Dear Steven,

Again, I support the sentiment:

‘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!’

However, I do worry about your suggestion that we ask scientists to look for a 3D picture. The ‘3Dness’ in our experience is not a feature of some (picture) thing we are beholding but a feature of the way we behold it. That is clear from all the pop-out illusions or indeed the Dalmatian. To get the 3Dness it is reasonable to assume that we would need to manoeuvre ourselves into the position of that part of the brain that accesses the signals that are beheld in a 3D way. (As to see the skull in Holbein’s Ambassadors we need to get in one specific position. http://claudia.weblog.com.pt/arquivo/2007/07/post_76.html) We would also need to be in a form that receives signals the way that bit of the brain does, which probably means that we would have to kindly ask that bit of the brain to step aside and make way for us.

It is not going to work is it? We cannot ask anyone to look for something that has 3Dness for a part of someone else’s brain by looking for 3Dness. What we can do is ask scientists to look for groups of signals that have a sufficient number of independent degrees of freedom relevant to their relations to each other to account for the very wide variety of experiences we can think of having and which are co-available to some part of the brain. As indicated above, a sense of 3Dness in an experience or beholding does not imply anything about the spatial arrangement of that which is beheld any more than the taste of sugar is a property of sugar on its own.

I must admit to having difficulty with certain aspects of your model and one that I worry about is suggested by your statement ‘Representationalism does require that patterns of activation in your brain be somehow aware of their own spatial configuration.’ I cannot think of any account of something being aware of itself that makes any sense in the causal framework that we normally couch all these ideas in. I would be happier with ‘Representationalism does require that something in your brain be somehow aware in a way that is dependent on the spatial configuration of its relation to the influences that inform it.’ Awareness is then tied to a causal path, as I think it must be.

So, yes, we need philosophers to bash scientists over the head – preferably in a civil fashion over a glass of reasonable quality wine – and say ‘No, you are not solving the problem your grant applications say you are going to solve’, but we also need to take into account the concerns philosophers have themselves raised about representationalism construed in terms of ‘pictures’.