Finally, after all these years, we're starting to unlearn duality. There aren't two planes of reality, the physical and the mental. There are not two regions of the cosmos, the heavenly and the terrestrial. There isn't me over here, and the world over there. There's only the world, which happens to include me: the real world, the only one there is. It's where we live. The 21st century is the perfect date to begin exploring our new (same old, beautiful) world. These are a few of the rapturous thoughts this book evokes in your present reviewer. 'Action in Perception' is really fun, really smart, and really deep. It's about a completely new way to think about what perception is. Noe suggests that we don't perceive IN ORDER to move around in the world; perception just IS moving around in the world. One of his many beautiful examples goes like this (I paraphrase). Here are two trees, one closer to me, one farther. I experience them as more or less the same height. But WHY would I experience it this way, given that the closer tree takes up so much more of my visual field than the far one? Answer: The far tree doesn't look as tall as the near tree IN SPITE OF the fact that it crosses a smaller part of my visual field -- it looks as tall as the near tree BECAUSE it crosses a smaller part of my visual field, and this is just what I would expect, having experienced HOW the "apparent" sizes of things tend to CHANGE as I move through the world. The structure of the world is not stored in a 3D model in my brain -- why would I need such a model, when the world itself is out there for me to look at whenever I want to? -- what I hold onto (or, in some cases, am born with) are what might be called physical heuristics: patterns of how the shapes around me tend to change as I move. I believe this table to be rectangular not DESPITE the fact that its "apparent" shape changes as I walk around it, but BECAUSE its "apparent" shape changes as I walk around it -- in a specific pattern with which I am familiar. That pattern of geometric transformations is how I RECOGNIZE a rectangular surface. I'm probably not conveying these examples very well, but if the ideas I've been babbling about here sound at all intriguing to you, you will enjoy this book tremendously.