The Matter of Vision

Modern society has been the prisoner of three stern gaolers, Language, Consciousness and Reason. Each member of the troika has succeeded in imposing an image of its hegemony upon the mind of modern culture. The result has been the incarceration and repression of their opposite number, the target of this relentless campaign; Vision, the Automatic and Emotion.

The task of those images is to boost the prestige of their masters at the expense of their opposite numbers, and in that they have been remarkably successful. Jealously painting-out the real role of their opponents, they have consistently sought to reduce their status.

Language, Consciousness and Reason (LCR) are seen here in terms of their status as cultural artefacts, that is not things themselves, but the 'ideology' attached to each of them that reifies them above their real status. The question is not of their real relationship to their opposite numbers but the ideological ones that have developed around them.

This project suggests that Language, Consciousness and Reason, in contrast to their image in the public mind, are not quite the peaks of being human that have been promulgated, but more limited in their achievements and reach than their 'ideologies' would claim. Those ideologies also have an aggressive attitude towards their opposite numbers and have set out to demote and 'denigrate' Vision, the Automatic, and Emotion (VAE).

The aim of this project is to restore Vision to its real status as the noblest and wisest facility of man, and to turn the tables on the vulgar upstart Language. Likewise, to promote the massive role of the Automatic compared to that of Consciousness, and to aid the return of Emotion to the prestige and position proposed for it as early as 1739 by David Hume in the face of the inflations of Reason.

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In the late 1950s it was calculated that the eyes absorb a million times the information of which consciousness is aware. In 1965 a physiologist put it that "only one millionth of what our eyes see, our ears hear, and our other senses inform us about appears in our consciousness". Of the range of external stimuli Consciousness handles a millionth, but for internal activity the figures for the brain as a whole suggests it handles between ten and thirty billion times the information of Consciousness. That would suggest the possibility that the rest of the information is handled outside Consciousness, yet Language provides us with only a negative term for that activity – the 'unconscious'. The proposal here is to dedicate an independent term to that area – the Automatic.

Although Consciousness has a limited capacity for information-processing, as in the fabled seven objects that can be held in Consciousness at any one time, it has evolved for the tasks it carries out, and information-processing capacity is not coterminous with value. In other words, Consciousness is more than Information. The brain works to reduce information that is not necessary, a reducing valve, and Consciousness in particular does not necessarily require large numbers of neurons to carry out it important functions. However, given that caveat, the issue remains that both the very substantial work of the Automatic and its significance is arguably consistently undervalued, even by neuroscientists. It is not that Consciousness is not valuable but that arguably in relation to the Automatic it is an epiphenomenon, an effect rather than a cause, a by-product of brain-function, whereas the image often proposed is of an all-powerful phenomenon, and that of the Automatic a shadowy and uncertain one.

It is suggested here that the Automatic does nearly all the work and directs the limited capacities of Consciousness to attend to the few stimuli it is capable of handling at any one time, effectively tasking it with reporting back on the significance of, and any changes to, those stimuli as part of a feedback loop energised by the Automatic.

The image this project disputes is that LCR are the Major partners and VAE are the Minor partners. This nomenclature echoes an old distinction that used to be made between left and right hemispheres of the brain, with the Left, language-oriented hemisphere, termed Major, and the Right, vision-oriented hemisphere – termed Minor. That terminology reflected an old prejudice that Language is more important than Vision, a prejudice that is the prime target of this project.

Again in raw numbers, Language processes an average of around ten bits per second of information. Vision processes around ten million bits per second, again a differential of a million times. Yet the ideology around Language, here referred to as Logocentrism, unequivocally suggests that Language is superior to Vision – with Vision characterised as superficial and lacking in depth compared to the profundities of which language is capable. The proposition here is that quite the opposite is true, Vision is deeper and broader, more sophisticated and mature than Language could ever...