Constructing Reality

It's a widely held belief these days that the world we perceive results as much from objects affecting our sense organs as it does from our brain imposing preformed categories on the sensory input, according to some probabilistic or statistical scheme. So a bunch of completely independent contrast boundaries becomes an outline, because it's unlikely boundary fragments would align if they were not part of some common shape. And once our visual system has connected the lines, the shapes resulting from that trigger yet another inference system, that supposes that anything that looks like a face in all likelihood is one. And thus a robot stares at out you from a collection of 36 image tiles that are not robotlike at all.