Visual Imagery and Consciousness
Nigel J.T. Thomas
Page 7
http://www.imagery-imagination.com/viac.htm
From the enactive perspective, to have a conscious visual experience is not to have a representation in one's brain, but to act, and to be interacting with the world, in a certain way. To have imagery is to act in the same sort of way, but to fail to interact. Actions (unlike brain states) have inherent intentionality, just as mental images do: actions are necessarily about, or directed at, something (possibly something imaginary, as when we search for the leprechaun's gold), just as images are always images of something. When I enact my perceptual routine for looking at, and recognizing, a cat, my action is intended to enable me to see a cat, and in a real sense it remains so, it remains cat-directed, even when I enact it knowing that no cat is actually there to be seen.
However, to point out that actions have intentionality is not, thereby, to explain how they come to have that intentionality, and to say that mental images are really actions rather than entities (representational brain states) is not, in itself, to explain how they come to be conscious. Much more work needs to be done to make these matters clear. Although it has been argued that enactive (or "sensorimotor") perceptual theory can explain perceptual consciousness, such claims remain very controversial. Nevertheless, the enactive theory of imagery clearly radically reframes the problem of explaining imaginal consciousness. No longer is it (as for quasi-pictorial and description theories) a problem of explaining how a brain state can be a conscious (and intentional) state. Rather the problem is to give a scientific account of the intentionality of action (a problem we face anyway), and then to explain how such action can somehow constitute consciousness. This is, no doubt, a difficult problem, but it is not the "hard problem."
Conclusion
At the time of writing, imagery is still a rather neglected topic within the broader, and growing, field of consciousness studies. This is in rather stark contrast to the importance it was accorded by earlier, pre-Behaviorist students of consciousness. Indeed, the Behaviorist revolt against consciousness, which let to several decades of scientific neglect of the topic, seems to have been fueled, in considerable part, by frustration at the factious and irreconcilable "imageless thought" controversy, and it clearly involved the rejection of imagery quite as much as the rejection of consciousness itself. Perhaps recent students of consciousness have been reluctant to fully engage the topic of imagery because it has already proven so controversial within cognitive science, and because the best-known theories that have been developed in that context do little to illuminate imagery's conscious nature. However, this situation may now be changing, and a developing understanding of imagery may come, once again, to be seen as an integral and essential aspect of our developing understanding of consciousness itself.
Glossary
- Hard problem
- In this article, the "hard problem" of consciousness refers to the problem of understanding how a brain state (a spatio-temporal pattern of neuronal excitation, itself reducible to a complex dance of molecules and ions around membranes) could possibly be a conscious experience. Posed this way, the problem is unsolved, and may well be insoluble. It does not necessarily follow that consciousness cannot be scientifically understood, however. The problem may be ill-posed.
- Imageless thought
- A thought that is (i) consciously experienced, but (ii), unlike mental imagery, has no sensory or "perception-like" character. The existence of such thoughts has been controversial ever since the notion was first introduced into psychology in the early twentieth century.
- Intentionality
- The property, possessed by many, perhaps all, mental acts or entities (such as mental images, beliefs, desires, and thoughts in general), of being about, of, or directed at something. The "thing" in question (sometimes referred to as the "intentional object" of the image, thought, or whatever) may be real or imaginary (one may have a thought about a unicorn quite as well as a thought about a horse). This technical, philosophical concept of intentionality is only indirectly (if at all) related to the ordinary language notion of having an intention (to do something), or of doing something intentionally (i.e., on purpose rather than inadvertently).
- Mental Imagery
- Quasi-perceptual experience: that is, experience that subjectively resembles perceptual experience, but which occurs in the absence of the relevant perceptual stimuli. It is generally acknowledged that imagery may occur in any sense mode – visual, auditory (including what is sometimes called "inner speech," or "thinking in words"), olfactory, kinesthetic, etc. – or even in several simultaneously. However, visual mental imagery, also colloquially referred to as "visualization," "seeing in the mind's eye," "picturing," etc., has been by far the most extensively studied and discussed.
- Mentalese
- The hypothetical, innate and unconscious, "language of thought," held by some cognitive scientists to be the symbolic format in which information is represented within the brain, and which the brain, considered as a computer, uses in its computations. It supposedly resembles the languages people actually speak in having a combinatorial syntax and an arbitrary semantics. Clearly we are not consciously aware of our mentalese representations as such, but if they do indeed exist they may be the substrate of the conscious thoughts that we experience as mental imagery and "inner" speech.
- Retinotopically Mapped Visual Cortex
- Certain visual processing areas of the cortex of the brain, most notably the primary visual cortex (V1), that are structured as (rather distorted and low resolution) maps of the light-sensitive retina upon which light is focused at the back of the eye. Adjacent regions of cortex, in these areas, correspond to adjacent areas on the retina such that, during vision, the two-dimensional spatial pattern of excitation of the cortical neurons corresponds topologically to the pattern of illumination, the optical image, on the retina.
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