ABSTRACT
Selecting and paying attention has puzzled philosophers (and psychologists) for centuries: there’s no place for this activity in traditional or conventional accounts of perception. Contemporary accounts of selective perception (including explanations for memory and decision-making) attempt to overcome the difficulty by introducing information processing, based on computing and thus entailing computing elements such as algorithms and filters, coding, storage and retrieval, inputs and outputs. Each successive information-processing model requires more explanatory mechanisms—yet the moment of decision or choice is forever eluded. The reason for this is given by Neisser: organisms actively search for what they need: ‘To pick one apple from a tree you need not filter out all the others; you just don’t pick them’ (1976). Gibson (1966, 1979): all creatures are born into an already-existing environment. Species evolve characteristics enabling their survival in their habitat; creatures actively select and pay attention to circumstances that promote life. The complementarity of a creature and its habitat is an affordance. This includes humans and human characteristics such as sign-making.
