Visualizing Conceived as Visual Apprehending without any Particular Point of Observation

I argued in my book on perceptual systems [1] that there can be no visual perception without some accompanying awareness of the 'visual ego', even if dim. Awareness of the environment entails a reciprocal awareness of the ego. The latter might be an actual seeing of one's body, or it might only be an awareness of the point of observation of where one is located in the world. I suggested that one's attention may shift between the 'objective pole' of visual experience at one extreme and the 'subjective pole' at the other but that both poles of experience exist. For example, one can perceive an external object as such or one can notice the perspective appearance that it has when seen from 'here'. Some degree of self-awareness is inevitable and I have implied that there is some awareness of one's existence and location in the world. And this is especially true during locomotion that, being visually controlled, entails what I have called visual kinesthesis. But is it true that we can never get wholly away from this kind of awareness? Is it in fact inevitable ? Emphasis on the visual ego in visual perception is useful as an antidote to the doctrinaire concepts of physical optics, physiological optics and the orthodox theories of perception founded on them. They have too long dominated the study of vision. But does my emphasis do justice to a kind of visual apprehension that does not seem to be accompanied by any visual ego ? I will call this visualization. We certainly seem to be able to apprehend things without seeing one's body at the same time. And I believe we are able to apprehend things without any awareness of a particular point of observation. An example of visualizing without having a point of view is the knowing of the arrangement of one's house, the layout of the rooms. There is no special vantage point from which one perceives this layout, no map or 'bird's-eye-view' to one's introspection and certainly no pictorial image of how things look from the front door or the back door or from a station point in any one of the rooms. Another example is the way we all learn to visualize 'space', the geometrical space of three dimensions having the x, y and z axes of the Carte-