I. A Theoretical Backdrop

It is not we who perceive, it is the thing that perceives itself yonder - it is not we who speak, it is truth that speaks itself at the depths of speech — Becoming-nature of man which is becoming-man of nature — The world is a field, and as such is always open.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

When considering perception as a topic of speculation my thoughts are rooted in C.D. Broad’s theory of brain function as “eliminative and not productive.” Based on the work of Bergson and later popularized by Aldus Huxley, Broad concludes that “The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful.” Essentially, Broad sees the brain as a kind of valve that reduces an infinite field of stimuli to a reasonable amount of information that can be handled by human consciousness. Huxley adds that “in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this Particular planet.”

Complimentary to the “eliminative” interpretation of brain function is a widely held premise of cognitive science, the idea that conscious thought requires approximately five percent of the brain’s actual mental activity. For the brain to perform its unconscious work of sensory filtration a large amount of sensory information must be processed, examined for usefulness or validity and then reported to the conscious mind in the form of thought. What results, then, is a kind of mental summary of the current sensory landscape. The amount of information that becomes accessible to the conscious mind is necessarily limited, but the brain still retains much of the unfiltered information as a kind of storage heap of unprocessed, or unthought, sensory data. While this ‘storage heap’ remains mostly inaccessible and unorganized, at least in any conscious way, it nonetheless remains to some degree as the raw data used by the brian in its ongoing mental processes.

As Huxley points out, this is most likely the result of biological need and evolution. The human being has developed the tool of cognition in order to process and evaluate sensory stimuli in the way most efficient for its survival on the surface of planet earth. But while this cognitive filter has served our biological needs incredibly well, in the early 21st century our basic survival is rarely dependent upon immediate sensorial experience. In order to fully understand our sensorium and its relation to the ‘reality’ in which we live, think and act, a consideration of the role of survival in perception and consciousness appears to be vital. In my opinion, this ‘storage heap’ of unthought sensory data is equally important and relevant, especially when venturing into the world of metaphysics and the meta-sensorial.