Gestalts as ecological templates

Jan Koenderink

To appear in:
Oxford Handbook of Perceptual Organization
Oxford University Press
Edited by Johan Wagemans

1. Visual awareness

Open your eyes in bright daylight, what happens? Typically you will be immediately aware of the scene in
front of you. There is nothing you can do about it, the "presentations" simply happen to you. The
presentations follow each other at a rate of about a dozen a second (Brown 1996; VanRullen, Koch 2003).
Typically each one is similar to the immediately preceding one, though occasionally sudden changes occur.
Changes appear to be both of an endogenous and an exogenous origin [1].

You have no control over the presentations, except by way of voluntary eye movements, and so forth. But
many of the eye fixations are generated endogenously, rather than voluntarily. They also “happen to you”,
although you won’t notice. They are part of what I propose to call your “zombie nature” *2+. Apart from
immediate awareness you have a stream of cognitions and reflective thoughts. The latter are your doing,
you have largely control over your thoughts, although a minority "simply occur” to you. In cases where you
know to be aware of an "illusion", you usually can't "correct" your awareness [3].

Your awareness is your reality in the sense that it is simply given to you [4]. Introspectively, a "corrected
illusion" in reflective thought is much “less real” than the illusion in your immediate visual awareness.
Thoughts may be right or wrong (your rational mind knows that), but awareness is beyond this or that, right
or wrong (your gut feelings depend on that).

2. Qualities and meanings

The content of your presentations is exhausted by qualities and meanings. Here I use "meaning" in the
sense of something like "good horse sense", or "gut feeling". A large dark something may appear
"threatening", even if you don't know its why, what, or where. Taking a rope for a snake [5] means being
aware of a “coiled elongatedness” entering cognition. A meaning is not that different from a quality like
"redness" [6], except that it carries an emotional load that pure qualities lack. But it is only a matter of
degree, it is not that redness is devoid of emotional charge.

3. The physical and the mental realms: bridging hypotheses

The "physical world" is a description of your habitat in terms that are publicly agreed on as the rockbottom
truth. It is the most "objective" description that humanity has been able to put together. It is extremely
effective in simple tasks, like setting a man on the moon (a matter of straightforward engineering), perhaps
less so for more complicated tasks, like predicting tomorrow's weather (involving chaotic systems). The
physical world is something you can know (by studying the sciences), it is not something you can be
immediately aware of. You still see the sun rise and set, even though you may prefer Copernicus'
interpretation. You may have had this conviction since childhood, it will not keep you from seeing the sun
“set”. Likewise, you experience the earth as “flat”, and the blue sky as a “dome”. It is the way “things are”,
at least in your presentations.

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The "mental world" is what you experience. For the larger part it is immediate awareness. There are also
confabulated thoughts that treat awareness as a mere moment in a "stream of consciousness". Reflective
thought does not partake in the immediate qualities and meanings that make up awareness, thus it is only
about experience.

In discussions on psychological issues, like perception, one has occasion to deal with both mental and
physical objects. The alternative would be pure behaviorism, that is physiology, which is self-contradictory
because any “science” is by definition a social undertaking *7+. Mental and physical objects have to be
treated on ontologically categorically distinct levels. The round square in your mind is just as round as it is
square [8], although there is no such an object in the physical world. The Higgs boson [9] is a major player
in the physical world (more so than your chair, an arbitrary and continually changing conglomerate of
molecules), although you may have no mental image of it, or maybe not even have heard of it. Objects like
the round square commonly occur in your thoughts, it is impossible to think without them (consider
“heaven”, “honesty”, “common opinion”, and so forth). Likewise, physics cannot do without many fictional
entities like “entropy”, “wave functions”, or “photons”.

The causal theory of perception has that objects in the physical world are the causes of objects in your
mental eye. It is a theory for which not the slightest thread of evidence can be found in the sciences.
Nevertheless, it is a very popular theory (it may well be the most common), because mainstream thought
ascribes to the notion of a “God’s Eye View. This is a view of reality that would have you to believe that:

- there is a unique way things look (as seen by Him!);

- this view is independent of the observer, thus fully objective (for He is never wrong!);

- physics is the unique way to come to know this objective reality;

- limited anatomical or physiological resources are the causes of illusion and error (your cat or
dog has only a limited view of the world);

- modern Western man comes close(st) to seeing things as they really are (as wide-spread
practices like rain dancing, black magic, and so forth, suggest).

The core concept is objective reality. In Western philosophy, Kant’s Copernican revolution *10+ replaced it
with trancendental idialism. However, this never really influenced the attitude of mainstream science in a
serious way, nor that of generally accepted common sense. Holding such convictions by default (perhaps
unfortunately, few people question them or even think about them) leads to numerous further
misunderstandings. Fortunately, there are (and have always been) thinkers who expressly reject the God’s
Eye View (e.g., [11]). However, it is perhaps fair to say that they represent a marginal stream of thought.

The causal theory of perception is an idea that purports to bridge the ontological chasm between the two
realms of the physical and the mental. I will call it a "bridging hypothesis". This particular bridging
hypothesis is based on the God’s Eye View, I used it only to introduce the concept. But the concept of
“bridging hypothesis” as such is something one cannot do without.

A number of distinct bridging hypotheses have been proposed. I mention only a few. A common one is the
causal theory of perception. Another is the notion of the Gestalt school that Gestalts in visual awareness
are isomorphic with certain brain activities (Kohler 1920). Eliminative materialists hold the notion that
“pain” is really nothing but the “firing of C-fibers” *12+. The notion that consciousness is due to activity of a
NCC (“Neural Center of Consciousness”) is hardly a bridging hypothesis, but more like a theory held by one
of Molière’s physicians in the farce La malade imaginaire (e.g., opium induces sleep due to its virtus
dormitiva). One of the few bridging hypotheses that makes any sense to me is the one proposed by Erwin
Schrödinger (of quantum mechanical fame).

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Schrödinger proposed that awareness is generated when the organism learns (Schrödinger 1958). All
learning is necessarily by mistake, that is, through the falsification of expectations through actual
experience. This is an idea that finds wide acceptance in biology, psychology, and philosophy. But
Schrödinger gives it a novel twist: you “meet the world” when your expectation is suddenly exposed as
wrong, thereby initiating a spark of enlightenment so to speak. Awareness can be understood as a series of
such micro-enlightenments. I find Schrödinger's proposal attractive, although there is no way to prove it in
the framework of the sciences because it is a pure bridging hypothesis. However, it leads to interesting
consequences, thus it has its value as a heuristic device. Moreover, the alternatives (the NCC and so forth
*13+) seem to me just silly in comparison. I’ll refer to it as the Schrödinger principle.

4. The Sherlock Method of imposing meaning on chaos

The famous method of Sherlock Holmes [14] is widely used in criminal investigation. It has to be, for it is
essentially the only method that lets you pursue open problems in an at least partially understood domain.
I know of no other method except exhaustive search, which is usually ruled out because of pragmatic
reasons–it tends to be slow. In taking your important life’s decisions (e.g., “am I going to have another
beer?”) you aren’t going to wait eons for an algorithm to complete.

Pure forensic research sometimes suffices to solve a crime by stumbling upon the solution more or less by
accident, but more frequently does not. If it does not, all forensic research can do is to build a file of the
scene of the crime in the widest sense. There is virtually no limit to what might be (and often is!) collected,
from DNA traces, to weather records, discarded cigarette butts, broken twigs, records of telephone
conversations, and what have you. The sky is the limit. Very few of these traces are likely to become
relevant at any time in the investigation. The file is so voluminous that it will never become exhausted.
Most of the traces will never be considered at all. So much for forensic science. Typically, it doesn’t solve
crimes. It does not even supply “data”, but only an (arbitrarily extensive) snapshot of the scene of the
crime.

Solving crimes is of considerable importance to society. The method of Sherlock Holmes offers at least a
way to proceed. The detective comes up with a "plot". If ideas are scarce he starts with a random idea ("the
butler did it" being as good as any). Given the plot, he generates questions. Answers to many of such
questions can be searched for in the file delivered by forensic research. If the file fails to yield an answer,
perhaps additional forensic work is requested. In case the plot does not work out the detective swaps it for
another one. Usually this one will be more focussed, as the previous work will have led to novel ideas and
questions. The questions allow focussed search in the file. Even better, they allow him to ignore most of the
"potential evidence". The case is declared "solved" when a sufficient number of unlikely expectations have
been corroborated by the evidence in the file. The probability of being wrong can be made almost
arbitrarily small, because the probabilities for the unlikely events have to be multiplied. This is not unlike
the game of "Twenty Questions" [15]. Starting with complete ignorance, twenty (yes/no) questions tend to
be sufficient to guess any word an opponent may have taken in mind. Small wonder, since 2-20 equals one in
a million. How many words can your opponent take in mind anyway?

Perception is like playing Twenty Questions with nature (Richards 1982). The sensory systems build a huge
forensic file. This file fills the sensory front-end of the brain. It is a volatile buffer that is continually
overwritten. The agent may ignore most of this structure using the Sherlock method. It actively looks for
evidence in the mess delivered by the sensory systems. It does “reality checks”, not “computations on the
data” in the sense of “inverse optics” (Poggio 1985). If the organism reaches a dead end, it tends to switch
behavior. Consider an example: your keys lie on the table in front of you, in full view. You need your keys
and start looking for them. Since you never leave keys on the table you “overlook” what is in front of you,
and start exploring key hooks, drawers, keyholes, coat pockets, and so forth. You arrive at a dead end
because you applied the wrong plot. In this case the plot is template-like, bit like von Uexküll’s *16+ “seek

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image” (Suchbild) in animal behavior. Did you lose completely? No, you collected a long list of places where
not to look, possibly a great time saver. More importantly, you detected the need for a paradigm shift.

The Sherlock model centers upon the framing of questions. Notice that the meaning of an answer is
defined by the question, for questions imply a set of acceptable answers. That is why a discarded cigarette
butt - otherwise an irrelevant object - may bring the butler to the gallows. Questions are like computer
formats that define whether a certain sequence of key presses will be interpreted as a number, a password,
a command, or what have you. The meaning is not in the sequence of key-presses, but in the currently
active format. This is how awareness is generated (here I use Schrödinger's bridging hypothesis!), and how
awareness becomes composed of meanings.

I will refer to this important principle as Sherlock’s principle: “The meaning of an answer is in the question,
questions derive from a plot.”
"Meaning" cannot be computed from mere structure, as the causal theory of perception implies.
Algorithms (of the "inverse optics" kind in vision) merely transform meaningless structure into equally
meaningless structure. In most computer applications the meaning is provided by a user, the computer
simply computing a sequence of symbols, or an array of pixels. In the case of sentient beings, the meaning
has to be intrinsic, that is to say, imposed by the agent’s intentionality. This does not imply that the
meaning is a mere arbitrary hallucination. It will be confronted with the structure currently in the
perceptual front-ends. Such “reality checks” keep the system from free-wheeling. “Controlled
hallucination” is like “analysis by synthesis”, and very different from brute hallucination.

Although it is clear how meaning might be transferred so to speak, it remains unclear how the agent might
get at its plots. One a priori principle that appears rational is that any plot should ultimately be due to
repeated, uncontradicted experience. “Plots” are similar to Searle’s (1983) “local background”, Rumelhart’s
(1980) “schemata”, or Minsky’s (1975) “frames”_. The alternative would be that plots might be present at
birth, or might be revealed by some supernatural power. The latter possibility should be reserved to
religion, as it certainly lies outside the sciences. The former one is more interesting. It is certain that
organisms are not born without structure, anatomically and physiologically. No doubt certain abilities
involving (even extensive) brain activity are present prior to actual experiences. However, to hold that such
actions would be accompanied by immediate awareness, would be to fall back on revelation. I will consider
them part of the zombie nature. Of course, one may (eventually) become aware of one’s actions, even
automatic ones after the fact. After all, the body and its movements are just another part of the physical
world.

5. Animal behavior (ethology)

At this point I make a connection to biology. Reasoning from Schrödinger's notion, animals have perceptual
awareness, much like us, although they appear to have subhuman cognitive abilities, and perhaps lack
reflective thought completely, as their absence of linguistic abilities would suggest. Indeed, few owners of
cats, dogs, or horses would doubt that their pets are perceptually aware, they hardly consider the
possibility that they are caring for zombies. Thus, the study of animal behavior is of some potential interest
to the understanding of human perceptual awareness. The absence of reflective thought might render such
studies simpler, or perhaps “cleaner”, than is possible in man. Since animals are behaviorally advanced in
respect to human babies, animal studies might be expected to complement human developmental studies.

The study of animal behavior is ethology, a rather recent subfield of biology, whose founding father Konrad
Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and Karl von Frisch shared a Nobel Prize (in physiology or medicine) in 1973 [17]. A
most important immediate forerunner was Jakob von Uexküll [16], whose marks are abundantly present in
conceptual biology, psychology, and philosophy.

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Important instances of animal behavior over a wide range of species are Fixed Action Patterns (FAP’s), and
Releasers *18+. These might be said to make up most of “instinctive behavior”. What is striking about the
FAP’s is that they occur even when the circumstances are not appropriate.

For instance, birds have been spotted to feed fish *19+, apparently because they “mistake the open mouths
of the fish for the open beaks of their chicks”. However, such an interpretation is no doubt too
anthropomorphic. Geese that roll eggs to their nest appear to act rationally [20]. When they do the same
with a potato one may suspect low visual acuity, and perhaps defective spectral resolution. However, the
geese keep “rolling” even when you remove the egg. Apparently, they can’t help “rolling” once locked into
the action pattern. The action can also be triggered by a brick placed in the vicinity of the next. The
attempts of the bird to “roll the egg (brick) to the nest” appears comical to the human observer. In many
cases the “releasers” trigger behavior that even threatens the survival of the species. A spectacular
example involves male Australian Jewel beetles, mating beer bottles left about the roads to exhaustion
[21]. This in spite of the fact that the optical system of the beetle easily resolves the difference between a
beer bottle and a female. Such “mistakes” can actually be quite useful, for instance, certain dairying ants
appear to milk aphids (plant lice), yet the ants “really” mistake the rear-ends of the lice for the heads of
their fellow ants [22].

What’s in these animals’ minds? Do they have any? Or is “mind” synonymous with “human mind”, or even
“my mind”? A major reference suggests that humans are unique (Genesis 26,27: “And God said, Let us
make man in our image. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; …”
[23]). However, the generic knowledge of medical doctors and veterinarians is pretty much identical.

Such animal examples remind one of the fact that reflective thought often “knows” that certain spectacular
“visual illusions” in awareness are indeed illusionary, whereas awareness cannot be “corrected” at all. One
says that “vision is cognitively impenetrable”. Thus the “fixed action patterns” and “releasers” of ethology
have many features in common with the Gestalts in human vision in that they appear to be prepackaged
responses that cannot be circumvented by the animal. On the level of immediate awareness humans are
not that different from what ethology reveals in animal behavior. I give some striking examples of
template-like phenomena in human perception below. Although the emphasis tends to be on the illusory
character of such phenomena, the positive side is their adaptive significance. All well adapted user
interfaces have to be illusory (also below).

6. Von Uexküll and Gibson

Von Uexküll introduced the important notion of Umwelt (Uexküll 2011). The Umwelt describes the world as
it is relevant to the animal. For instance, to an animal without eyes the electromagnetic field that humans
know as "light" is irrelevant. It is not part of their Umwelt. A human swimmer is not aware of the electric
fields that sharks use to navigate and find their prey. Such fields are part of the Umwelt of the shark, but
not of that of the human. Ultrasonic sounds are part of the Umwelt of bats, but not of that of humans. And
so forth. What goes for the action of the world on the agent also holds for the opposite (e.g., motor
actions). Humans cannot change spectral reflectivity of the skin, spread strong electric fields, or emit
ultrasounds, like some animals can. Of course, the body itself is an important part of the Umwelt.

The Umwelts of different species may or may not spatially overlap. All - including that of humans - Umwelts
are only small parts of the physical world. Did you know that a hundred billion solar neutrinos [24] pass
through your thumbnail every second? You have zillions of such blindnesses. Von Uexküll uses the
imaginative notion that each sentient being is enveloped in its own sphere like a soap bubble. It never gets
out of it, and it is fully unaware of anything outside of the boundary of this sphere. In that sense the beings
in their Umwelts are like the Leibnizian monads, for “the monads have no windows” (Leibniz 1991).

Despite their isolation, the life of sentient beings is somehow in harmony with that of all others. Von

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Uexküll uses the image of droplets on a cobweb that all reflect each other, much like “Indra's Net” (Cook
1977). An example of such a harmony is that spiders build webs that have exactly the right mechanical
properties and maze sizes to fit flies. In Leibniz monadology this harmony is pre-established. In von
Uexküll's account it is due to the co-evolution of all species and their terrestrial environment, although von
Uexküll remained skeptical with respect to Darwinism.

James Gibson *25+ must have been well aware of von Uexküll’s work, since it was regularly cited in
behaviorist psychology. He coined the concepts of “ecological niche” and “affordance” in analogy to von
Uexküll’s Umwelt and “functional tone”. However, where von Uexküll is very consequent in defining
Umwelt, and qualities as intrinsic to the organism, Gibson is usually ambiguous, and often locates meanings
and qualities in the physical world.To von Uexküll a stone becomes a projectile only when you pick it up
with the intention to throw it, whereas to Gibson one property of a physical stone is its “throwability”:

“An affordance is not bestowed upon an object by a need of an observer and his act of perceiving it.
The object offers what it does because it is what it is” (Gibson 1986).

Gibson also hardly recognizes the Leibnizian harmony, which always has been a major source of wonder to
many researchers of the animal world. This appears to reflect the well known difference in perspective
between the anglo-saxon and continental European traditions in general.

An account in contemporary terms might run as follows. The physical world (Welt) is perhaps the least
clearly defined entity. For our (biologically inspired) purposes we certainly don’t need reference to quark’s
*26+, Dirac’s equation *27+, and so forth. The “physical world” is the everyday world as described by the
applied sciences on scales relevant to humans. Although very vague, one may simply consider a huge chunk
with respect to a large variety of scales. An overdose doesn’t hurt, because the physical world as such is
irrelevant to the organism (Turvey,Shaw, Reed, Mace 1981). The Umwelt is a subset of the physical world
that might conceivably involve the organism, because it might be involved in actions to its body (in the
widest sense), or might be the target of its own actions. Thus the Umwelt is different from a mere
geographical niche (Umgebung), which is Gibson’s use. The body itself is part of the Umwelt.

We need additional distinctions. The “sense world” (Merkwelt) is a subset of the Umwelt that might
causally affect the organism’s sense organs. The “act world” (Wirkwelt) is a subset of the Umwelt that
might be causally affected by the organism’s effectors. Sense world and act world allow of dual
descriptions. One is in terms of the causal nexus (mainly physics) of the Umwelt, the other is in terms of
neural activity in the body of the organism. In the latter case one thinks of the act world as the “motor
system” (in the most general sense, including the glandular system, etc.), and of the sense world as the
“sensoria” with their associated neural “front ends”. All these above distinctions in what is usually simply
called “world” are basic in discussing organisms, and are commonly introduced in modern accounts
(MacIver 2009).

In virtually all organisms one encounters closed loops of sensorimotor behavior. An action in the act world
causes an action in the sense world, the chain being closed in the Umwelt. Activity in the sense world
causes actions in the act world, the chain being closed in the brain. Umwelt, sense world, brain and act
world are nodes in a single closed loop. The brain may complicate this loop in numerous ways. For instance,
an intended motor action yields an expectation of consequent sensor activity, the so called re-afference
signal (von Uexküll’s “new loop” (Uexküll 1926), now usually associated with von Holst and Mittelstaedt
(1950)). The re-afference is an expectation, that may, or may not, happen to successfully predict sensory
effects. Mismatches are informative, because the organism “meets the Umwelt” in the mismatch, thus this
may again lead to awareness according to Schrödinger’s principle.
In these functional loops (Funktionskreisen) certain invariants eventually obtain a “functional tone”, an
envelope based on frequent uncontradicted experience. Since an invariant may occur in many, intertwined
functional loops, such functional tones may acquire multiple degrees of freedom. Eventually they become
carriers of meaning. When traced to the Umwelt they are like Gibson’s affordances, although that strips

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them from their roots in the functional loops, and moves them from their proper ontological level.

One important point is that the functional tone derives from uncontradicted experience. I will refer to this
as von Uexküll’s principle: “The form of awareness reflects prior experience. There is no awareness from
“revelation”. Of course, this also involves Schrödinger’s bridging hypothesis again. I return to this point
later.

The “inner world” (Innenwelt) of the organism can be thought of as a “projection” of the functional
organization (as implemented by the whole body, including the brain) on the Umwelt. It is the
implementation of intentionality. Without the organism inner world and Umwelt disappear, and one is left
with the meaningless chaos that is the physical world. This is a revolutionary notion with for many perhaps
shocking consequences. It implies, for instance, that even space and time - as you know them - are your
constructions, not pre-existing entities that you happen to find yourself immersed in. There are indeed
many instances of animals that lack space and/or time as judged from the structure of their sense and act
worlds. Humans also appear to construct their own space-times (Koenderink, Richards, van Doorn 2012).

As von Uexküll remarks, the inner world of an organism must forever remain a closed book to us. It can only
be experienced from within, and cannot possibly be revealed by external observation. This recommended
him to the behaviorist movement [28] in the United States of the early twentieth century. The inner world
is mental. It is "what it is like" to be a certain being. He recognizes that we will never be able to enter the
inner world of other beings. This is echoed by Thomas Nagel in his famous paper “What is it like to be a
bat?” (Nagel 1974).

Notice that von Uexküll’s account (and the consequent account from ethology) suggests logical, and
mutually complementary tasks for anatomy, physiology, brain science, ethology, behavioristic psychology,
and cognitive science. It also treats phenomenological research as beyond the realm of the sciences. Of
course, this assumes that the various disciplines “play fair”, and stick to their assigned areas of endeavor
and discourse. Perhaps unfortunately, brain scientists engaging in “mind talk”, and psychologists engaging
in “brain talk”, are commonly overstepping their boundaries (Manzotti, Moderato 2010).

In my view phenomenological research is not altogether ruled out as a science, as von Uexküll implies,
because it applies singularly to homo sapiens, whereas he considers general, typically alien
phenomenology. In the human case a “shared subjectivity” is possible due to the fact that individuals
cannot be pried loose from their embedding in a social structure. This enables an empathic or “silent”
understanding between individuals, a “pointing to the moon” *29+. Successful pointing, as a silent
communication device, implies emphatic understanding ( Montag, Gallinat, Heinz 2008; Stein 1917). When
“pointing to the moon”, your dog will look at your finger, and so do young children. However, dogs will
never “get it”, whereas little children soon will.
An example would be a “visual proof”, as frequently used by the Gestaltists. “Kanizsa’s triangle” (Kanizsa
1955) tells us something, “we know not what”, but we all agree. Is it a scientific fact? That is a matter of
definition, but it is definitely a fact of experimental phenomenology, because the triangle belongs to the
“inner world”. When neuro-cognition purports to explore it, it oversteps its boundaries. There is a place for
experimental phenomenology because we are humans. Neither behaviorism, nor cognitive science – by
design – address the inner world.

7. The human condition: Awareness, cognition and reflective thought

Both humans and animals have perceptual awareness (in a sense they are awareness, in that it exhausts
their reality). It is likely that all vertebrates have a similar basic structure that is in place at birth. The
similarities between newly hatched chicks, fishes and human babies are striking. The so called “core
systems” identified by Elizabeth Spelke in psychology *30+, and Giorgio Vallortigara *31+ in ethology
comprise (at least):

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 - inanimate manipulable objects;

- animate agents;

- numbers;

- geometrical shapes & space;

- social partners.

In humans these are just a foundation, whereas in some animals they are all there is, and will ever be.
However, without the foundation human development might well be impossible. Humans are singular
animals (Twain 1903) in that they have a highly developed cognitive system that complements the basic
awareness system, and - more importantly - have language and reflective thought to complement this. It
seems evident that at least some animals have appreciable cognitive abilities [32], whereas reflective
thought appears to be singularly human.

It seems likely that there is an almost continuous spectrum between immediate perceptual awareness and
reflective thought based on vision. For a start, consider these ballpark temporal ranges:

- tenth of a second: immediate visual awareness (presentation, glimpse). Based on a single

fixation, and the preceding moments. It happens autonomously;

- a second: a glance, involving a few involuntary fixations, perhaps a single voluntary one. A
glance is based on a number of presentations, some of these due to different fixations picked
automatically. The temporal order within a glance is not necessarily conserved;

- few seconds: a good look, involving several glances, and voluntary fixations. The voluntary
fixations are driven by cognition, good looks are due to your actions. In retrospect you may
know what you did, there is a notion of temporal order;

- many seconds: scrutiny, involving as many good looks as necessary. Scrutiny is driven by
cognition and reflective thought. Typically you are looking for something, or trying to clear up
some issue by optical means. Rational processes are in control. You can explain what you are
doing, to yourself, or to others. This is a typically human action.

There is a gradual transition from mere awareness, generated by pre-aware microgenetic processes, to
rational thought on the basis of optical sampling.

The processes that lead to awareness are themselves pre-aware, thus subconscious. They are at best
proto-rational. Yet they are mainly top-down, that is constructive, rather than bottom-up, thus reflexive.
Bottom-up processes certainly occur in microgenesis, but they cannot lead to qualities and meanings by
themselves, they have to be considered protopathic. Such protopathic processes are important in injecting
“gists” that may help to launch microgenetic threads. This yields a head start in the Twenty Questions game.
The microgenetic process may be considered as an evolutionary game in which the final (fittest) winner
decides on the awareness. The game consists of generating plots and running reality checks of the plots
through probing the sensory front ends. This allows most of the sensory input to be ignored, and to
promote some of it to the status of quality and meaning. It is an implementation of Sherlock’s method
(Brown 1974, 1975).

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The elementary process is “poking” with the intention to meet a “resistance”. In biological terms one
imagines that the most basic drive of organisms is to expand their world (a Nietzschean Wille zur Macht
*33+), leading to a “poking” of their environment by any means possible. In the lower, unicellular organisms
such poking appears to be random. When the poking meets resistance, the organism is in direct contact
with the world. When the poking becomes “aimed”, searching for specific resistance, it is alike to
questioning the world. Eventually this leads to “presentations”, that is awareness (Schopenhauer’s Die Welt
als Wille (poking) und Vorstellung (presentation) (Schopenhauer 1818/1819)). In humans this evolves into a
nexus of qualities, meanings, and emotions.

The process is systolic, the microgenesis of the next presentation going on, even as one experiences the
previous one. The time scale is largely limited by the fact that the perceptual front-end buffers are
continually being overwritten, thus there is only so much time for a reality check. A natural termination is
enforced when the volley of threads launched by the microgenesis has been tried against front-end activity.
Then a next systole is required in which some threads are killed, others diversified (split into several
independent threads). Thus the process is much like any variety of genetic algorithm, for instance “harmony
search” (Geem, Kim, Loganathan 2001). One imagines the individual threads to be fairly simple, because
any single presentation cannot be very complicated. The general gist will be kept, and the focal structure is
probably limited by the magical number seven plus or minus two.

The cognitive processes are distinct from this as they have their own agenda of plots. These plots may be
injected to bias microgenesis, the resulting awareness again making its way to the input of cognitive
processes. Apart from triggering plots, the cognitive processes generate concepts that may enter reflective
thought. In a way, the world on and in which cognition works is awareness.

Reflective thought, finally, may be expected to launch novel cognitive processes. It works on the conceptual
level to confabulate “stories” that account for the sequence of good looks. The world on and in which
reflective thought works is cognition.

Thus the various levels are intertwined in complicated ways. To try to understand vision in simple terms as
“bottom up this - top down that” is far too simplistic to have much explanatory power.

8. Human visual awareness as a user interface

A good way to summarize the above account is to say that human visual awareness *34+ is an “optical user
interface” (Hoffman 2008, 2009). This implies many things, several of great conceptual importance. I’ll
discuss only a few. Consider the implications of visual awareness being a “user interface”. A user interface
[35] is a system designed to:

- both disconnect the user from the world, and to re-connect the user to a subset of the world. The
re-connection fully re-defines the natural causal interactions between the agent and the world;

- screen the user from complexities of the world that the user does not “need to know”. Thus, the
interface is by its very design non-veridical;

- enable simple and efficacious interaction with the world in terms of the interface.

Thus the user ends up interacting with the interface, rather than the world per se. The world is
“summarized” in the interface in a way that promotes efficacious actions, rather than understanding. This is
definitely to the advantage of the user. It optimizes “fitness” in the evolutionary sense, at the expense of
veridicality. What the user doesn’t need to know, the user will never know: the interface is there to make
sure of that.
Perhaps the best known example is the “desktop” paradigm of laptop computers *36+. Consider the process

9
of deleting a text file. The text file “is” an icon on the desktop. You use the mouse to “drag it” to the “trash”,
which is another icon on the desktop. As you place the text file on top of the trash, it magically disappears.
What really happened? That depends. To the interface programmer you moved the mouse, thus defining a
sequence of screen locations. The program writes the empty desktop over the text file icon, then writes the
text file icon in its new location over the desktop. This process is terminated once the mouse is over the
trash. The text file icon is not redrawn, instead a message is send to the file manager. The file manager is
another program. It manages nested lists of files. It deletes the text file from the list. This deletion generates
a signal to the “system” (another program) that “frees” the space on the disk (or somewhere else) where
the text file was stored. Nothing happened to the text file (a hacker may still “retrieve it”). Only a reference
was deleted and the desktop picture changed. The systems programmer has another story. The electronics
engineer another story still. The chips technician has yet another story, and so forth. The user doesn’t have
to know, nor does the user want to know. The fact that the text file icon suddenly disappeared was
encouraging (the “text file disappeared in the trash”). Are text files like such icons? No way! The text file is
different things to different people. Fortunately, the user doesn’t need to know.

It is actually a good thing not to know what goes on in the physical environment you find yourself in. You
don’t want to be a systems programmer, an electronic technician, a chip specialist, a solid state physicist, a
quantum mechanics expert, …, just to delete a text file! Moreover, you don’t want to know what is inside
the box you call “computer” (vacuum tubes, transistors, silicon chips, sawdust, empty beer cans, or what
have you). Thus desktop interfaces are good. Everybody agrees on that. The surprising thing is that people
somehow hesitate when talking about perception and the physical world. Most contemporary philosophers
consider it problematic that we do not have the kind of awareness that might be designated “veridical”.
(Strange enough, it is usually silently understood that we all know what might be meant by “veridical”. Does
it include string theory *37+? This is the God’s Eye View again.)

Biological evolution *38+ doesn’t care about all this. It simply optimizes biological fitness *39+. As a
consequence strange things may happen, as is amply recorded in ethological research. It is not that humans
are exempt of such strange behaviors either. After all, rain dancing [40], black magic [41], and various
religious beliefs [42] are still widespread. Many of these cases are beneficial to the agents, some not. In all
cases the agents are “fooled” by their user interfaces.

9. Some common templates

The entities of the user interface are arbitrary “templates”. They are like the icon of the text file on the
desktop of your laptop computer. The icon has really nothing in common with the text file as you
understand it (which is probably a nested sequence of letters, words, sentences, paragraphs, and so forth,
possibly organized on a page in some pleasant pattern, unless you are using the UNIX vi editor), it simply
stands for it like a name. The icon has nothing else to do with what you mean than a mere conventional
association.

Most people are not aware of this, or prefer to forget it. When they have unfortunately deleted their text
file accidentally, they start searching for its icon(!). Yet only the icon is really gone, whereas the text file (at
least immediately after the act of deletion) can probably still be recovered, thus is still “on” your computer.
The icon is like the Gestalt, quality, or meaning, in your visual awareness. Although the elements of your
immediate awareness are not physical objects, they are indeed your reality. But they are your reality, and
nothing beyond that. That does not mean they have no useful existence. As you change your text file (you
probably wrote it in the first place), it will have different effects as you send it as a letter. Using the internet
– at considerable remove from “daily reality”, you can donate half of your income to a house for stray cats.
This will have real consequences to your life, for instance, it may prevent you from paying your rent, causing
you to have to sleep in the streets. Although sleeping in the streets is tough (“real” reality), it is still
experienced in terms of your user interface. Everything is.

10
In immediate visual awareness you encounter qualities and meanings, packaged as Gestalts. These are, no
doubt, elements of your optical user interface. They are template objects. Consider a few common
templates:

- figures and grounds [43];

- volumetric objects;

- causal interactions(Michotte 1946);

- and so forth.

What about them? The familiar phenomenon of “figure-ground reversal” is sufficient evidence for the
volatile nature of this distinction. You know, no doubt, that you see only the frontal surfaces of “volumetric”
objects. The apple you see may actually turn out to be hollow on turning it around. Causal interactions may
be faked like in a magician’s show, or in the interaction of the text file with the trash icon.

Here I will discuss a few fairly obvious, and common reflections on the fact that human visual awareness is a
“user interface”. One spots this because the elements of the user interface tend to be abiding templates,
rather than “solutions of the inverse optics problem”. I simply give some obvious examples. Many more can
be found, one needs only look for them. What is perhaps surprising, is that mainstream vision research has
failed to notice these facts, for one is not talking of minor effects! The reason is, no doubt, that they were
never looked for.

External local sign. “Local sign” is a concept due to Lotze (1852). It is a place label on fibers of the optic
nerve, a solution to the problem of how the brain “knows where the fibers are from”. Tarachopia (Hess
1982) appears to be an aphasia revealing a defective local sign. “External local sign” (Koenderink, van
Doorn, Todd 2009) assigns a “visual ray”(Burton 1945), that is a direction in the world, in oculocentric
coordinates, to fibers in the optic nerve. Early speculations about the origin of external local sign are due to
Berkeley (1709). Otherwise hardly any phenomenological research exists on the topic.

In a simple experiment we mapped external local sign throughout the field of view of a few dozen
observers. One simple overall measure of external local sign is the angular spread of the visual rays over the
full field of view. This is the diameter of the “visual field”, which is the subjective correlate of the field of
view. Whereas the field of view of the human eye subtends about 180º, we find a wide spectrum of visual
field diameters. The distribution appears to be bimodal, most observers having a visual field of about 90º
across. Thus most observers experience visual objects as far more “in front of them” than they are.

External local sign appears to be an important rigid “template”, that strongly influences human awareness
of visual space. We found that virtually all observers commit huge errors (exceeding 100º) when asked to
rotate (under remote control) one of two congruent objects in the scene in front of them so as to be
geometrically parallel (Koenderink, van Doorn, de Ridder, Oomes 2010). We also showed that visual
observers make huge mistakes in judging whether a number of people in front of them are arranged in strict
military order. Such non-veridical observations are due to the application of a rigid template that fails to
implement the optical fact that visual directions fan out from the eye into a half-space.

Linear perspective of pictorial box spaces. Pictorial “box spaces” are renderings of cubicles (Panofski 1927).
They were common in the woodcuts of the middle ages, but still in use today. The early renderings are in a
free style reminiscent of one point perspective. Later one used true one point perspective, which is very
simple in the case of cubes. The front and back faces of the cube are rendered as squares, the image of the
back face smaller than that of the front one. Then corresponding vertices are joined (the “orthogonals”) so
as to define the side faces. The front face is left “transparent”, so the cubicle is open to the view. In a true
linear perspective the orthogonals would be concurrent lines. The construction is so simple that many

11
draftsmen sketch it free hand. The cubicle then acts as a “stage” that the artist may fill with any content.
The stage defines the pictorial space, it acts as a scaffold, or skeleton to the pictorial structure.

In linear perspective there is a well-defined viewpoint, and thus angular size of the cube. Given the
viewpoint, the ratio of the sizes of front and back face is fixed. As you change this ratio, the prediction is
that the cubicle will either appear as a thin slab (ratio nearer to unity), or a deep corridor (ratio larger than
fiducial). In an experiment we asked observers to adjust the ratio such that the awareness was of a true
cubicle (Pont, Nefs, van Doorn, Wijntjes, te Pas, de Ridder, Koenderink 2012). We did this for a wide range
of viewpoints, varying both distance and angular size. The result was clearcut in that the prediction was not
borne out at all. What observers do is set a fixed ratio. They impose a template, even when “not
applicable”.

The result may account for the fact that observers judge wide angle or tele photographs as “distorted” as
compared with photographs taken with a “normal lens” (field of view about 40-50º). They do this, even
when the viewpoint is perspectively “correct”. Apparently they apply templates for familiar things, and
experience obvious deviations from the template as distortions. That is no doubt why artists “correct for
distortions” when depicting wide angle scenes (Pirenne 1970).

Shape from shading. “Shading” is an important shape cue for visual artists. It has been used from the
earliest time on. An interpretation in terms of optics starts in Renaissance art, and becomes a proper
(applied) science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Shading was taught as a discipline in
Western academies of art till the early twentieth century (Baxandall 1995).

The perception of shading was initially studied with the simplest patterns, designed to isolate the “shading
cue” in its simplest form. The canonical stimulus has been a circular disk filled with a linear lightness
gradient. From an optical analysis one finds that such a pattern can be due to the illumination of a curved
surface in infinitely many ways. Assuming a uniform, unidirectional illumination, the possible surfaces would
be quadrics: spherical, cylindrical, saddle shaped, and anything in between. From the phenomenology we
know that observers are only aware of spherical patches though. In order to become aware of a cylinder
one needs to change the shape of the patch from circular to square, whereas saddle shapes are never
reported. Perhaps surprisingly, an analysis reveals that the prior is biased towards saddle shapes (about 57%
of the area of a Gaussian random surface is saddle shaped; Koenderink, van Doorn 2003).

Apparently human visual observers apply templates that do not include a saddle shape. This may be due to
a general disregard of saddle shapes. For instance Alberti, writing in the fifteenth century, proposes a
“complete” catalogue of shapes that lacks saddles (Alberti 1435). Apparently, they never occurred to this
highly educated intellectual. The correct taxonomy only came with Gauss in the nineteenth century (Gauss
1828).

An interpretation might be that spheres and cylinders are “thing-like”, whereas saddle-shapes cannot be
(you can’t have an object bounded by saddle-like surface throughout). Thus the template might be biased
to “things”, that is to say volumetric objects of manipulable size.

12
10. Conclusion

Human visual awareness is perhaps best characterized as an optical user interface. The elements of the
interface are template-like. They have qualities and meanings that derive from their functional role in the
interface. Thus, awareness is non-veridical by design. Evolution optimizes biological fitness, rather than
physical veridicality. In this, human visual awareness is not unlike the structure of animal vision as described
by ethology.
Throughout the paper I have consistently used three principles that appear fundamental to the
understanding of visual awareness (the epithets are mine, and perhaps not entirely fair)

- Sherlock’s principle: The meaning of an answer is in the question, questions derive from a plot;

- Schrödinger’s principle: The occurrence of awareness corresponds to the falsification of an

expectation;

- Von Uexküll’s principle: The form of awareness reflects prior experience. There is no awareness from
“revelation”.

Many of the conceptual leads are due to von Uexküll, who has indeed left his marks on various strands of
modern biology, psychology, philosophy, semiotics, artificial intelligence and robotics, and so forth.

Can the user interface be changed, or extended in the course of the life of an individual? The quick answer
appears to be: No!, or at least, hardly! Non-vertebrate animals appear to have fixed interfaces, and the
majority of vertebrates is not that far ahead. Even primates (including humans) appear to have
predominantly fixed interfaces, although these develop over a number of years in the child. The human
interface has many traits common to these of all vertebrates, is still adapted to savannah hunter-gatherer
life, and so forth. Yet it appears that the human interface has at least some (very limited) flexibility. Most
adaptations to the technological age are on the level of reflective thought, and novel sensorimotor and
cognitive adaptations. They tend to be in the margin of visual awareness per se, more like a layer of
(painfully cognitive) “corrections”. Yet it is obvious how novelty might arise. It has to be through the
formation of novel functional loops, slowly developing novel “functional tones”.

One might wonder why the “application of templates” would lead to awareness at all. At first blush it would
seem to run counter to Schrödinger’s principle. But notice that the implementation of the “application of a
template” would be the launching of a microgenetic thread that would still have to pass a reality check. A
standard template is likely to be violated in such checks, and to be fine-tuned to fit (or be killed). Thus, the
templates are more like plots, enabling the system to come to terms with the optical structure impinging
upon it. There is no reason to think they would not lead to the falsification of expectations on various
different levels.

13
11. Notes

*1+ The generic example are the depth flips of a “Necker cube” (Necker 1832).
*2+ The reference is to “philosophical zombies”. See the entry on philosophical zombies in the Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/.
*3+ See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_illusion on “Optical Illusions”.
*4+ Notice that my use of “reality” is phenomenological, and different from what is often called “physical
reality”. The German distinction between Realität and Wirklichkeit does not seem to have an equivalent in
English.
[5] Mistaking a rope for a snake refers, of course, to the generic example of illusion from the Vedanta. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vedanta.
[6] On the notion of qualia see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia.
[7] See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God%27s_eye_view.
*8+ The “being” of an object such as a “round square” is famously discussed in Alexius Meinong’s theory of
objects (Meinong 1899).
[9] On the Higgs boson see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson.
*10+ See Kant’s Preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (2nd edition of 1787, a serious
revision of the first edition of 1781).
[11] Alfred Korzybski, Science & Sanity, available at http://esgs.free.fr/uk/art/sands.htm.
*12+ “Type physicalism” proposes that mental event types (e.g., such as pain in an individual) are identical
with specific event types in the brain. In this case the “C-fibre firings” in the individual. Of course, this
extents to all sentient beings, and all times.
*13+ E.g., Francis Crick: “You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of
personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and
their associated molecules”. (See http://www.consciousentities.com/crick.htm).
[14] On the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_Holmes.
*15+ “Twenty questions” is a spoken parlor game. It originated in the U.S., because very popular in the late
1940’s (through a radio quiz program). The game spread through Europe and was popular till (at least) the
1990’s. An online version can be found at http://20q.net/.
[16] On Jakob von Uexküll see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakob_von_Uexk%C3%BCll.
[17] See http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1973/.
[18] On ethology see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethology.
[19] A video clip of a bird feeding fish is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEDBABFnpRQ.
[20] This is the example made famous by Konrad Lorenz. A video is at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUNZv-ByPkU.
*21+ See “University of Toronto Mississauga professor wins Ig Nobel Prize for beer, sex research”, at
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-09/uot-uot092911.php#.
[22] Video clips at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tE7UL2pAaL0,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcdAgvroj5w, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NybgIxjlAGQ, and
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43id_NRajDo.
[23] King James Bible (completed 1611). Available online at the Electronic Text Center of the University of
Virginia:
http://www.rasmusen.org/special/USEFUL/CHILDREN/Things-to-do-words/literature-kids/Childrens.bible.b
ook/bible_kjv/kjv/etext.lib.virginia.edu/kjv.browse.html.
[24] On solar neutrinos see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_neutrino_problem.
[25] On James J. Gibson see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_J._Gibson.
[26] On quarks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark.
*27+ On Dirac’s equation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_equation.
[28] On behaviorism see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behaviorism.
*29+ On Hotei (“the laughing Buddha”) pointing to the moon see
http://www.myrkothum.com/the-meaning-of-the-finger-pointing-to-the-moon/.
[30] Elizabeth S. Spelke’s website at the Department of Psychology of Harvard University has a good list of
important publications (http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~lds/index.html?spelke.html).

14
*31+ Giorgio Vallortigara’s website at the Center for Mind/Brain Sciences of the University of Trento has a
useful list of publications (http://www.unitn.it/en/cimec/11761/giorgio-vallortigara).
[32] See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_cognition.
[33] See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_to_power.
*34+ I use “awareness” as synonymous to “sentience”. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience.
[35] See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_interface.
[36] See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_metaphor.
[37] See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_theory.
[38] See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution.
[39] See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitness_%28biology%29.
[40] See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainmaking_%28ritual%29.
[41] See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_magic.
[42] See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion.
[43] See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Figure%E2%80%93ground_%28perception%29.

15
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