The Geometry of Vision and the Mind Body Problem

Book excerpt: This book focuses on the philosophy of perception with particular emphasis on the geometry of phenomenal visual space and mind body issues concerning the relationships between that space and neural activity in the brain. The contents include a detailed attack on naive realism and a defense of the causal theory of perception, along with analyses of both the topology and metric structure of visual space. It is shown how a variable curvature geometry for visual space can account for phenomenal visual depth perception, and an extension of that analysis is given to the other sense systems. The final chapter defends the claim that the conscious mind is a spatial entity, but still questions whether a physicalist reduction can be made of it to activity in the brain.