Gestalt question

[bipolarbear]

Well, it has been a while since I've been to Poly. Last time was probably for that collar popping net prank thing that never went anywhere.

Anyhoo,

I was in my General Psych class (Bipolar has made it to college now) and because the teacher is an incompetent social worker who is only used to teaching part time we get the option of studying perception.

I was skimming the chapter reviewing all of my favorite aspects of Gestalt when something hit me.

It is rather far fetched, but I found it fascinating.

The thought came that, do some of these principles carry over into other aspects of human thought, like logic, philosophy, and the like.

I askedthe teacher and she said yes but I don't trust her so I decided to go a rung higher on the ladder of reliability and ask the internet.

Here is a wiki link for those of you not in the know.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestalt_psychology

[bipolarbear]

So I can see how something like the Principle of common region could overlap into religious beliefs. In that there are some beliefs that seem to be present throughout all of the major religions, yet people fail to see these. Though this is more likely related to ignorance.

The Principle of Closure fascinates me as related to how we would go about thinking about something like philosophy

[Japher]

Gestalt psychology (also Gestalt theory of the Berlin School) is a theory of mind and brain that proposes that the operational principle of the brain is holistic, parallel, and analog, with self-organizing tendencies. The classic Gestalt example is a soap bubble, whose spherical shape (its Gestalt) is not defined by a rigid template, or a mathematical formula, but rather it emerges spontaneously by the parallel action of surface tension acting at all points in the surface simultaneously. This is in contrast to the "atomistic" principle of operation of the digital computer, where every computation is broken down into a sequence of simple steps, each of which is computed independently of the problem as a whole. The Gestalt effect refers to the form-forming capability of our senses, particularly with respect to the visual recognition of figures and whole forms instead of just a collection of simple lines and curves.

I don't get it.

[KrazyHorse]

That soap bubble analogy is really crappy. There's nothing mysterious about a soap bubble. Each point on its surface does obey a simple mathematical formula, just as each step in a computer program is very simple. The result of a number of such simple operations is complexity, both in a computer program and a soap bubble.

Psychologists trying to make physical analogies when they don't understand physics

[Colonâ„¢]

Physics

[Japher]

bad analogies are like poorly thoughtout similes...

[Harry Tuttle]

That is a really dumb analogy.

[Japher]

so what is gestalt?

[Harry Tuttle]

1 + 1 does not necessarily equal 2, definately nothing less than 2, but usually something more than 2.

It basicly says that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

In reality it's bull****, used for "alternate" types of medicine, hokey commune thinking, and is usually used as a bad excuse for communist revolutions. You know, make the people think you know what you're talking about, with metaphors.