Object Recognition
Ian Wells >

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The study of object recognition appeals to me fundamentally because as the cliché goes, studying the mind is equivalent to space exploration. The difference of course is that the universe inside my mind is not and cannot ever be the same as the universe inside your mind: While we can both sit on the back porch on a clear night marvelling over the vastness of the universe, neither one of us can peer into the depths of someone’s mind and marvel at the vastness of their beliefs. But by existing in a shared space (e.g., communication), all of us can at least attempt to understand the nature of the reality inside another person’s mind. In doing so, we can at least attempt to test the extent to which our own beliefs of reality are the same as other’s beliefs. While no one will have perfect beliefs, we can seemingly improve our beliefs through finding agreements. Science is one of the tools that allow people to communicate their beliefs about reality in search for such agreements. More importantly, science is a tool that allows people to judge the likelihood of a belief being true regardless of the number of people who agree with it.

In the past, object recognition was thought to occur by the light from an object “meeting” the same object inside your soul. For example, imagine a little chair in your soul which is somewhere inside your head, and then the light, like the light from a movie projector projecting an image of a chair, would enter your eye and “meet” the chair inside your soul and this would somehow produce your awareness of the chair. If you go back even further in time, it was actually believed that the light projector was inside your head, and that reality was experienced because of it being a projection of your soul and the spiritual world (that sensation was a spiritual phenomenon). Kind of weird to think about this I guess, but actually it still fits with current philosophy. The connection between the brain (material reality) and the mind (e.g., the soul or the subjective sensation of reality) remains as elusive as it was thousands of years ago. No one has yet to come up with proof that what you see is the same as what I see. Or even more radically, I may simply be a figment of your imagination. These days, based on the idea that the mind is material, the process of object recognition is more mechanical and less spiritual or philosophical. My research focuses on the idea that object recognition, or the phenomenon of being conscious of an object, occurs only after it has been processed in increasingly complex mechanical and / or computational ways.

The opinions about how vision works are more complex now because we have a much better understanding of how the brain works. We know for example, that damaging your brain damages your mind (providing strong evidence against the idea of perception occurring via your soul). We also know how brain damage leads to the breakdown of neural pathways and how it is these pathways that provide normal functioning brains. We do not know however how these neural pathways actually produce the phenomenon of sensation. That is, we do not know how the brain creates the mind. The problem is multifaceted. First, we cannot agree on a definition of consciousness. For example, we cannot test whether non-human animals are conscious because we cannot define consciousness. Second, even if we were to make a computer that said it was conscious, since we made it say it was conscious it’s impossible to prove that it actually is conscious. But then again, you might be the only conscious person on the planet and the rest of us could be zombies who just say we are conscious. Finally, we might all just be a figment of your imagination. Thus, I look forward to spending some of the time I have been given, trying to understand the nature of consciousness, and in turn I hope this leads me to better understanding the nature of reality (a better understanding of the universe: which in turn will increase my chances of survival).