Answer:
Sources from which I proceeded to develop this way of thinking, They are both
historical and biographical sources and can be summarily described by the headings:
(1) Language, (2) the work of the skeptics from the beginnings of Western History,
(3) a key concept of Darwin’s theory of evolution and, (4) Cybernetics.
About thirty years ago, Heinz von Foerster noticed an inherent quality of the
nervous system (and almost everybody believes that human beings must be viewed as
nervous systems when one focuses on cognition): The signals that are sent from
sensory elements to the cortex are all the same. This had been discovered by Johannes
Müller around the middle of the last century, but von Foerster was, as far as I know,
the first to emphasize its epistemological implications.
He called this “undifferentiated coding”.1 What this means is that if a neuron in
the retina sends a “visual” signal to the cortex, this signal has exactly the same form as
the signals that come from the ears, from the nose, from fingers or toes, or any other
signal-generating part of the organism. There is no qualitative distinction between any
of these signals. They all vary in frequency and amplitude, but there is no qualitative
indication of what they are supposed to mean.
It was a very baffling observation. It has since been confirmed by Humberto
Maturana in the field of color vision, where he has shown that the receptors which are
supposed to sense red – or what physicists think of as the kind of light waves we call
red – send signals that are in no way different from the ones that sense green. If we
are able to distinguish them, the distinctions must be made in the cortex. Yet, they
cannot be made on the basis of simple qualitative differences, because there are no
such differences.2 It is therefore unwarranted to maintain that we distinguish things
because we receive “information” from what we usually call the outside world.
From the epistemological point of view, this is earth-shaking. Yet if you look
through the contemporary literature of psychology and especially the psychology of
perception, one finds practically no reference to it.
