Visual Intelligence is subtitled ‘How We Create What We See’ and in it Hoffman sets down a tentative set of ‘rules’ that humans use to interpret the visual input from our eyes. These rules work in combination to build up lines, shapes, colors, 3-d placement and more. You can try some of the visual illusions that help to show how the rules can allow us to be ‘tricked’ in many ways, such that your sense of what you’re seeing is not what is really there…
In the final chapters, Hoffman argues that we do the same thing with the input from our other senses as we do with the visual input; we create representations that are well-adapted to our survival. And he goes further, to say that our representations, while they must be taken seriously, are not necessarily a guide to what is ‘really’ out there…
I believe these are important points. Clearly we only pick up on certain spectrums of all that is ‘out there’ while other organisms are able to to pick up different spectrums, and may have very different (but also effective) rules for interpreting the input. Given this, can we really take seriously the idea that we are somehow close to understanding the universe? I’d say it would be foolish to think so.
In the final chapters, Hoffman argues that we do the same thing with the input from our other senses as we do with the visual input; we create representations that are well-adapted to our survival. And he goes further, to say that our representations, while they must be taken seriously, are not necessarily a guide to what is ‘really’ out there…
I believe these are important points. Clearly we only pick up on certain spectrums of all that is ‘out there’ while other organisms are able to to pick up different spectrums, and may have very different (but also effective) rules for interpreting the input. Given this, can we really take seriously the idea that we are somehow close to understanding the universe? I’d say it would be foolish to think so.
