Read Metzger's "Laws of Seeing!" Published in the 1930's and FINALLY
just translated to English. Its the Gestalt book to end all Gestalt
books, and very well written, accessible, even scientifically
relevant , given its age. I just bought it a few months ago, if you
want to take a look I can bring it around on Thursday.
http://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262134675
V. S. Ramachandran has written a lot of good works on this,
explaining the science and philosophy of perception. B. Lotto does
some great lectures on this topic, based heavily on the Gestalt
theories in the above book -
http://www.lottolab.org/publications.asp
Basically, as the Gestalt psychologists discovered through some
careful scientific experiments is that we are pattern-matching
creatures (note: I didn't say machines), trying our best to figure
out relevant information from non-static, ever-changing sensory
inputs. We can only concentrate our limited, high-resolution
attention on a few objects / concepts at a time, so we have to
segregate the rest into "background" or lower-resolution attention.
There are a number of empirical rules that we use to decide what to
focus on and why, mostly gained through evolving ways of avoiding
predators, navigating by the sun and moon (the direction of light and
how that changes our ideas of shape and contour is very interesting),
foraging for food (color vision, attention, the significance and
sensitivity to different colors), hunting, etc.
And I think you've already read some of it, but "Auditory Scene
Analysis" is also a great example, but less concerned with overall
philosophy.
Happy Friday,
Evan
On Sep 25, 2009, at 11:33 AM, alex wrote:
> To answer my own question, I think the answer is that this is indeed
> known as figure-ground, and is a tenet of Gestalt psychology. The
> request for reading recommendations remains though.
>
> Cheers
>
> alex
>
> 2009/9/25 alex <alex_at_lurk.org>:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I've got a question for the philosophers among us...
>>
>> When we hear music we perceive rhythm in terms of meter, and infer
>> meter from the rhythm. When we hear a sound we perceive it in terms
>> of the instrument that made it, and infer the instrument from the
>> sound. When we see a figure in a picture we perceive it in terms of
>> the ground behind it, and infer the ground from the figure. We
>> understand a linguistic statement in terms of a metaphorical
>> structure, which we infer from the statement. When we have a
>> conversation we build perceive words in terms of the person who says
>> it, and build a picture of the person in terms of the words they
>> say.
>>
>> This seems to be a general structure of experience -- perceiving
>> something in terms of underlying structure which inferred by the
>> something you're perceiving. I think this must be something that
>> philosophers have thought about, psychologists too. Does it have a
>> name? What should I read to understand it better?
>>
>> Cheers
>>
>> alex
>>
>> --
>> http://yaxu.org/
>>
>
>
>
> --
> http://yaxu.org/
Evan Raskob
ML Studio
4-8 Arcola Street
London E8 2DJ
United Kingdom
http://mlstudio.co.uk
http://pixelist.info
Received on Fri Sep 25 2009 - 11:04:09 BST