SPACE PERCEPTION
| Collection | International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics |
|---|---|
| Year | 2004 |
| Vol. (num.) | 2(2) |
| ID | ◀ 3118 ▶ |
| Object type | Epistemology, ontology or semantics |
BERTALANFFY observes that von UEXKÚLL discoveries about the selective ambients of living systems relativize “… forms of intuition, considered by KANT as a priori and immutable. The biologist finds that there is no absolute space or time but that they depend on the organization of the perceiving organism” (1962, p.74).
Indeed experiments and even daily experience “… prove that the space of visual and tactual perception is in no way Euclidian. In the space of perception, the coordinates are in no way equivalent, but there is a fundamental difference between top and bottom, right and left, and fore and aft. Already the organization of our body, and, in the last resort, the fact that the organism is subjected to gravity, makes for an inequality of the horizontal and vertical dimensions” (Ibid).
Moreover “… perception of space is based on binocular vision, parallaxis, the contraction of the ciliary muscle, apparent increase or decrease in size of an approaching or receding object” (Ibid., p.79).
Thus space (as well as time, matter and energy), while their existence is doubtless as neatly separated frames, are constructed by us as a useful conceptual frame, in correspondence with our biological nature.
I. SILVERMAN, for instance, observes: “Space is the medium in which Energy and Time expenditures are opposed” (1992, p.137).