2
The Visual World
What Do You See When You See?
If you lift your eyes from this book, what is revealed to you is a spread-out
world of objects of many shapes, colors and kinds. Perhaps what you see are
the familiar furnishings of your room, and if you look out a window you may
see houses and trees, or a distant panorama of hills and fields. In fact, the word
panorama is very apt: The root of the word is orama, the Greek word for what is
seen with the eyes, and the prefix is pan, as in pantheism, meaning all. What you
behold is a comprehensive display of the things before you, and this display is
given to you as a single, undivided experience.
Psychologists refer to what you see as a Gestalt: It is an organized whole
grasped by the mind as a unit. Once the whole is grasped, you can focus on
individual parts and discern specific objects in distinct relations. But prior to
that you have the experience of the primordial glance which delivers to you the
whole panorama as a unified experience. The primacy of the undivided Gestalt
in the experience of seeing has been confirmed over and over by experiments
in vision science, and will be discussed in the next chapter.
It is in this form that vision exists among all sentient creatures that see.
Without integrated perception of visual patterns as undivided wholes, life
in its present form could not exist. The appropriate, purposive behavior of
almost every creature we observe is evidence that all organisms with developed
nervous systems rely on integrated perception of whole scenes. A creature as
small as a fruitfly skillfully pursues mates and evades predators—feats which
are effectively impossible unless a whole display is grasped in a glance. What
an insect perceives may be very simple and lack detail, but the whole of it is
seen in one eyeful.
© The Author(s) 2021
C. Pinter, Mind and the Cosmic Order,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50083-2_2
7
The Visual World
What Do You See When You See?
If you lift your eyes from this book, what is revealed to you is a spread-out
world of objects of many shapes, colors and kinds. Perhaps what you see are
the familiar furnishings of your room, and if you look out a window you may
see houses and trees, or a distant panorama of hills and fields. In fact, the word
panorama is very apt: The root of the word is orama, the Greek word for what is
seen with the eyes, and the prefix is pan, as in pantheism, meaning all. What you
behold is a comprehensive display of the things before you, and this display is
given to you as a single, undivided experience.
Psychologists refer to what you see as a Gestalt: It is an organized whole
grasped by the mind as a unit. Once the whole is grasped, you can focus on
individual parts and discern specific objects in distinct relations. But prior to
that you have the experience of the primordial glance which delivers to you the
whole panorama as a unified experience. The primacy of the undivided Gestalt
in the experience of seeing has been confirmed over and over by experiments
in vision science, and will be discussed in the next chapter.
It is in this form that vision exists among all sentient creatures that see.
Without integrated perception of visual patterns as undivided wholes, life
in its present form could not exist. The appropriate, purposive behavior of
almost every creature we observe is evidence that all organisms with developed
nervous systems rely on integrated perception of whole scenes. A creature as
small as a fruitfly skillfully pursues mates and evades predators—feats which
are effectively impossible unless a whole display is grasped in a glance. What
an insect perceives may be very simple and lack detail, but the whole of it is
seen in one eyeful.
© The Author(s) 2021
C. Pinter, Mind and the Cosmic Order,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50083-2_2
7