ABSTRACT
Realism is an ecological concept. At various places in the earlier lectures we discussed barriers to ecological realism as thwarts to the understanding of perception, with some barriers discussed more explicitly than others. The foregoing provides the opportunity to underscore the magnitude of the challenge posed by ecological optics: The foundation for optical information in the specificational sense is the physics of multiple reflections by, and multiple reflections among, indefinitely many reflecting surfaces, each of non-Gaussian randomness that is different from surface to surface. The embryonic evaluation applies equally to ecological acoustics, ecological mechanics, and ecological chemistry—to the patterned energy dispersals that make possible perceiving by listening, touching, smelling and tasting in all their manifest forms within the several Kingdoms. Closely related to the doctrine of the independence of perception from stimulation are the parallel doctrines of defining reality in an absolute sense or, correspondingly, defining the environment in a strictly predicative manner.
