Animal Perception

"The size-levels of the world emphasized by modern physics, the atomic and the cosmic, are inappropriate for the psychologist. We are concerned here with things at the ecological level, with the habitat of animals and men, because we all behave with respect to things we can look at and feel, or smell and taste, and events we can listen to."

"The sense organs of animals, the perceptual systems (Gibson, 1966b), are not capable of detecting atoms or galaxies."

"We must first consider how we can perceive the environment—how we apprehend the same things that our human ancestors did before they learned about atoms and galaxies. We are concerned with direct perception..."

"The flow of abstract empty time, however useful this concept may be to the physicist, has no reality for an animal. We perceive not time but processes, changes, sequences, or so I shall assume. ...Terrestrial processes occur at the intermediate level of duration. They are the natural units of sequential structure."

"And once more it is important to realize that smaller units are nested within larger units. There are events within events, as there are forms within forms, up to the yearly shift of the path of the sun across the sky and down to the breaking of a twig."

"The motions of things in the environment are of a different order from the motions of bodies in space. The fundamental laws of motion hold for celestial mechanics, but events on earth do not have the elegant simplicity of the motions of planets."

"Events on earth begin and end abruptly instead of being continuous. Pure velocity and acceleration, either linear or angular, are rarely observable except in machines. And there are very few ideal elastic bodies except for billiard balls."

"The terrestrial world is mostly made of surfaces, not of bodies in space."

"In our concern with surfaces and their purely geometrical layout, we must not forget that the air is filled with sunlight during the day and that some illumination always remains, even during the night. This fact, too, is an invariant of nature. Light comes from the sky and becomes ambient in the air."

"This is what makes persisting surfaces potentially visible as well as potentially tangible. How they are actually seen by animals with eyes is the problem of this book..."

Gibson, James J. (2014-11-19T22:58:59). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Psychology Press & Routledge Classic Editions) . Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition. Emphasis added

THIS is phenomenology, with profound implications. Because: Humans are animals.