A commenter to a recent post said, in part:
The consensus in science is that objective data (like photons, matter, etc.) interact with our body via the sensory system (nervous system, etc.) converting a truncated amount of incoming data (due to limitations on nervous system processing speed and resolution) into even further truncated streams of information (due to nervous system compression before & as a result of space limitations in the body/spinal cord), eventually leading to the brain where that truncated data is translated into what we perceive (perceptions).
That is a view known as “representationalism” and computationalism is the particular version of representationism that says that what the brain is mainly doing is computation.I’m not sure that is the consensus view in science, though it probably is the consensus view in philosophy of mind, in cognitive science and in cognitive psychology. Many behaviorist psychologists would disagree.
The view of representationalists is that we don’t experience the world at all. Rather, received stimuli form a representation of the world, and we then experience that representation. This includes the view that perception is passive, and that our cognitive processes apply only to what perception has given us. Steve Lehar has an illustrated page where he argues the case for representationalism.
The alternative view is that we directly perceive and interact with the world, rather than with representations of that world. Perhaps the best known advocate of direct perception was J.J. Gibson.
For myself, I favor direct perception, though my own view is a little different from that of Gibson. The problem with representationalism, is that it posits a layer of representation that insulates us from the world. Throughout our entire lifetimes, we would access only finitely many datapoints. Granted, that would be a very large finite quantity. But it still would not be enough for us to infer what we seem to know about the world. This is sometimes described as the “poverty of stimulation” problem. It would seem to require that most of our knowledge of the world comes to us through our genes. But it is not clear how that would help, because processes involved in biological evolution would also have been restricted to finitely many datapoints. Moreover, it is doubtful that the capacity of the DNA is sufficient to carry all of the required innate knowledge.
I often hear that direct perception is impossible, that it depends on magic. I have seen arguments that purport to show that. However, when I visit the grocery, my purchases are scanned by a bar code scanner. And the operation of the bar code scanner is based on the methods of direct perception. So arguments that it could not work seem unconvincing.