ABSTRACT
This chapter considers problems of functional and structural decomposition of visual perception and of the visual system. It presents a simplified wiring-diagram of part of the retina to summarize some properties of retinal cells and of the neuronal interactions. The chapter discusses the correlation-structure of retinal activity patterns. It shows that the interrelations with the rest of our visual system are so strong, that a functional decomposition of the retina is not necessarily a simpler goal than a functional decomposition of the whole visual system. In multicellular organisms perception is a process characterized by a set of causal relations between the structure of the environment insofar as it influences or has influenced the functional activity patterns in the organism’s receptor cells either directly or recursively, and the structure of that organism’s actual and potential behaviour. Neuroreductionistic reasoning has proved very fruitful in suggesting new and often elegant experiments, sometimes with striking and inherently valuable results.
