Mind, Body, World- Foundations of Cognitive Science, 2013a

an enormously high-quality visual world that seems to be delivered to us effortlessly.
“You open your eyes and—presto!—you enjoy a richly detailed picture-like experience
of the world, one that represents the world in sharp focus, uniform detail and
high resolution from the centre out to the periphery” (Noë, 2002, p. 2).
Indeed, our visual experience suggests that perception puts us in direct contact
with reality. Perception is transparent; when we attempt to attend to perceptual processing,
we miss the processing itself and instead experience the world around us
(Gendler & Hawthorne, 2006). Rather than experiencing the world as picture-like
(Noë, 2002), it is as if we simply experience the world (Chalmers, 2006; Merleau-
Ponty, 1962). Merleau-Ponty (1962, p. 77) noted that “our perception ends in objects,
and the object[,] once constituted, appears as the reason for all the experiences of it
which we have had or could have.” Chalmers (2006) asserts that,
in the Garden of Eden, we had unmediated contact with the world. We were
directly acquainted with objects in the world and with their properties. Objects
were presented to us without causal mediation, and properties were revealed to us
in their true intrinsic glory. (Chalmers, 2006, p. 49)
To say that visual processing is transparent is to say that we are only aware of the
contents that visual processes deliver. This was a central assumption to the so-called
New Look theory of perception. For instance, Bruner (1957, p. 124) presumed that
“all perceptual experience is necessarily the end product of a categorization process.”
Ecological perception (Gibson, 1979), a theory that stands in strong opposition
in almost every respect to the New Look, also agrees that perceptual processes
are transparent. “What one becomes aware of by holding still, closing one eye, and
observing a frozen scene are not visual sensations but only the surfaces of the world
that are viewed now from here” (p. 286, italics original).
That visual processing is transparent is not a position endorsed by all. For
instance, eighteenth-century philosopher George Berkeley and nineteenth-century
art critic John Ruskin both argued that it was possible to recover the “innocence
of the eye” (Gombrich, 1960). According to this view, it is assumed that at birth
humans have no concepts, and therefore cannot experience the world in terms of
objects or categories; “what we really see is only a medley of colored patches such
as Turner paints” (p. 296). Seeing the world of objects requires learning about the
required categories. It was assumed that an artist could return to the “innocent
eye”: “the painter must clear his mind of all he knows about the object he sees, wipe
the slate clean, and make nature write her own story” (p. 297).
Most modern theories of visual perception take the middle ground between the
New Look and the innocent eye by proposing that our experience of visual categories
is supported by, or composed of, sensed information (Mach, 1959). Mach (1959)
proclaimed that,
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