Serendip is an independent site partnering with faculty at multiple colleges and universities around the world. Happy exploring!

Reply to comment

kdilliplan's picture

Finite Ambiguity

I’ve been thinking about how people often see what they want to see and don’t see what they don’t want to see.  From they way we’ve been talking about vision, the I-function and stories in class, it would be easy to say “we’ll never truly know what ‘reality’ is because everything we perceive is only a story in our heads” and be done with it. I don’t think that is a useful thing to do. There seems to be a large amount of standardization in the way people see things. For instance, in the case of the ambiguous images we looked at in class, there were four main responses: 1) It’s a woman standing by a tree with buildings, etc. in the background. 2) It’s a face.  3) It’s both a woman by a tree and a face, depending on how you look at it.  4) It’s neither a woman nor a face, only a pattern of light and dark. However, very few people would look at the image and see something other than one of those four options. Very few people would see a space ship, or the inside of a library, or a basket of fruit, no matter how much they wanted to. The same goes for all the ambiguous images we looked at.  We can make several different stories about what we see, but we can’t really make an infinite number of plausible stories.  This leads me to believe that there is some degree of “truth” to the images, or at least we are all similarly limited in what we are able to perceive.

Reply

To prevent automated spam submissions leave this field empty.
1 + 5 =
Solve this simple math problem and enter the result. E.g. for 1+3, enter 4.