Cognitive impenetrability (CI) of a large part of visual
perception is taken for granted by those of us in the field of
computational vision who attempt to recover descriptions of space
using geometry and statistics as tools. These tools clearly point out,
however, that CI cannot extend to the level of structured descriptions
of object surfaces, as Pylyshyn suggests. The reason is that visual
space – the description of the world inside our heads –
is a nonEuclidean curved space. As a consequence, the only
alternative for a vision system is to develop several descriptions of
space–time; these are representations of reduced intricacy and
capture partial aspects of objective reality. As such, they make sense
in the context of a class of tasks/actions/plans/purposes, and thus
cannot be cognitively impenetrable.