Are Gestalts Real?
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group is perceived as a whole and is a Gestalt in mind. But as you may recall,
we are all deceived by distal attribution: We project everything we see onto the
external world and have the experience of seeing it out there, where we believe
it belongs. In the same way, the group of objects that catches your eye is seen
as a Gestalt ... but it is seen as a Gestalt “out there”. Its unity, its cohesion as a
group, are projected by you onto the environment. That is the reason you are
so certain that objects you see grouped together really are grouped together.
But that’s not all: Objects and sundry pieces of matter are scattered all
around us. That’s because the physical world is a multiplicity and its shards
are distributed throughout space. When we try to imagine the universe, what
appears in our mind’s eye is ourselves looking out upon it. We imagine ourselves
perched somewhere in space, seeing planets, meteors, comets and all the rest.
We may not explicitly see ourselves in that picture, but we’re present, we’re the
silent observer. It’s in our nature to imagine all things as they would appear in
our perspective. We therefore believe things are grouped in the universe just as
they’re grouped in our eyes.
Most importantly, from an impersonal viewpoint, sets of objects are deeply
embedded in their background. The human visual system must work very hard
to extricate the exact group that’s of interest to us. The group of interest then
comes into existence as a result of the effort we have devoted to extrude it from
a background in which it is buried. The Gestalt group comes into existence
because we have created the information necessary to define its boundaries.
In all cases, specific information is needed to carve out a given group and
individuate it. Gestalts don’t come for free.
Immanuel Kant, Philosopher of Gestalt
The Eighteenth Century philosopher Immanuel Kant was the first thoroughly
modern European thinker. His ideas about the human mind anticipated much
of contemporary psychology: Indeed, most of the founding ideas of cognitive
science are prefigured in Kant’s writings. It is only his vocabulary that is outdated today and sounds strange to our ears. 11
The process of mentally uniting many objects together into one global experience, he called transcendental apperception. Thus, transcendental apperception
refers to the act of forming Gestalts. Kant had the original insight to recognize
that a Gestalt is not merely a group of objects, but something entirely new and
original. For example, the Big Dipper is not just a group of seven points, but is
a pattern, in which the points play a supporting role. We can almost imagine
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group is perceived as a whole and is a Gestalt in mind. But as you may recall,
we are all deceived by distal attribution: We project everything we see onto the
external world and have the experience of seeing it out there, where we believe
it belongs. In the same way, the group of objects that catches your eye is seen
as a Gestalt ... but it is seen as a Gestalt “out there”. Its unity, its cohesion as a
group, are projected by you onto the environment. That is the reason you are
so certain that objects you see grouped together really are grouped together.
But that’s not all: Objects and sundry pieces of matter are scattered all
around us. That’s because the physical world is a multiplicity and its shards
are distributed throughout space. When we try to imagine the universe, what
appears in our mind’s eye is ourselves looking out upon it. We imagine ourselves
perched somewhere in space, seeing planets, meteors, comets and all the rest.
We may not explicitly see ourselves in that picture, but we’re present, we’re the
silent observer. It’s in our nature to imagine all things as they would appear in
our perspective. We therefore believe things are grouped in the universe just as
they’re grouped in our eyes.
Most importantly, from an impersonal viewpoint, sets of objects are deeply
embedded in their background. The human visual system must work very hard
to extricate the exact group that’s of interest to us. The group of interest then
comes into existence as a result of the effort we have devoted to extrude it from
a background in which it is buried. The Gestalt group comes into existence
because we have created the information necessary to define its boundaries.
In all cases, specific information is needed to carve out a given group and
individuate it. Gestalts don’t come for free.
Immanuel Kant, Philosopher of Gestalt
The Eighteenth Century philosopher Immanuel Kant was the first thoroughly
modern European thinker. His ideas about the human mind anticipated much
of contemporary psychology: Indeed, most of the founding ideas of cognitive
science are prefigured in Kant’s writings. It is only his vocabulary that is outdated today and sounds strange to our ears. 11
The process of mentally uniting many objects together into one global experience, he called transcendental apperception. Thus, transcendental apperception
refers to the act of forming Gestalts. Kant had the original insight to recognize
that a Gestalt is not merely a group of objects, but something entirely new and
original. For example, the Big Dipper is not just a group of seven points, but is
a pattern, in which the points play a supporting role. We can almost imagine