Unitary Apprehension

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Unitary apprehension is the ability for the mind to conceive multiple individual parts as a single whole. Multiplicity exists in almost everything except some building blocks of atoms themselves (e.g. electrons). Physical multiplicity exists as a natural quality of every day items because most products are a combination of different more basic products. For example, a Rubik’s cube is composed of individual colored blocks, but it is a single whole. Although physical multiplicity and a sort of total apprehension exist, this does not meet the philosophical meaning of unitary apprehension.

Unitary apprehension happens when, under a single act of consciousness, multiplicities become one noema. It is a property of the brain to interpret information in the simplest possible way. See the example below:

Most people interpret this image as a square, and the brain instantly recognizes the blank space as the most meaningful part of the picture. However, the blank space is actually the absence of anything. We immediately speak of what the picture is not. The picture is actually four semi-circles.

Another example of unitary apprehension is a line of trees in the distant horizon. Although close inspection would reveal individual trees, at a distance they blend together to form a single line. This can also be said of most art, and in particular, the impressionist movement of pointillism.

Unitary apprehension is closely related to a psychological movement during the 19th century that emphasized the study of gestalts. Developed by Kurt Koffka (1886-1941), gestaltism is the attempt to study how individuals perceive a world of chaos as one whole. In other words, it studies how individual parts of a system ultimately form a single whole. Evolutionary biologists often refer to this principle as holistic, and it can be applied to a variety of phenomena of the natural world.

One well studied example of a gestalt is the idea of a superorganism, which occurs when members of the same species synergetically connect with one another to achieve a single goal. For example, eusocial workers such as ants rely on each other for their queen’s survival. Since workers of prototypical colonies cannot reproduce, it can be abstractly said that the entire ant colony is actually a single organism.

In psychology, the controversial theories of gestalt psychology came to an end in the 20th century for similar reasons that phenomenology fell out of fashion. In particular, it failed to explain the mechanisms of gestalt formation, and instead favored describing the result. Another failing of gestaltism can be attributed to a growing emphasis on the fashionable approach of structuralism, which aimed to form mental maps by putting together segments of individuals’ past.

This topic is broached in mathematics in category theory. Similar to functions, morphisms relate broad noema on a schema through various functors that are presented over a commutative diagram as shown below:

This is actually very simple: the letters represent objects that are connected by arrows and edges. Various connections between objects have different properties according to the diagrams.

For example, an isomorphism is a function f : X → Y that allows an inverse: g : Y → X.

Common to gestalt psychology is the concept of a psychological isomorphism, which is essentially a technical term for ‘sameness’. In other other words perception and physiological representation are the same because a phenomenological response mirrors the physiologic response of the brain. This phenomenon is most clearly seen by the phi phenomenon, where individual still images are seen as motion. For example you may wish to research phenakistiscopes.