Pointing "to them"--where?
I'll unapologetically move the goalpost and claim that I'm talking solely about the mapping on V1, which coincidentally, happens to be the most firmly defensible "image". I'll explain why I'm moving the goalpost shortly.
You have ripped up an image and given parts of it (odd, that some parts overlap, other parts are "motion" or "hedonic relevance") to a score of independent messengers, each zipping through the city, some to separate destinations, others to the same destination through different stops. If this constitutes "an image" to you, then we will simply disagree.
Then assume we disagree. That's fine. But we disagree about
what exactly?
My problem isn't that we disagree, but rather, that I can't seem to make sense out of what you're saying. In particular, it seems to me that I simply
get to disagree in the first place--not merely as a matter of personal opinion--but in a fundamentally correct way. That is, it seems to me that I can not only claim there
are images in the brain, but I can mean something by it, and be entirely correct about it. And, likewise, I not only
can claim that there's a Cartesian Theater, but I can mean something specific and, again, be entirely correct about it. If both of these are true, then your claim that there's no Cartesian Theater is either wrong, or means something different; likewise, your cautions about my not using the word "image" to describe what is represented in the visual cortex is either a misguided assertion, or is a disconnect.
This is the third post I've made in this exchange, and I don't think I quite got an answer yet. I'm going to proceed and play devil's advocate by doing exactly what I think I probably
get to do, and I'd like to challenge you to explain where this diverges from your definition set.
In terms of an image, you've been claiming that the things in the visual cortex are not an image, but you've yet to tell me what it means to say they are not an image. So
until you give me a better definition of image, I'm going to say that in terms of neural processing, an image is nothing but a spatial mapping of spatial information onto the brain. Given this definition, there is most certainly an image on V1--as there is a spatial mapping on V1 of the retina, down to the blind spot. Forgetting all of the a priori reasoning about consciousness--opinionating about its nature, and what not--which is something I'm not yet interested in--the
raw facts, the
a posteriori structure of the actual brains we're using to see with, include that there is a spatial projection of the entire visual field on V1. As such, there's an image. Whether there "should" be one or not, whether it is supposed to explain something, or can't explain anything... well, there it is!
Likewise, as with the Cartesian Theater,
until you give me a definition, I'm going to say that if all of the following are true, I have a Cartesian Theater:
- I can identify an image in the brain
- The image is in large part a source of information about the visual field
- The image serves as a starting point for gleaning further visual information; the said processing of further information is done in parts of the brain other than the image
The first two can, in a very meaningful sense, be described as a Cartesian Theater screen. The third part is, in a very meaningful sense, ascribable to Dennett's homunculi.
The raw facts are, that there is an image on V1, and that there's a tremendous amount of processing of visual information that occurs using as a primary source, that image on V1. Said processing occurs throughout the rest of the visual cortex, extending outside it altogether. So given the above definition, there's a Cartesian Theater.
Now I'm pretty sure you mean something a bit more specific by image, and a bit more specific by CT. I'd like to know what that is. However, there are some other points about your post to dig through...
The V1 mosaic is not an image; at best it is part of one, at worst it stretches the image metaphor to the breaking point.
Until you define image, I don't know your grounding for making this claim. It may very well stretch your metaphor to the breaking point, but I have no clue what your metaphor is. It most certainly doesn't stretch
my metaphor.
If we pretend that our best case scenario qualifies as an image... what is the viewer?
The rest of the brain. The only qualification I need for a meaningful "homunculi" is listed above--I need a "little man" looking at, and gleaning information from, in large part, a "theater screen". That completes, for me, every fundamental aspect needed to make a metaphore. "Little man", formally, to me, means anything smaller than the whole theater. Given the qualifications above, which I deem devil's advocate like but certainly very fair to the analogy, there's a perfectly viable "Cartesian Theater", that actually happens to describe vision.
Should you mean something different by Cartesian Theater, I'd like to hear it. Specifically, though, I would like to note that CT, as far as I understand it, is an analogy invented by Dennett, and furthermore, he specifically claims that it's something people ascribe to without even knowing they're participating in dualistic thinking, and using "such a terrible idea". From a devil's advocate viewpoint, I'm going to claim that all of the accusations of dualism are nothing more than meaningless connotation, and that all that's really being done by proposing a Cartesian Theater is proposing that there's a partition with those pieces... i.e., if I try to find the raw meaning behind the CT removed from all of these reasons why I'm supposedly not supposed to have one, I wind up with a mere description of structure, not some grand dualistic metaphysics. Again, this is from a devil's advocate view, but I'm seriously flirting with the possibility that this isn't an inaccurate description of the situation.
What would cure me is a better definition of a Cartesian Theater, and some sort of reasonable account of why so many people studying cognitive sciences are somehow without knowing it buying into a dualistic metaphysics. You could say I'm a bit skeptical here.
In the story of the blind men and the elephant, we have a reader to combine the disparate elements; if we only have the blind men, each with a portion of the elephant available to them, do we have the whole image perceived? I say no; if you say yes, again, we will simply disagree.
The analogy is poor, though. What actually happens in the visual cortex is nothing like the blind man parable. What happens is more like this:
First off, the men aren't blind--they are just nearly blind. Second, they aren't standing at different parts of the elephant. They're gathered in a crowd, in somewhat of line talking to each other. The guy in the front is staring at the elephant--the
entire elephant, mind you, but he is mostly blind. He notes: "Hmmm... there's something over here", waving his arms, "and over here, and here...", etc, simultaneously (sorry, it's a poor analogy) pointing to all of the places where there seem to be things. The second man in line takes a look at it and says, "hmmm... hearing everything you just said, it sounds like the stuff over here is sort of oriented this way, and the stuff over here, is sort of oriented that way", etc... simultaneously talking about rough qualities of the entire elephant. The next man hearing this says, "yeah, it's like it has this sort of shape" to the second man, who agrees since that fits what he said (though he, like many of us, changes his mind midway in the details, but it's mostly like he said, except for the shapeliness pointed out by the third guy), etc.
In other words, these are not blind men playing with what one thinks is a rope, what one thinks is a hose, what one thinks of as a tree, etc., standing at different parts of the elephant. The brain
could work this way on the vision problem, it
just doesn't. Each man is picking out certain kinds of things from the whole image--except when they don't, but even when they don't, and they're working with portions, it's still a specialized
aspect of the image they work on. They just plain aren't splitting the elephant up and handing it to each other.
Parallel throughput processing does not have a place where an image is available, nor a place for a viewer.
But there are images, and viewers. In spirit, it sounds pretty much like what the Cartesian Theater presumably is supposed to do in itself--only it seems there are multiple layers of it (with feedback signals). I'm not quite sure where the CT aspect actually falls on its face.
The tapestry of experience simply is not what it seems.
Right, but
that much I can figure out before even bothering with a posteriori.
Any explanation of consciousness needs to explain what actually happens, not the fairy-tale version.
Agreed. That's why I'm not going to trust any sophistry, no matter what ism it supports, until it's backed up by cold hard a posteriori data.
But I still see the problem of "getting to" call this a Cartesian Theater, and "getting" to call those images.
What's more, I'm not really talking about how consciousness works overall... I'm talking only about the visual pathway (for which I'm so terribly a layman, but this is the one aspect that I'm fascinated by, and as such, know the most about). I wouldn't be so forward as to claim that consciousness itself, or any other sense pathway (e.g., hearing), works in similar ways.
Vision, though, is fascinating in this regard, because we can at least loosely trace our way from feedforward effects of the photon all the way up to the feedback effects of
attention itself.
]. The Behaviorist doctrine is just a perspective w/ limited capacity in helping us explain and understand mental phenomenon. Right now you're scoffing at the notion of there being a 'mind' in much the same way [and for many of the same reasons] that a person centuries ago would scoff at the 'absurd' notion that the earth moves. The whole "mind-is-a-fiction" doctrine has become so entrenched in your school of thought that you've become highly resistant to even honestly considering that there are other valid ways of understanding and approaching the issue of animal behavior.
