The “Closure Machine”: How humans really see the world

Look around you right now. Stare at all the things nearby. These things will lovingly present you with what the psychologist James J. Gibson called an “ambient optic array” — the structured pattern of light reaching your eyes. Light reflects off surfaces, passes through the cornea and lens, and lands on the retina, where photons trigger the photoreceptors that kick off neural processing.

Of course, we do not see a world of individual photons. We see a world of meaningful things — things that we build with, cook with, play with, fight with, and use. Gibson argued that we see the world in terms of “affordances,” where we see objects as opportunities for action. We think, “What can I use this thing for?” and “What’s it good at?”

In this week’s Mini Philosophy interview, I spoke with the philosopher Hilary Lawson, who takes this idea one step further. Lawson believes that our entire mind is built on these kinds of “what’s it good for?” frameworks.

Lawson is well known for founding the HowTheLightGetsIn festival in the UK — the world’s largest philosophy and music festival — where the public is introduced to a diverse range of ideas. In our interview, we discuss what he means by “closure machines” and how a festival of ideas like his can return us to a kind of openness.

Closure machines

“I sometimes describe humans as closure machines,” Lawson says. “That’s how we’ve evolved — to make closures. We look around our environment, and we somehow think we see reality. But we hold things in these ways in order to achieve things.”

We don’t “see” reality as it is. We hold the world in useful frames, or what Lawson calls “closures,” that let us act. Closures feel like “the way things are” for everyone. We assume that everyone sees the world with the same closure as we do, but, of course, a closure will often reflect the person, the society, or the age to which it belongs.

The idea of a closure fits well in a tradition that flows from Immanuel Kant all the way up to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “duck-rabbit” image. The point is not that these are simply interpretations of the world, because an interpretation implies a degree of conscious awareness and changeability that closure often lacks in the moment. For instance, with the duck-rabbit image, you can see it either as a duck or a rabbit. You can do various tricks to see both, but you cannot see both at the same time.

Likewise, with a closure, we can do various things to challenge and invite a new closure — a kind of transitional openness. We can read books, travel, and talk to other people. The more we run up against the various ways other people “close” the world, the more we open ours. But the human mind has “evolved to make closures,” so we cannot stay in a state of forever-openness. We cannot postpone a closure for long, but only hop between them.

A tree is not just a tree

Lawson is a philosopher, and his closure theory often relates to everyday instances of perception or epistemology. In our conversation, for example, we talked about a tree. “I cannot help but see a tree as a tree,” I said, to which Lawson replied:

“Of course you can. You can very easily. You just have to escape from your everyday. You’ve grown up and you’ve spent your life with people correcting you as a child. ‘No, that’s not a swing, it’s a tree.’ Whatever.

When you see it as a tree, somebody in the past has thought, you know, this is a useful way of holding it, and you have been socialized into seeing it like that. But there’s an indefinite number of other ways that you could see it. And when you start to see the world as a source of potential, of alternative ways of seeing it, then it is exhilarating because you are no longer somehow trapped in just ‘this is what you see.”

Three ways to close the world

Closure, though, is more than just Gibsonian affordances; it’s an entire worldview or conceptual framework. Here are three examples:

The West and the rest: The idea of talking about “Western” intellectual or political values as set against the rest is a kind of closure. Yes, it can be ham-fisted and overly simplistic, but the reason this “closure” is so tenacious is that it is a useful framework that allows us to make sense of the world and to act. It shapes alliances, makes headlines, and frames geopolitics. As with all closures, it’s a way of seeing the world that is practical — and to talk of right and wrong, good or bad, misses the point about epistemology.

The scientific paradigm: Much of my conversation with Lawson explored the notion of scientific models. Anyone who has read a science book in the past 50 years will appreciate that the “Newtonian” way of seeing the world is at best incomplete, and at worst, a misunderstanding. And yet, when it comes to the macroscopic world, that’s still the model toward which most people gravitate (sorry). Why? Because it works. For almost all the things that actually matter to people on a day-to-day basis, Newton is fine. Throwing a ball, riding a bike, and sending satellites to space all work under this model. As Lawson puts it, “The Newtonian framework … has the great advantage that it is always able to account for anything that happens.”

The point with closure is not truth or falsity, but what allows us to function and get by. It might be that Newtonian physics starts to become no longer fit for purpose — Lawson himself argues that the model is at breaking point — but at the moment, it’s the best we can live by.

Homo economicus: In some ways, Lawson’s “closure” is a kind of postmodern version of American Pragmatism. Pragmatism says that something is true or false based upon its “cash value” or real-life output. Of course, Pragmatism is a capitalist’s dream. When we see things in terms of what they can produce or give, we tend to value them based on what they can produce or give.

The term “Homo economicus” is a modern idea that imagines humans as being economic units. We are not Homo sapiens (wise) or Homo ludens (playful) but rather cogs in the great, oily, mass-producing machine of post-industrial civilization.

The idea of “closure” does not necessarily always lead to Homo economicus. It is possible that, in the foreseeable future, people start to realize that viewing everything in terms of productivity and output is a dysfunctional way to live. It’s hardly new wisdom to suggest that hustle culture and always-on mindsets are damaging to who we are. But, at least at the moment, the closure of Homo economicus seems to be here.