Right before our eyes, we see the weather.

It can dictate what we do for the day. It can be life-altering. Or a simple change of plans. Imagine the time when we didn't have weather apps that would assist in our planning. Even before aviation, what we know of navigation came from sailing. In the early era of travel by sail, sailing vessels waited for weeks or more at a port due to violent storms or favorable winds to carry their sails. The ability to foresee bad weather was a critical skill for any competent navigator. Signs of winds are also used by hunters of the far north, as it secured a settlement for the season. The Polar Inuits living in the farthest northwestern part of Greenland at the time of Knud Rasmussen's expeditions (Fifth Thule Expedition between 1921 and 1924) settled in an area where the strong winds from the north diminished just as it passed over the settlement. Today, we rarely look upwards. It seems that weather apps give all the information we need in temperature, wind speed and direction, sky conditions, and possible precipitation. As we rely on our devices, online, and the last part of the news for the weather forecast, perhaps the skill to observe weather seems less relevant today.

When thinking about how predictions were/are made by reading signs of weather in clouds and winds by hunters and sailors alike, pilots also have an expertise in predicting weather, and with a confidence that comes with experience. The confidence in statements like, "Wait two hours, it will clear up." What pilots were taught back in ground school was to 'visualize' the weather. Asking a pilot, I note him as Pilot 1, of over 35 years experience flying in Greenland, what does ‘visualize’ mean, he stated, “Visualizing signs of weather in the sky is forming a picture of the visual forms, like, rain or snow or fog moving in, and in Greenland, I can see quite far in the distance towards the coast. Up in the sky, squall lines help predict bad weather, and with the mountains here, lenticular [clouds], which are almond-shaped, indicate mountain waves – something to stay away from since it can be turbulent.” As many weather services report from weather stations and satellites provide inputs to computer models for predictions, it is the processes that drive these complex weather systems that can be rather imprecise for longer ranges. Moreover, predictions for extreme phenomena in a short time and distance are elusive, especially in Greenland.

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Aviation theory of what weather is made of – the physical matter and how to cope with its unpredictability – visualizing it before taking off adheres to the textbook way of preplanning. Besides aviation theory, pilots also need certain ratings (i.e., Night Rating to fly at ‘night’) and, if possible, certain types of equipment, like weather radar in the cockpit, for another way to be 'ahead' of weather.

Before any flight, pilots gather weather data from various sources, interpret the data for the planned route, and if need be, get supplementary sources, such as calling the Meteorologist who prepared the report, as pilots in Greenland do on occasion to possibly confirm their assessment. Philosophically speaking, pilots must be sceptical of what is on weather reports, which becomes an important ingredient for living until old age. The method is to always have an alternate, just in case. And to be clear, no matter the latest and sophisticated equipment, it’s not possible to fly in all the weather conditions nature gives. Thus, pilots have more to say about the weather; some learned to respect the weather and never to be complacent about their beloved adversary again.

Part of all the chapters are devoted to the elements of aviation weather along with the descriptions of the machines they fly and the stories they tell.

It was dark from the East. We took off from there, I

Why do we see white as the colour of clouds?

Light is made of many different wavelengths and each a different colour. We see those colours when objects absorb one wavelength and reflect another. Clouds are visible aggregate of minute water or ice particles suspended in air. So, with a laser, the light from the laser scatters the tiny particles in the cloud making each particle visible. If the laser is red, the particle would be red. The air in and around the cloud would reflect any colour. Yet, when light scatters all together, the ‘colour’ appears as white, hence the colour of clouds are white. Since fog is a cloud at surface level, fog too appears as white. It’s true, our eyes saw white, however, our eyes do misinterpret. Thus, perception is more than the physiology of the eye and perhaps more than the mind.

Our eyes are in motion. Our eyes are being stimulated. The context of the word stimulus is in the frame of reference to psychology and physiology, but in context, comes many meanings (Gibson 1960, 1966, 28). The use of stimuli in sensory physiology means light, sound, smell, etc. If to stay within the limits of flying in the day with light, ‘night’ is defined as when the centre of the sun’s disk is 6° below the horizon, known as the ‘blue hour’. Picture walking along the meridian of 100° west of the Prime Meridian of Greenwich, the longitude that runs from the North Pole, across the Arctic Ocean, North America, down to the Pacific Ocean, Southern Ocean, Antarctica, and then South Pole, you would start to see the changes in the sun’s disk. You begin to realize that the curve is higher in the southern sky and lower in the northern sky, and no sun at all. Sensing the sun’s orbit tilted is sensing all the stimuli around.

Not least, for Gibson (1966, 29), stimuli as information all depends on the observer and the receptor organs, and in this event, the ‘available’ stimulus (in the environment) and the ‘effective’[1] one is distinguished between “stimulus energy and stimulus information (italicize in original).” For Gibson, the energy from stimuli is crucial here, as energy transforms substances. The sun provides enormous energy. Virtually all of earth’s systems are driven by solar radiation and the climate is determined by the amount of energy received from the sun. With less light in places like Greenland, so must the animals and plants and people arrange their growth and daily activities. The rhythm of light-energy, together with the high angle at which an oncoming ray of light enters gives a constant to prompt action. Something happened in front of our eyes.

The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (1966, 7), a book Gibson laboured through the senses for which the environment has basis on the notion that our senses convey things for us to know about our environment. Gibson described the environment in terms of ecology that merged concepts of physics, geology, biology, archaeology, and anthropology. Yet, for Gibson (1966, 8-22), for us to ‘see,’ the preconditions for vision (not vision itself), he offered concepts such as ambient energy for ways to open our eyes as we move over the environment. Gibson (1966, 4) emphasized the senses stating, “The eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and skin can orient, explore, and investigate. When thus active they are neither passive senses nor channels of sensory quality, but ways of paying attention to whatever is constant in the changing stimulation.” From physiology, there are parts of our brain that mediate automatic and regulatory functions[2]. If our bodies drop or rise in temperature, the brain region senses this and commands muscles to react. Gibson does not discount that there are receptors for each sense connecting with the central nervous system drawn up to the brain. Gibson’s views stand on grounds that challenge the mind-body problem latent in this thesis. It’s worth quoting Gibson (1966, 5),

“The active senses cannot be simply the initiators of signals in nerve fibers or messages to the brain; instead they are analogous to tentacles and feelers. And the function of the brain when looped with its perceptual organs is not to decode signals not to interpret messages, not to accept images. These old analogies no longer apply. The function of the brain is not even to organize the sensory input or to process the data, in modern terminology. The perceptual systems, including the nerve canters at various levels up to the brain, are ways of seeking and extracting information about the environment from the flowing array of ambient energy (italicize in the original).”

Neuroscientist in the 1960s, Paul Maclean conceptualized the brain having three functional domains, in brief, the layers do overlap, the flow of information and commands is not just top down between them, automatic aspects of each layer cannot be separated (such as emotions and thought are not separated) (Sapolsky, 2017, p. 23). As we are aware, different disciplines produce different answers – due to ontological and epistemological first instances; due to the methodological principles – and as this thesis explores, there are intertwining angles, none standing alone in the mind-body problem.

I have two challenges: one, describe the pilot’s perception in Greenland’s hostile environment, framed from particular angles including Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, Gibsonian principles of ecological optics and perceptions of the environment, and postphenomenology considering the affordances of technology.

As Gibson reminds us, the methodological problem of describing the ‘look’ of things, is not to fall into the dualism of perceptual experience severed from the physical environment. It was nearly the end of the 1960s, Gibson followed through with the notion that animals (people) as perceivers and the environment in which the animal (species) thrives could neither be understood or examined independently of one another (Lombardo, 1987, p. 193). This then, for Gibson would mean a “phenomenological characterization and a psychophysical explanation of the veridical perceptual experience (Lombardo, 1987, p. 193) (italicise in the original).” In other words, following Gibson requires to go beyond describing experience, because it is only when the relation between perceptual experience and the physical world is merged and coinciding with a reality that reveals any meaning.

What is perceived can be described synoptically with the medium of air and substances of the atmosphere – the immediacy of weather. Inspired by Gibson (and Ingold to the extent of weather as an ‘experience of light’), my attempts are to describe how pilots perceive of the weather. My strategy is to write in a continuous flow between pilot and environment of how their eyes scan the environment. I bring forth the optic array of the environment describing the physics of weather overlapping their experience flying in it. I am aware, I may find myself floating ambiguously in between objectifying weather when I avail to the physics of weather. That said, I describe the flight environment through weather, which contextualizes the environment of Greenland – recall the intro of Greenland’s hostile environment. I hope then to find a balance and flow between, in this case, mind and matter. I heed Gibson’s (1986, 211) reconsideration of eye movements and pointed out that the traditional eye movements focused on the eye physiology, not how the visual system works. I delve into the Gibson’s re-examination eye movement asking, what are the eyes good for in relation to picking up information. In moving towards Gibson’s visual perception, the pilot’s part of this study use their eyes in the real flight environment of Greenland. As in this case, the machine/helicopter becomes the ‘mediating’ force between their eyes and the environment.

The phenomenological task is to describe the world of experience, as it appears to the perceiver, the first-person perspective. Yet, as noted above, to know what we ‘see’ carries forth in our experiences. Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (PhP) (1945) is concerned not only with human knowledge, but also takes issue with our conceptual framework in how we conceive consciousness, the world, and their relation. Phenomenology was a way to dissolve these concerns. At the core of his phenomenology, perception is an ongoing process of exploration and discovery, from the intersubjectivity of the world gradually emerging for the perceiver (). Merleau-Ponty’s () conception of lived experience is anti-Cartesian, rejecting the dualism of mind and body, object and subject, in what is known as the phenomenal field. Following Merleau-Ponty’s PhP, when the world of things is not determined, an alternative strategy is to describe lived experience in a way that shows how our consciousness of the world is related to lived experience.However, there is no clear line between describing lived experience and giving it a structure. In other words, there is no ‘pure’ phenomenology.

When the pilot enters the helicopter, at the start of each flight, this is not where ‘preparedness’ begins. What happens before the pre-planning of a flight, before the first live mission, before the years of becoming Captain, and for some, before the 5000 flight hours or more gathering all the experience? What happened were factors that led up to the present, impacting how the pilots perceive of their environment.

To fully appreciate Gibson’s perception of the visual world, and later his ecological approach to the environment, a brief background is given to understand who influenced Gibson. Darwin was one such person. Works of Darwin’s Origins of Species (1859) and Hubert Spencer’s (1829-1903) Principles of Psychology (1855) postulated that the organism adapted to the physical world for continuous survival, and with respect to Spencer, mentally we (humans) had to adjust (Lom 118). Psychological importance in evolution and adaption gained momentum and adaptation becomes central to functionalistic psychology (late 19th Century) in that, the animal adapted to the physical environment (Lombardo, 1987, p. 119). In this sense, the environment of animals is functionally tied to animal existence. Yet, the physical world was explained in terms of physical matters that questioned the disconnect between mind and matter, to which Gibson’s later work on visual perception and functionalism involved rethinking dualism of that time.

The functionalism and perception that Gibson was inclined to forward, was one related to Aristotle’s functional approach which connects the knower and the known where the mind is knowing something about the state it is in, such that certain aspects cannot be separated, and relates to the subject-object dualism in how we know what we know (Lombardo, 1987, p. 185). Functionalism lead to the question, how do we know the environment in which we are in?Central to this question is the word environment. From the study by Lawrence Crook (Gibson & Crooks 1938) on driving automobiles, Gibson attempted to characterize the most relevant features to visual perception. In another direction, away from laboratory studies, Gibson introduced terms such as, terrain, destination, collision, and obstacle(Gibson & Crooks 1938). The practicality of navigating safely was a function of perception. This supports Gibson’s approach to perception as a function which did not sit in an internal state, yet required a specific description of the environment that directly relates to that function. As was the case, from Gibson’s study of automobiles, there was a link between what was transmitted to the retina of the eyes, and how this related to the surroundings, for instance the proximity to other cars or objects ahead. By the end of World War II, Gibson’s approach to visual perception combined phenomenology and functionalism (1947, 1948, 1950).

However, from 1957 onwards, Gibson’s approach to the problems of visual perception proceeded on a different path; instead of asking, “How do things look?”, Gibson provoked the discussion from the point of motion, shape, distance perception, and the like by describing the “What is there to see?” (Lombardo, 1987, p. 250). This constituted a major rift between ecological and psychophysical theories[1]. Describing the environment to be perceived was for Gibson, the starting point, which led him away from ‘classic’ phenomenology. Gibson’s concept of visual perception moved more toward functional and ecological which perception could not be described independently of the environment. Second, Gibson was impressed by Wall’s[2] evolutionary approach, the primacy of considering the environment in an investigation of visual perception. If vision is treated as an evolved adaptation to the environment, then ascertaining those most adaptively significant facts of the environment, to which perceptual capabilities are functionally related, is essential in understanding visual perception.

[1] Noted in other writing (1961a 254-257), ’effective’ means having a ‘perceptual effect’ (cited in Lom 255)

[2] ANS – Layer 1 from Maclean