Donald D . Hoffman Mimesis and its Perceptual Reflections

In his book Mimesis and its Romantic Reflections, Burwick discusses the potential for deception of the mimetic tradition in literature and the arts, and argues that romantic literature indeed grapples with issues of mimetic representation. His interest in mimesis extends also to visual perception and visual illusions, not solely as these inform literature and the arts, but as a topic of inquiry in its own right. With this interest as my point of departure, in this paper I discuss the mimetic assumption almost universally held by perceptual scientists, and suggest that this assumption is stronger than is justified by empirical evidence and, moreover, that it obstructs theoretical advance in the scientific study of the relation between biology and conscious experience. I propose weaker, non-mimetic, assumptions that comport better with the empirical evidence and dissolve the current theoretical obstructions, permitting a scientific solution to the classic mindbody problem. Introduction: Perception as mimesis In his introduction to Mimesis and its Romantic Reflections, Burwick observes that scientific progress in the study of visual perception informed the romantic confrontation of imitation and representation: In order to give serious deliberation to the problems of mimesis as imitation of the mind’s apprehension of reality, romantic critics frequently turned to the phenomenological and transcendental philosophers of the age [...]. Reacting to discoveries in physical and physiological optics, they all recognized the fallibility of the senses. If the means of perception and the media of representation are unreliable, then any attempt to define imitation in the arts will obviously be complicated by disjuncture. (9) Physical and physiological optics have advanced substantially since the romantic era, and the fallibility of the senses has been investigated down to its molecular biology. Yet, remarkably, the two classes of theories currently most popular among perceptual scientists both assume that a goal of perception is to match, or at least to approximate, true properties of a physical world that is assumed to exist independent of any acts of observation. Mimetic assumptions have not died by the hand of science; they provide, instead, the almost universally accepted point of departure for scientific theories of perception. The two classes of perceptual theories are the direct and indirect. Indirect theories trace their history from the remarkable work of the Arab scholar Alhazen (965–1039;