I guess my critique is that nobody is talking about the 3-D PICTURE of the world that we see in experience, and how nobody in neuroscience seems to be concerned with the fact that we have found no pictures in the brain that look anything like the fully volumetric three-dimensional multi-modal unified experience that we have.


There is a great deal that can be learned about the brain just by observing the "picture" of our experience. For example consider phenomenal perspective, the fact that objects in the distance appear smaller by perspective, and yet at the same time they appear undiminished in size. Your hand shrinks to half size when you double the distance to your eye, and yet at the same time your hand appears to stay the same size, even as it shrinks! The sides of a road converge to a point on the horizon, and yet at the same time the road appears straight and parallel even as it converges! This is direct and incontrovertible evidence that our experience has a variable representational scale, it is like a scale model with large scale at the center and smaller scale in the distance.

This is not a property of the world itself, nor is it a property of the retinal image, which is just a two-dimensional projection. Phenomenal perspective is a unique and significant property of the internal image representation in your own brain, and it has the very useful property that it can encode an explicit model of an infinite space within a finite representation. Is that not deeply fascinating?

It is time for philosophers to start banging on the doors of their local neuroscientists, and demanding that someone go look to find the picture that we know is in there! Here is a case where philosophy can inform neuroscience for a change, and tell them exactly what they should be looking for in the brain!