being.

Students will thus be asked to read widely across both scientific and humanistic disciplines, in order to appreciate the differences in methodologies, purviews and paradigmatic assumption between them, and to make informed connections and syntheses across these disparate bodies of knowledge at the points where they overlap. That doing so will help them better understand not only the world that they inhabit, but also themselves, is reflected throughout the entire design of the module, from its title to its modes of assessments – all of which endeavor to “bring home” to students in an immediately personal way, the insight revealed in the scholarly texts we read that even the most mundane acts of “everyday” perception are multiply mediated accomplishments of biology, technology and culture.

PLEASE NOTE: The readings listed below are representative ones only. The actual reading list will be distributed to you on the first day of class.

The first unit in the module introduces students to the vast diversity of species-specific sensory perception, from the ultraviolet vision of bees and butterflies to the biosonar capabilities of bats and dolphins to the infrared detection of mosquitos, snakes and goldfish to the electroreceptivity of the platypus’ bill. Using as a paradigm example, a detailed examination of the evolution of the eye from its earliest incarnation as a photoreceptive protein in unicellular organisms to the highly specialized eyes of contemporary insects, mammals and birds, students will come to understand not only the selection pressures and “evolutionary arms races” that have resulted in such a diversity of abilities and eye-types, but also the realization that we human beings, too – like all other life forms on the planet – have perceptual access only to an extremely partial and evolutionarily selective experience of the reality of the world “as it is in itself.” Major readings for this section may include:

WEEK ONE: COURSE INTRO AND PHILOSOPHICAL BACKGROUND TO THE TOPIC

Latour, Bruno. (1999). “Do You Believe in Reality?” Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, pp. 1-10.

Plato. (c. 380BC / 1974 AD). The Allegory of the Cave. Book VII, The Republic. Grube, G.M.A (Trans) Indianapolis: Hackett, pp. 167-173.

Descartes, René. (1641 /1973). Meditations on First Philosophy. In: The Philosophical Works of Descartes, translated by E. Haldane and G. Ross, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 131-200 [abridged by DF]

Shoemaker, Sydney (1990). Qualities and Qualia: What's in the Mind? Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 50:109–31.

BonJour, Laurence (2001). Epistemological Problems of Perception. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Zalta, Edward (Ed.). Online text [abridged by DF]

WEEK TWO (and beyond): THE BIOLOGY OF SIGNIFICATION

Hughes, Howard C. (1999). Excerpts from Sensory Exotica. A World Beyond Human Experience. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 1-16; 118-128; 200-214; 260-278.

Campbell, Angela L., Naik, Rajesh R., Sowards, Laura and Stone, Morley O. (2002). Biological infrared imaging and sensing. Micrometre. 33 (2): 211–225.

Wiltschko, Wolfgang and Wiltschko, Roswitha. (2008). Magnetic orientation and magnetoreception in birds and other animals. Journal of Comparative Physiology 191 (8): 675-693.

Pratt, Stephen C. (2004). Quorum sensing by encounter rates in the ant Temnothorax albipennis. Behavioral Ecology 16 (2): 488–96.

WEEK THREE:

Wehner, Rüdiger. (2005). Sensory physiology: brainless eyes. Nature 435: 157–159.

Lamb, Trevor D., Collin, Shaun P. and Pugh Edward N. (2007). Evolution of the vertebrate eye: Opsins, photoreceptors, retina and eye cup. Nature Reviews Neuroscience. 8 (12): 960–976

Llinas, Rudolfo. Lessons from the Evolution of the Eye. I of the Vortex: From Neurons to Self. Cambridge: MIT Press, 93-111.

Zeki, Semir. (2000). The Myth of the ‘Seeing Eye’. Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 13-21.

WEEK FOUR:

Uexküll, Jakob von. (1934 /1992). A stroll through the worlds of animals and men. Semiotica 89(4), 319–391.

Deely, John. (2001). Umwelt: An organizing concept in the study of the lives of animals. Semiotica 134(1/4): 125–135.

Hoffmeyer, Jesper. (1997). On Creatures’ Sensory Universe. Signs of Meaning in the Universe. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, pp. 52-68.

WEEK FIVE:

Churchland, Patricia. (1986) Animate Vision and excerpts from Neurophilosophy: Towards a Unified Science of the Mind-brain. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 1-13, 60-63, 124-125.

Kleisner, Karel and Maran, Timo. (2014). Visual communication in animals: Applying Portmannian and Uexküllian approaches. In: Visual Communication (Handbooks of Communication Science). Machin, David (Ed.). Berlin: DeGruyter Mouton, pp. 559-676.

Heffner, Henry E. (May 1998). Auditory Awareness. Applied Animal Behaviour Science. 57 (3–4): 259–268.

Hoffmeyer, Jesper. (2000). The Biology of Signification. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 43(2), 252-268.

PLEASE NOTE: The readings listed below are representative ones only. The actual reading list will be distributed to you on the first day of class.

Unit 2 Part 1: Perception as Enculturated Biology

Unit 2 introduces students to the ways in which the brute reception of sensory input becomes organized, interpreted and acted upon in human beings’ perceptual and cognitive experience of the world.

Because the topic cuts across both biology and culture, I have divided this unit into two main areas of examination. First, students will learn about gestalts, affordances, selective attention, visual closure, perceptual constancy and change-blindness – in short, all the ways in which our perception of what it is we “see” and “don’t see” when our eyes gaze upon a scene or an object are informed both by contemporary cultural understandings, as well as by the history of “interpretations” that have become canalized over the course of human cultural evolution. Major readings for this section may include:

WEEK SIX:

Wertheimer, Max. (1923/1958). Principles of Perceptual Organization. In: Readings in Perception. Beardslee, David C. and Wertheimer, Michael (Eds.), Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand Press, pp. 115-136.

Banerjee, J. C. (1994). Gestalt Theory of Perception. Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Psychological Terms. New Delhi, India: M.D. Publications, pp. 107–109.

Wolfe, Jeremy M., Kluender, Keith R., Levi, Dennis M., Bartoshuk, Linda M., Herz, Rachel S., Klatzky, Roberta L., and Lederman, Susan J. (2008). Gestalt Grouping Principles. In: Sensation and Perception. Stamford, Connecticut: Sinauer Publishers, pp. 257-292.

Kubovy, Michael and van Valkenburg, David. (2001). Auditory and visual objects. Cognition 80: 97-126.

WEEK SEVEN:

Peterson, Mary A. & Skow-Grant, Emily. (2003). Memory and learning in figure-ground perception. In: Cognitive Vision: Psychology of Learning and Motivation. Ross, Brian and Irwin, David (Eds.), Oxford UK: Elsevier Academic Press, pp. 1-34.

Michael, Donald N. (1958). A Cross-Cultural Study of Visual Closure. In: Readings in Perception. Beardslee, David C. and Wertheimer, Michael (Eds.), Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand Press, pp. 160-171.

O’Regan, John Kevin. (2001). Thoughts on Change Blindness. In: Vision and Attention. Harris, Lawrence R. & Jenkin, Micheal (Eds.) Springer, 2001, pp. 281-302.

Gibson, James J. (1977).The Theory of Affordances. In: Perceiving, Acting, and Knowing: The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Robert Shaw and John Bransford (Eds.), Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Publishers, pp. 67-82.

Unit 2 Part 2: Perception in a Symbolic Species

The first part of this unit examined the ways in which human culture (and cultural evolution) plays an ineliminable role in shaping how we organize and interpret sensory stimuli into categorizable “objects” and “events”. The second part of the unit examines how we humans, alone among all our fellow animals, come to categorize those phenomena into even higher-order understandings through the “symbolic prosthesis” that is language – and how these now “symbol-laden” perceptions, in turn, once again both delimit and give meaning to what we “see”. It will examine, in particular, the ways in which different cultures come to “see” [x] as “an example of” or “evidence of” [y], and the cultural and historical practices that enable and perpetuate such “seeing.” Major readings for this section may include:

WEEK EIGHT:

Bateson, Gregory. (1972). Effects of Conscious Purpose in Human Adaptation. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 446-454.

Tomasello, Micheal. (1999). Biological and Cultural Inheritance. The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, pp. 13-56.

Deacon, Terrence W. (1997). Excerpts from The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain. New York: W.W. Norton, pp. 433-39; 448-454, 463-64.

Short, Thomas Lloyd. (1982). Life among the legisigns. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 18(4): 285-310.

WEEK NINE:

Garfinkel, Harold. (1962 / 1972). Common Sense Knowledge of Social Structures: The Documentary Method of Interpretation. In: Symbolic Interaction: A Reader in Social Psychology, Manis, Jerome G. and Meltzer, Bernard N. (Eds.). Boston: Allyn and Bacon Publishers, pp. 76-103.

Goodwin, Charles. (2000). Practices of Seeing, Visual Analysis: An Ethnomethodological Approach. In: Handbook of Visual Analysis edited by Leeuwen, Theo van and Jewitt, Carey (Eds.). London: Sage Press, pp. 157-82.

Goffman, Ervin. (1967). On Face-Work: An Analysis of Ritual Elements in Social Interaction. Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behaviour. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, pp. 5-45.

Heritage, John. (1984). Maintaining Institutional Realities. Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, pp. 180-198.

PLEASE NOTE: The readings listed below are representative ones only. The actual reading list will be distributed to you on the first day of class.

The final unit of the module looks at the role and impact of technology in human perception and what has been called the “highest” form of perception, cognition. In particular, we examine: (1) technology as perceptual prosthesis (from microscopes and fMRI imaging to cochlear implants, bionic eyes, and smart drugs) (2) technology as cognitive prosthesis (e.g., computers, GPS and even written language as examples of cognitive scientist Andy Clark’s distributed cognition hypothesis), (3) technology as both perception and cognition-shaping (e.g., an examination of communications theorist Marshall McLuhan’s “medium is the message” hypothesis, asking what “kinds” of thinking and seeing are made more – and less – likely when one learning about the world primarily through watching television versus through reading texts versus through Instagram, Facebook, Vine and Twitter ) and (4) technologies that promise to go beyond merely “aiding” and “shaping” our perceptions of reality, but to actively “augment” it as well (the so-called “virtual reality” technologies…and whether or not they are really a difference in kind, or only in degree, from every other perception-enabling “technology” that we have examined in the module). Readings for this unit may include:67

WEEK TEN:

Clark, Andy. (1998). Where brain, body and world collide. Daedalus: The Journal of the American Arts and Sciences 127.2: 257-276.

Wagman, Jeffrey B. and Miller, David M. (2003). Nested reciprocities: The organism-environment system in perception, action and development. Developmental Psychology 42: 317–334.

Marsen, Sky. (2008). Becoming More Than Human: Technology and the Post-Human Condition Introduction. Journal of Evolution & Technology 19.1 (2008): 1–5.

Nicogossian, Judith. (2011). From Reconstruction to the Augmentation of the Human Body in Restorative Medicine and in Cybernetics PhD. Thesis in Biological and Cultural Anthropology. Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia.

WEEK ELEVEN:

Franchi, Stefano, and Güven Güzeldere. Machinations of the Mind: Artificial Intelligence from Automata to Cyborgs. (2005). Mechanical Bodies, Computational Minds: Artificial Intelligence from Automata to Cyborgs. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, pp.1-53.

Haraway, Donna Jeanne. (1991). A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Routledge, pp. 149-183.

Webpage for the Borgfest Cyborg Festival and Human Augmentation Expo: http://borgfest.com/

WEEK TWELVE:

McLuhan, Marshall. (1967). The Medium is the Message. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, pp. 7-24.

Postman, Neil (1985). Media as Epistemology. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York: Penguin, pp. 16-30.

Postman, Neil (1990). Informing Ourselves to Death. Speech given to the German Informatics Society, Stuttgart, Germany, 11 October 1990. Online text.

Christakis, Dimitri A. And Moreno, Meghan A. (2009). Trapped in the Net: Will internet addiction become a 21st-century epidemic? Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine 163 (10): 959–960.

WEEK THIRTEEN: COURSE WRAP-UP AND SUMMATION WEEK

Siegel, Susanna. (2005). The Contents of Perception. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Zalta, Edward (Ed.). Online text [abridged by DF]

Nagel, Thomas. (1986). The Incompleteness of Objective Reality. The View From Nowhere. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 25-28.

Markoš, Anton. (2009). What Is It Like To Be Me? Life as Its Own Designer. Berlin: Springer, pp. 78-80.

Eiseley, Loren. (1971). The Brown Wasps. The Night Country: Reflections of a Bone-Hunting Man. New York: Scribner, pp. 227-239.

Assessment and Assignments:

Below is the Assignment Assessment breakdown for this module. Further details on the specific requirements for each assignment will be distributed to you and discussed in class.