1 Introduction
3
segmentation into those objects that are important in its lifestyle. Contrary to
commonsense realism, the physical world has no pre-existing segmentation.
Far and away the most important and most remarkable attribute of the
animal brain is that all creatures perceive in Gestalt wholes. When you open
your eyes, what you behold is a comprehensive display of the things before
you, and this display is given to you as a single, undivided experience. Vision
would be meaningless, and have no biological function if people and animals
saw anything less than integral scenes.
Common sense leads us to assume that we see in Gestalts because the world
itself is constituted of whole objects and scenes, but this is incorrect. The reason
events of the world appear holistic to animals is that animals perceive them in
Gestalts. The atoms of a teacup do not collude together to form a teacup: The
object is a teacup because it is constituted that way from a perspective outside
of itself.
Gestalts do not merely allow you to see whole objects and scenes, but also
to experience events that unfold in time. When listening to music, you hear
more than just the note currently being played: You hear a whole melody.
When someone speaks you hear a whole sentence. Gestalts bring into being an
entire aspect of reality that would not exist otherwise—a reality in which many
things which are separated in space and time are perceived together as a new
combined entity. The new entity did not exist before the parts were perceived
as one.
One of the most ancient dichotomies is that between form and substance.
Intuitively, it seems indisputable that every material thing has two orthogonal
aspects: It has matter and form—and these two things jointly determine what
an object is. This belief is another example of naïve realism—for in actual fact
form cannot exist except in the view of a Gestalt observer. Form does not inhere
in brute matter but emerges in Gestalt observation.
It is not merely the appearance of objects that emerges from observation, but
also their structure. Indeed, the structure of an object is its precise description
in analytic terms: It is an explicit accounting of all the functional parts and the
relations by which they are connected. Such a description rests on a specific
segmentation of the object into parts. If an object is segmented into parts
differently, this of course gives rise to a different description. Thus the structure,
as it is perceived by an observer, is relative to a given segmentation of the
object into parts and relations between parts. This is an important observation,
because it reveals that structure is in the observer, rather than in the object itself.
This fact is strongly counterintuitive, for common sense tells us forcefully that
every object in the world has a unique structure, and its structure is inherent
in the object.
3
segmentation into those objects that are important in its lifestyle. Contrary to
commonsense realism, the physical world has no pre-existing segmentation.
Far and away the most important and most remarkable attribute of the
animal brain is that all creatures perceive in Gestalt wholes. When you open
your eyes, what you behold is a comprehensive display of the things before
you, and this display is given to you as a single, undivided experience. Vision
would be meaningless, and have no biological function if people and animals
saw anything less than integral scenes.
Common sense leads us to assume that we see in Gestalts because the world
itself is constituted of whole objects and scenes, but this is incorrect. The reason
events of the world appear holistic to animals is that animals perceive them in
Gestalts. The atoms of a teacup do not collude together to form a teacup: The
object is a teacup because it is constituted that way from a perspective outside
of itself.
Gestalts do not merely allow you to see whole objects and scenes, but also
to experience events that unfold in time. When listening to music, you hear
more than just the note currently being played: You hear a whole melody.
When someone speaks you hear a whole sentence. Gestalts bring into being an
entire aspect of reality that would not exist otherwise—a reality in which many
things which are separated in space and time are perceived together as a new
combined entity. The new entity did not exist before the parts were perceived
as one.
One of the most ancient dichotomies is that between form and substance.
Intuitively, it seems indisputable that every material thing has two orthogonal
aspects: It has matter and form—and these two things jointly determine what
an object is. This belief is another example of naïve realism—for in actual fact
form cannot exist except in the view of a Gestalt observer. Form does not inhere
in brute matter but emerges in Gestalt observation.
It is not merely the appearance of objects that emerges from observation, but
also their structure. Indeed, the structure of an object is its precise description
in analytic terms: It is an explicit accounting of all the functional parts and the
relations by which they are connected. Such a description rests on a specific
segmentation of the object into parts. If an object is segmented into parts
differently, this of course gives rise to a different description. Thus the structure,
as it is perceived by an observer, is relative to a given segmentation of the
object into parts and relations between parts. This is an important observation,
because it reveals that structure is in the observer, rather than in the object itself.
This fact is strongly counterintuitive, for common sense tells us forcefully that
every object in the world has a unique structure, and its structure is inherent
in the object.