The unfathomable richness of seeing

Most experts hold that visual experience is remarkably sparse and its apparent richness is illusory. Indeed, we fail to notice the vast majority of what we think we see, and seem to rely instead on a high-level summary of a visual scene. However, we argue here that seeing is much more than noticing, and is in fact unfathomably rich. We distinguish among three levels of visual phenomenology: a high-level description of a scene based on the categorization of “objects,” an intermediate level composed of “groupings” of simple visual features such as colors, and a base-level visual field composed of “spots” and their spatial relations. We illustrate that it is impossible to see the objects that underlie a high-level description without seeing the groupings that compose them, and we cannot see the groupings without seeing the visual field to which they are bound. We then argue that the way the visual field feels—its spatial extendedness—can only be accounted for by a phenomenal structure composed of innumerable distinctions and relations. It follows that most of what we see has no functional counterpart—it cannot be used, reported, or remembered. And yet we see it.