[venachescu]

No, we are absolutely predicting when we are looking at a photo; firstly, we really do not see the ‘whole thing’, our eyes make quick, stereotyped (cough predictive cough) movements to a few spots on the image and mentally imagine the rest. Secondly, that’s assuming we recognized something in the image, if it’s unclear, like a grainy photo or lots of shadows, we start to make informed guesses about what could be there.

All of our sensory systems work this way - we use an enormous amount of context to bubble up predictive categories and the collect marginal amounts of information until one prediction dominates over all others.

When one doesn’t, we get gestalt like illusions; like the cubes that are projected both forwards or backwards - or dresses that are blue and black and white and gold - or laurel and yanni in perfect harmony, etc.