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Gestalts are symbolic shorthand that expects the world to conform to certain rules of appearance and/or behaviour.
Gestalts are a shorthand way to map a summary of many past experiences onto the present so that meaning-making (and therefore response) is rapid.
Language is a means to communicate Gestalts.
A gestalt is an expectation – a shorthand for what has already been determined so that it can be accessed far more quickly and does not have to be constructed time and time again from the basic principles. It is interesting that the act of exploration is common to all cellular and multicellular Life, so spacial geography is always a learned Gestalt. Snow leopards, goats, ants, slugs and fish, slime mold colonies, tree branches and roots – and most Living organisms - have a territory that they learn to navigate. This lack of a long-term Gestalt for territory makes sense because the real world is so variable in terms of layout and contents, in the various pleasant and not-so-pleasant ways it might relate, and in the various challenges and opportunities it presents. Provided that changes are small and incremental (or rhythmically predictable – as in seasons, or night and day) the internal map for mobile creatures may also become a Gestalt that can be compared to and updated according to direct experience.
Some things are more reliable – such as the fact that light falls from above, creating shadows underneath. One visual Gestalt (of a couple of dozen) is therefore an expectation that this arrangement of light is universal. Your visual meaning-making apparatus expects light above, shadow below, and this expectation used as a shorthand to meaning-making makes for faster interpretation. So one form of camouflage seen in a vast number of prey-creatures is a dark back and a light belly, which may create confusion in the predator for a critical few fractions of a second. And a face lit from below looks – wrong and somehow eerie. On the other hand, abstract figures take on a life of their own, but only because we "know" what they contain – so you would not see a horse in the image unless you knew of the existence of horses.
Most creatures possess hard-wired sensory and locomotive Gestalts, so they hardly (if at all) need to learn how to use their senses or their limbs. Insects emerge from a pupa and can immediately navigate their world, identify food, and move their limbs with innate dexterity, as all plants "know" to seek the light with their leaves and to explore the dark moist earth with their roots. There are several reasons why infants in some species – notably humans – take time to grow, the first one being that they can learn how to navigate the world better and interact with it more skilfully, and can "program" their inner Gestalts to suit specific environments. Not only that. Learned-Gestalt patterns essentially treat the body and senses as if they are tools and so have an inherent meaning-making already set up to use tools as natural extensions of the self. A relationship can therefore also be modified – so we are able to employ dogs ears as extensions to our senses and their teeth as extensions to our hands, to grow plants as extensions to the landscape’s innate abundance. And this tool-usage can be extended into meta-levels, such as using a magnet to retrieve a key that opens the padlock to a toolbox, or paying a plumber by use of a credit card transaction.
To see, we must forget the name of the thing we are looking at
Claude Monet
Once a Gestalt has been "programmed", it can be changed, but only if there is the means to do so. Innate Gestalts are fixed. Learned Gestalts such as how to move a limb or perceive shadow and light can be re-programmed if there is need, or if the re-programming takes substantial time and attention. Here, Thrive-reward (of which dopamine is just a part) is required to re-program a semi-fixed pattern. Danger-survival status may also turn into a powerful Gestalt if present for significant lengths of time that also has to be de-programmed if circumstances change. So a very stressed mouse will give birth through an epigenetic imprint to infant mice whose physiology has already been primed with a "knowledge" that the world they are entering is inherently dangerous. These mice live on fast burn, suffer consequential illnesses, and the epigenetic imprint has been found to persist for generations.
The day you teach the child the name of the bird, the child will never see that bird again.
Krishnamurti
Words and recognition-through-words is also a Gestalt. I encourage you to observe your internal mental processes when you name something, say how you can name "a tree" as you drive past it on the road. The idea of the thing becomes more clear, but curiosity about its actual real living, constantly shifting detail may (not necessarily, but for most people most times) then just drain out of you like water down a plug hole. A "river" is just a uniform ribbon on the landscape until the details of the ripples, reflections, meanders, currents, plants, fish, insects, surrounding dependent vegetation (etc) are recognised. Each act of recognition is also a naming, and so the act of naming creates an idea of clarity – which may be sufficient, but it always draws us out of the reality. The clarity of naming that is similarly useful for recognising internal states – Anger, Confusion, Peacefulness, Stillness, Agitation – also leads to that emotion being amplified, fossilised and almost created. As Ged, Ursula le Guin’s Wizard of Earthsea found, Naming is a powerful act of magic. The illusion of Hollywood films is largely created by an act of Naming, in which the infinitely rich and varied world is condensed in front of your eyes to just a few people in a room, and everything else is a stage prop. The act of naming attaches a story to the object, person, sensation, and then its reality is bound, as described by Anaïs Nin :
We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are!
Thus, Naming can be an extremely useful tool – provided that is not the only hammer in the toolbox, and that we are not entranced by its magic. The powerful genie in the lamp is supposed to be the servant of whomsoever sets him loose.
Relational experience (experiencing things as they are) requires that there is no (or less) naming and no (or less) story to tell other than the interaction - as it unfolds both the inside and outside of your skin, and is stripped as far as possible of expectational Gestalts that attempt to put it in the "I know exactly what this is" perceptual box. So the necessary and incredibly useful clarity of re-cognition (remembering) is only one way to see the world or experience yourself. It is a crystallised form seen as if looking down a telescope, and is based as much (or even completely) on memory as on the actuality. When perception is removed from the telescope then there is more, a wider, more spacious field of greater possibility. The Gestalts will attempt to pull you back to their safely familiar, and so a small, often effortless but nevertheless conscious choice has to be made as to what layer of reality you wish to focus on. A non-Gestalt reality is full of potentially new and therefore may feel uncomfortable or disturbing if you need to know "in order to feel safe". We rely on Gestalts to allow quick decisions and fast response if speed is necessary, and for clarity. But if there is space and circumstance to slow down then the use of Gestalts, words, re-cognition – is no longer the only possible mode of seeing. When this principle is turned inwards, feelings, mental states, sensations stripped of words (or the words use are to clarify, but not then held onto) allow the present moment to flow and not be pinned down by the reality of previous moment. Emotions released from their story then become a flow of information that rises and subsides, leaving behind peace and spaciousness.
Thus, from the principles of Varela, Pask and more recently, Biosemiotics, the basis of Life is quasi-autonomous conscious "units" (selfless selves) that are remarkably simi"lar to Koestler's Holons or Hoffman's Conscious Agents that are all in a Loosely Coupled co-operative organisation that varies its level of autonomy vs coherence to best meet the immediate circumstances. They :
• have a limited understanding of their immediate environment,
• participate in that environment as best they can
• have "amicity" – i.e. pay active, curious, participatory attention to the comings and goings around them as a clue to how they should best behave
• respond and modify their local environment such that they participate in the flow of information and alter the degree to which they merge into it or separate from it
• self-regulate according to their immediate needs
• re-organise their relationships and internal structures so as to find the optimal balance between energy expenditure and response
These quasi-autonomous units / conscious entities are not unlike the broomsticks that the Sorcerer's Apprentice animated to make his chores easier. Once set off, they are somewhat mindless – except they have the intelligence, loyalty and determination to keep up their task regardless of any impediments (such as obstacles in the way or being chopped by an axe). They are subject to "amicity" in that they are aware of each other and recognise when the Sorcerer's spell tells them their task is complete.
It is hard to reconcile these semi-intelligent broomsticks by purely sub-partitioning any organism into smaller and smaller biological/physiological entities because there is no bottom turtle. Whatever scale might be investigated is, in turn, supported by sub-Gestalts exhibiting similar characteristics and capacities, engaged in conversations with each other such that their activity is well ordered and coordinated with reference to a larger organisational scale than their particular domain. Self-regulation (staying alive) is the main priority of conscious entities, expressed by the broomstick's self-replication when axed. If there is sufficient spare adaptive capacity, they participate more actively, and if there is not (or they need to recharge and repair), they withdraw and "vegetate".
These conscious entities exist on two levels:
There are purely "instinctive" entities such that a dragonfly can emerge from its pupa, immediately know what wings and eyes are for, and use them.
And there are learned, plastic, potentially re-programmable Gestalts that humans are particularly adept at using. The mammalian (and particularly the human) organism has sacrificed many powerful innate instinctive non-conscious entities, replacing them with adaptable Gestalts. Learned through an extended childhood, the Gestalts in an adult human are finely tuned and adaptive to the specific environment – they are software rather than hardware, meaning that we are born and grow up with an internal toolkit well-tuned to environmental needs. With applied effort, they can also be changed (re-programmed) later in life, as needed. In truth, we have evolved to treat our whole body and sensory system as if it were a set of prosthetic tools.
It is, therefore, almost impossible to take a photo of a bluebell wood "as you see it". The visual senses detect your amazement and interest in the rich blue-violet colour - and respond by making the colour more prominent and vibrant in your conscious visual experience. The way anxiety and chronic pain can escalate for no physical reason is an equivalent amplification for the opposite reason – that occurs during PTSD and/or central sensitisation.
