To
see something in the natural world, it not only helps, but
is apparently imperative, that we have some mental picture
of that "something" already there in our mind's
eye. Recognition is a matching up of mental pictures and
physical reality – a resonance between mind, the world's
furniture, and their events, mediated by the senses.
If
we need a mental picture before we see something, it is
only fair to ask where those pictures come from in the
first place. … Where do new ideas – new
"intensions", new ways of seeing – come from?
Goethe was on to something when he said that we have to
learn how to see things in new ways. The mind does not
create the natural world, but it does search for new ways
to make sense of it, to bring real events and entities
into focus, to see familiar phenom- ena in novel ways, to
"make the world visible".
I
have long thought of the scientific process as a matching
up of mental pictures against perceptions of the world –
in a search for absolutely the best, most accurate,
description of that world. Patterns impose themselves on
us. We have but to open our eyes to see them. But it is
clear that something more is there as well: a search for
new ways of seeing that actually change the very per-
ception of the world itself. New phenomena, new
patterns will then be revealed, things and events that
have always been there but not previously been seen as
important – or even been seen at all.
