Contrast Gaffan’s experiments with the superficially more complicated

presentations.
Points of View 185
Contrast Gaffan’s experiments with the superficially more complicated
memory experiments performed by Davis and Fitts (1976) on rhesus
monkeys and pig-tailed macaques. In these experiments, pictures pasted
onto boards were used to cover wells in which food rewards could be
placed. The monkeys were presented with a sample picture, which they
pushed off the well to discover whether the sample was rewarded or not.
After a short delay, two pictures were presented simultaneously: one the
sample and the other completely novel. If the sample had originally been
rewarded it was rewarded again, while if the well under the sample had
originally been empty, then the novel picture was rewarded. The monkeys
mastered this principle.
In some ways this second set of experiments seems to involve more
complicated memory operations than the previously described experiments.
The animals are being asked to remember not just whether a picture
has been presented before but also whether it was rewarded or not.
This is a two-way classification. On the other hand, however, there is correspondingly
less reason to hypothesize that conscious recognition and
familiarity are driving the behavior in the experimental situation. Mastering
the principle can be explained in terms of the direct reinforcement
of associations. The first such association is the straightforward association
between the sample and the reward. The second is the association
between an unrewarded sample and the novel picture. To revert back to
the original characterization of conscious memory, it does not seem necessary
in explaining what is going on to appeal to more than the causal
efficacy of previous experience on present behavior. But there does not
seem to be a similar explanation of what is going on in Gaffan’s recognition
experiments. That is because the relevant association there involves
familiarity and recognition. It is an association between rewards and the
familiarity of a presented image. Successful performance in the Gaffan
experiments rests upon successful mastery of a basic inductive generalization
along the lines of ‘Pressing a lever when something seen before is seen
again leads to a reward’ in conjunction with specific individual conscious
memories of the form ‘This has been seen before’. Specific individual conscious
memories are required to learn this basic inductive generalization.
I offer Gaffan’s experiments as a clear example of behavior that demonstrably
requires explanation in terms of conscious memories.
186 Chapter 7
Let me relate this back to the concept of a nonconceptual point of view.
The conclusion so far is that any creature who has a temporally extended
point of view on the world must possess conscious recognitional abilities.
This enables us to return to the issue with which this chapter began. We
set out to identify certain fundamental dimensions of self-consciousness
to which the perceptual pick-up of self-specifying information cannot do
justice, and then to consider how basic-level information pick-up needs
to be augmented if those dimensions of self-consciousness are to come
into play. I put forward the notion of a nonconceptual point of view as
just such a fundamental dimension of self-consciousness, and I suggested
at the beginning of this section that the perceptual pick-up of selfspecifying
information might be sufficient for experience to reflect a point
of view on the world. We are now in a position, though, to see why it
cannot be sufficient.
On the ecological view, perception is fundamentally a process of extracting
and abstracting invariants from the flowing optical array. Organisms
perceive an environment that has both persisting surfaces and
changing surfaces, and the interplay between them allows the organism
to pick up the sort of information that specifies, for example, visual kinesthesis.
The key to how that information is picked up is the idea of direct
perception. The mistake made by existing theories of perception, according
to Gibson, is construing the process of perception in terms of a
hierarchical processing of sensory inputs, with various cognitive processes
employed to organize and categorize sensations. A crucial element of this
serial processing is bringing memories to bear upon present experience.
As emphasised in chapter 5, Gibson rejects this whole picture of perception.
Accepting that present experience is partly a function of past experience,
he firmly denies that this sensitivity to past experience is generated
by processing memories and sensations together. His alternative account
rests on the idea that the senses as perceptual systems become more sensitive
over time to particular forms of information as a function of prior
exposure.9 Although Gibson was rather polemical about what he termed
“the muddle of memory,” it would seem that his account seems to involve
no more than a differential response to stimuli as a function of past
experience. Gibson’s position seems to be that conscious recognition is
not implicated in ecological perception, although it might or might not
develop out of such ecological perception. It is perfectly possible for a
Points of View 187
creature to have experience at the ecological level without any conscious
recognitional capacities at all. If, then, a capacity for conscious place recognition
is a necessary condition of having experience that involves a temporally
extended point of view, then it seems that the dual structure of
experience involved in the ecological coperception of self and environment
must be significantly enriched before yielding a point of view.
The point, of course, is not that this creates any problem for the basic
idea of ecological perception; rather, it is that the materials offered by
Gibson’s own account need to be supplemented if they are to be employed
in the theoretical project under discussion, and it is perfectly possible that
Gibson’s concepts of information pick-up and direct “resonance” to information
in the ambient environment could have a crucial role to play in
such an extension of the basic way in which ecological perception is sensitive
to past experience (as they are, for example, in the account of perception
and memory developed in Neisser 1976). Gibson’s account alone
cannot do all the work it was earlier suggested it might be able to do,
because the capacity for conscious place recognition needs to be added
onto the ecological coperception of self and environment.
7.3 Three Intersecting Distinctions and the Acquisition Constraint
In chapter 5, I argued that the pick-up of self-specifying information in
perceptual experience was a source of nonconceptual first-person contents.
In chapter 6, I argued the same for somatic proprioception. I also
suggested that these are the most primitive types of first-person contents—
the building blocks from which we can construct a principled account
of both the nature and the acquisition of self-consciousness. One
obvious question that this raises is, are we committed to the view that
any creature whose perceptual experience is a source of nonconceptual
first-person contents ipso facto counts as self-conscious? This would, in
the eyes of most theorists, be a reductio ad absurdum of the position under
discussion. My discussion of the notion of a nonconceptual point of
view in this chapter has offered a way to avoid this conclusion. We now
have the conceptual machinery to impose a division within the class of
creatures whose perceptual experience supports nonconceptual firstperson
contents. This division divides those creatures that have a nonconceptual
point of view on the world from those creatures that do not. This