THE COMPUTER REVOLUTION IN PHILOSOPHY (1978): Chapter 9

Seeing the significance in a collection of experimental results, grasping a character in a play or novel, and diagnosing an illness on the basis of a lot of ill-defined symptoms, all require this ability to make a'Gestalt' emerge from a mass of information. A much simpler example is our ability to see something familiar in a picture like Figure 1. How does a'Gestalt', a familiar word, emerge from all those dots? Close analysis shows that this kind of ability is required even for ordinary visual perception and speech understanding, where we are totally unaware that we are interpreting untidy and ambiguous sense-data. In order to appreciate these unconscious achievements, try listening to very short extracts from tapes of human speech (about the length of a single word), or looking at manuscripts, landscapes, street scenes and domestic objects through a long narrow tube.