Eye, Mind and Image

Eye, mind and image follow their own rules, they have their own laws. Yet they are all interrelated. This substack is about the difficulty and reward of thinking them alongside each other, pressing analogies and admitting disanalogies. Vision can be likened to a constructive process. Is, as Donald Hoffman (Visual Intellitence, 2000) says, the eye like an artist, creatively picking and choosing the reality we see? It’s an interesting analogy, if difficult to sustain exactly.

But the point remains – coming up with a perceptual “sketch” with reality is not altogether unlike making a picture. When we say that we look out at the world with “mental paint,” our experience revealing the way our vision is subjectively conditioned by our own brain and mental apparatus, how much is that like the “style” that is found in a picture?

Eye, mind and image is also the name of a class taught at the University of Pennsylvania. I have sat in it off and on for several years, as it was taught mostly by Gary Hatfield and Michael Leja. I taught it for the first time in 2023 with Shira Brisman and have been teaching it since 2024 with the philosopher Hammam Aldouri. The class becomes a touchstone for years of reflection on things like visual perception, cognition, neuroscience, pictorial perception, aesthetics, Gestalt psychology, Rudolf Arnheim and other things.

I see this substack as an overflow, not only of this class, but of my own evolving interests over the years. The subjects will come up in no apparent order but reflect thought about these topics, many developed in a seminar I taught for fifteen years called, What is an Image? I hope that the reflections are useful and interesting in some small way.