Synthetic Consciousness: Seeing and Believing

“The Aleph was probably two to three centimeters in diameter, but universal space was contained inside it . . .” – JL Borges

Our eyes move. They rove and they direct attention. Indeed, vision and our ability to focus attention more generally are intimately intertwined. And this hybrid faculty of vision/attention has been extended as a metaphor for the way we focus our attention to the contents of our minds, even when vision is not active. 

Of course, for many animals vision is not the most important sense. And this simple fact raises so many interesting puzzles concerning animal consciousness and the senses in general. How is our apperception of a world related to the senses through which we perceive it? How different is experience for those of us without vision, either inborn or lost? How might attention “work” differently when the other senses must take the lead?

For most of us vision synthesizes the four other senses and provides the glue that vouches for our assertions of truth and claims of falsehood. What makes “the fox jumped over the fence” true, or false, for us? Eyewitness and certainty are two concepts so closely related.

Vision naturally figures in the creation and recording of images, and then too, of written language and its development. These trends in cultural evolution, relating to our visual embrace of the world, encompass historical effects almost certainly too enormous to catalogue.