Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle) / quote 105 of 138
The gestalt structure of consciousness
Our conscious experiences do not just come to us as a disorganized mess; rather they typically come to us with well-defined, and sometimes even precise, structures. We do not, for example, in normal vision see undifferentiated blurs and fragments; rather, we see tables, chairs, people, cars, etc., even though only fragments of those objects are reflecting photons at the retina, and the retinal image is in various ways distorted. The Gestalt psychologists investigated these structures and found certain interesting facts. One is, the brain has a capacity to take degenerate stimuli and organize them into coherent wholes. Furthermore, it is able to take a constant stimulus and treat it now as one perception, now as another. So in the famous “duck-rabbit” example there is a constant perceptual input but I perceive it now as a duck, now as a rabbit. In these drawings, the left-hand figure does not actually physically resemble a human face, but nonetheless, you will perceive it as a face because your brain organizes the degernate stimulus into a coherent whole. The right-hand figure is the famous duck-rabbit, which can be seen either as a duck or as a rabbit. Furthermore, the Gestalt structure is not only a matter of organizing our perceptions into coherent wholes, but within the entire conscious field, we make a distinction between the figures that we are perceiving and the ground on which they are perceived. So, for example, I see the pen against the background of the book, the book against the background of the desk, the desk against the background of the floor, and the floor against the rest of the room, until I reach the horizon of my entire perceptual field. There are thus two aspects, at least, to the Gestalt structure of consciousness. First, the capacity that the brain has to organize perceptions into coherent wholes, and second, the capacity that the brain has to discriminate figures from backgrounds.