Experience of the world in time

Abstract

Look at a tomato. It is present to you, as a whole, now, even though parts of it are hidden in space. Notice, in particular, that you now have a perceptual sense of the presence of the tomato's back even though you do not now see it. Objects even tomatoes are, in a sense, timeless they exist, all at once, whole and integrated. Indeed, it is just this fact about objects their timelessness that makes it puzzling how we can experience them as we do. In the language of traditional philosophy, objects are transcendent; they outstrip our experience; they have hidden parts, always. When you perceive an object, you never take it in from all sides at once. And yet you have a sense of the presence of the object as a whole at a moment in time. In what does this perceptual sense of the object's presence consist? Perceptual presence is the problem for the theory of perception (Noe 2004: ch. 2; 2006). We don't advance toward a solution by observing that we judge, or infer, or guess that the back of the tomato is present, that we don't really see it. First, that we don't actually see the back of the tomato is our starting point. The problem is to understand in what our perceptual sense of the thing's hidden presence could consist if it does not consist in the fact that we see it. Second, as a phenomenological matter, there is a difference between thinking that something out of view is present (e.g. that there is money in the purse), and its looking as if something out of view is present (e.g. that the tomato is not a mere tomato-facade). What we want is an account of the perceptual presence of that which is not perceived. The solution to the problem of perceptual presence is achieved by noticing that the way the unseen portion of the tomato is visually present is not, as it were, as somehow mysteriously seen without being seen, or as represented visually without being seen. Rather, the back of the tomato is present, now, in that it is available now. We have access now to it. And not just any old access. We experience the presence of what is out of view by understanding, implicitly, that our relation to what is out of view is such that movement of the eyes, or the body, brings it into view, and such that movements of the thing itself make a sensory difference to what we experience. The hidden portions of the object are present in experience now, even though we don't now see them, because we are now coupled to them in a special, immediate, familiar, sensorimotor manner. Sensori