Visual Imagery and Consciousness
Nigel J.T. Thomas
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http://www.imagery-imagination.com/viac.htm
Historical Development of Ideas about Imagery
Contemporary scientific controversies about mental imagery by no means turn entirely on matters of empirical fact. Disagreements turn largely upon conceptual issues, and upon differing ideas about what questions a theory of imagery most needs to answer. For example, is it crucial to consider the conscious and intentional nature of imagery when we seek to understand its cognitive mechanisms and functions, or are such considerations irrelevant and distracting? An awareness of the historical contexts from which the various contemporary research programs emerged is indispensable in understanding and adjudicating between such differing perspectives.
Scholars disagree as to whether ancient thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle, whose works contain the earliest known discussions of cognition, had anything like our modern concept of consciousness. However, it is clear that they did have the concept of mental imagery. Plato tentatively suggests that memory might be analogous to a block of wax into which our perceptions and thoughts stamp impressions (i.e., memory images); he also speaks, metaphorically, of an inner artist who paints pictures in the soul, and suggests that imagery may be involved in the mechanisms by which the rational mind exerts its control over the animal appetites.
However, it is Plato's successor Aristotle who provides the first systematic account of the role of imagery in cognition. In Aristotelian psychological theory, images play much the same role that the rather broader notion of mental representation plays in modern cognitive science. He held that mental images play an essential role in memory and thought: memory is the recall to mind of images of past events, and "It is impossible to think without an image." He also held that images underpin the meaningfulness of language, and play a key role in motivation. Were it not for mental images, he thinks, our speech would be empty noise, like coughing, and something could only excite our desire or fear while it was actually present to our senses. However, a mental image of the desired (or feared) thing enables us to think about it in its absence, and thus can sustain our motivation to obtain or avoid it at other times. Aristotle also posits a mental faculty, phantasia (usually translated as "imagination"), that is closely allied to (or perhaps even structurally identical with) the general faculty of sense perception, and is responsible for creating our mental images. Some suggest that this faculty amounts to his conception of consciousness.
In the wake of Aristotle's work, through later antiquity and the middle ages and into the era of modern philosophy, images continued generally to be seen as the principal vehicles of mental content. In the work of Descartes and his successors the mind was explicitly understood as conscious, and the contents of consciousness were known as "ideas." Descartes himself seems to have at least two distinct concepts of "idea." What he calls a "clear and distinct idea" is a direct (perhaps propositional) mental grasp of the essence of something. It exists within consciousness itself, but is not an image. However, he also hypothesizes that when we see, imagine, or remember something previously seen, a pictorial image is formed deep within the brain (on the surface of the pineal gland). Such images, which he also quite explicitly calls ideas, do not exist within the mind as such (since, for Descartes, the conscious mind is immaterial, and distinct from the brain), but they are somehow presented to the mind and are the immediate causes of our conscious perceptual, memory, and imaginative experiences.
The British Empiricist philosophers' concept of "idea" seems to combine aspects of both of the notions found in Descartes. Although some scholars today question whether John Locke really believed ideas to be picture-like, it is natural to interpret him as thinking so, and there is little room for doubt that his Empiricist successors, most notably Berkeley and Hume, conceived of ideas as images. Hume distinguishes "impressions" (i.e., percepts) from "ideas" that arise from the memory or the fancy, but he thinks that these differ only in the intensity with which we experience them, and he seems to conceive of all visual impressions and ideas as consciously experienced, picture-like images. Unlike the image-ideas of Descartes, however, for the Empiricists image-ideas are themselves entirely mental, and exist only inasmuch as we are conscious of them. Indeed, Hume's so called "bundle" theory of the mind suggests that these images actually constitute consciousness: the mind is nothing but a bundle of impressions and ideas.
Although it certainly had its critics, this Empiricist conception of mind continued to be influential up to, and beyond, the emergence of scientific psychology in the late 19th century. Pioneering experimental psychologists such as Wilhelm Wundt in Germany and William James in the U.S.A. thought of psychology as the study of consciousness and of the images (and emotional "feelings") that populate it. However, in the early 20th century a group of psychologists based in Würzburg in Germany, led by Oswald Külpe, reported that systematic introspection of thought processes under controlled laboratory conditions had led them to recognize that, as well as images, the mind also contains "imageless thoughts." These were, supposedly, conscious experiences (they had been discovered by introspection after all) and cognitive (they were evoked during reasoning, and were not merely emotional feelings), but, unlike imagery, they had no sensory character.
These claims proved extremely controversial. Some psychologists, such as Wundt, argued that the introspective methodology employed by the Würzburg psychologists was inherently unscientific and unreliable. Others, such as Edward Titchener, argued that competently conducted introspective investigations revealed no evidence ofimageless thoughts. The "imageless thought debate" that ensued proved to be irreconcilable. However, no party to this debate was claiming that thought in general is imageless; rather, the point at issue was whether non-imaginal, but nevertheless conscious, thoughts actually exist. Although the factious arguments about this have long since died down, the issue has never truly been resolved. Some people still hold (although perhaps more often as an implicit assumption, rather than an explicitly defended view) that all the cognitive contents of consciousness have a sensory character, either as actual sensations or percepts, or else as mental images; others hold (again, often implicitly) that there are also non-sensory conscious thought contents. These are sometimes referred to as states of "fringe consciousness," and may be described as "feelings" of, for example, "familiarity," "unfamiliarity," "rightness," "wrongness," etc.
Historically, however, the upshot of the deadlock of the imageless thought debate was a general discrediting of introspective methodologies in psychology, and even of the very idea that consciousness could be studied scientifically. John B. Watson argued that consciousness was an inherently unscientific notion, and, as a central plank of this argument, questioned the very existence of mental imagery. He urged that psychology should be reconceived as the study of behavior rather than the study of consciousness, and the Behaviorist movement that he instigated came to dominate the field for the next several decades (very roughly, from about 1920 to about 1960). Few, if any, of the Behaviorist psychologists who succeeded Watson went quite as far as he did toward denying the reality of consciousness and imagery, but almost all of them, in practice, treated them as beyond the reach of science. During the same period, the rise of the analytical philosophy movement (with its emphasis on formal logic and language as the keys to understanding knowledge and the mind), and particularly the influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein, also led many philosophers to discount the significance of imagery, or simply to ignore it. The upshot was that neither imagery nor consciousness received much serious attention during the Behaviorist era.
A revival of interest in imagery, however, was an important component of the cognitive psychology movement that challenged and eventually displaced Behaviorism as the dominant psychological paradigm in the 1960s and '70s. New experimental methods for studying imagery were devised that did not depend on purely subjective introspection, and evidence emerged suggesting that imagery plays a large role both in memory (as shown mainly be experiments on verbal memory), and spatial thinking (as shown by experiments on "mental rotation" and "mental scanning"). A strong empirical case was built up for the functional importance of imagery in cognition, and a vigorous (and continuing) debate ensued about the nature of the cognitive mechanisms responsible for imagery.
However, there was not a comparable revival of scientific interest in consciousness until the 1990s. As cognitive theories of imagery developed in the 1960s through the 1980s and beyond, only cursory attention was given to the fact that it is a conscious phenomenon (or to the, arguably, closely related fact that it bears intentionality). Even today (the early 21st century), cognitive scientists and neuroscientists often treat imagery purely as a form of representation, and offer no substantive account of how images are able to represent (almost certainly it is not because they resemble their objects), or of how they come to be consciously experienced.
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