The Picture-Postcard Theory of Reality
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perceive is a “hallucination”—not because what we see is mistaken, but because
forms and features aren’t aspects of brute matter but creations of perception.
That is the core idea of the leading theory of perception today. 9
It must be understood that nature does not aim to deceive us, but the
very opposite: We imagine objects to be in surrounding space because that’s
where they’re supposed to be—that’s where we reach out for them. Likewise,
we experience visual objects as “holographic” images because that is the most
informative and practical way of getting the information about them into our
mind. Surely, however, the physical world consists of solid three-dimensional
objects, so it seems that we must be seeing them correctly. Again, we are
mistaken: The appearance of a three-dimensional object such as a teacup is a
product of the visual brain.The “cup in itself ”, the real teacup in the unobserved
physical world, consists of atoms and charged particles, and “appearance” is
not a force of physics.
By its fundamental definition, the appearance of something is the way it
presents itself to a viewer who is located away from it and sees it as a Gestalt
whole. The shape and appearance of complete objects arises in the vision of
viewers capable of perceiving Gestalt wholes. What is odd is that we understand
this, and logically we accept it, yet despite that we continue to mentally “see”
objects around us as things whose shape and features are real aspects of the
external world.
This is equally true for the layout of the world in everyday scenes, for
example a glimpse of your living room or the view out of your window. The
arrangement of objects in a visual scene seems marvelously well-organized: We
know what each object is, and it seems to be located just where it ought to be,
as if the whole scene were a carefully framed picture or a well-designed stage
setting. This informative and clear formatting of the world-scene is a creation
of perception.
Naïvely, we believe that the world is truly spread out around us in pictures—
that is, we believe that the pictorial format that we see is the real principle of
the organization of the physical world. The mind conceives an orderly way
for objects to be laid out in space, where each object has a position that we
understand so we can readily turn our attention back to it. In fact, it is a
layout that the visual brain has constructed: It makes all of what lies in front
of us perspicuous as a coherent whole. The world is organized by vision into
something that looks like a picture postcard, and we are led to believe that
layout is the “true” layout of material objects in the world. I call this belief the
Picture-postcard Theory of Reality.
The truth is that there is nothing in the bare material universe whose function
it is to “organize” objects into a coherent array or display. There is no systematic
81
perceive is a “hallucination”—not because what we see is mistaken, but because
forms and features aren’t aspects of brute matter but creations of perception.
That is the core idea of the leading theory of perception today. 9
It must be understood that nature does not aim to deceive us, but the
very opposite: We imagine objects to be in surrounding space because that’s
where they’re supposed to be—that’s where we reach out for them. Likewise,
we experience visual objects as “holographic” images because that is the most
informative and practical way of getting the information about them into our
mind. Surely, however, the physical world consists of solid three-dimensional
objects, so it seems that we must be seeing them correctly. Again, we are
mistaken: The appearance of a three-dimensional object such as a teacup is a
product of the visual brain.The “cup in itself ”, the real teacup in the unobserved
physical world, consists of atoms and charged particles, and “appearance” is
not a force of physics.
By its fundamental definition, the appearance of something is the way it
presents itself to a viewer who is located away from it and sees it as a Gestalt
whole. The shape and appearance of complete objects arises in the vision of
viewers capable of perceiving Gestalt wholes. What is odd is that we understand
this, and logically we accept it, yet despite that we continue to mentally “see”
objects around us as things whose shape and features are real aspects of the
external world.
This is equally true for the layout of the world in everyday scenes, for
example a glimpse of your living room or the view out of your window. The
arrangement of objects in a visual scene seems marvelously well-organized: We
know what each object is, and it seems to be located just where it ought to be,
as if the whole scene were a carefully framed picture or a well-designed stage
setting. This informative and clear formatting of the world-scene is a creation
of perception.
Naïvely, we believe that the world is truly spread out around us in pictures—
that is, we believe that the pictorial format that we see is the real principle of
the organization of the physical world. The mind conceives an orderly way
for objects to be laid out in space, where each object has a position that we
understand so we can readily turn our attention back to it. In fact, it is a
layout that the visual brain has constructed: It makes all of what lies in front
of us perspicuous as a coherent whole. The world is organized by vision into
something that looks like a picture postcard, and we are led to believe that
layout is the “true” layout of material objects in the world. I call this belief the
Picture-postcard Theory of Reality.
The truth is that there is nothing in the bare material universe whose function
it is to “organize” objects into a coherent array or display. There is no systematic