Most of us know that the world is not much like what we see, hear and feel. The world itself beyond our body is different from our sensations. Our sensations are used to locate and describe objects in the world but they are different from those things.
The things in our experience are not only different from the actual objects around us but they are arranged differently. A tree usually appears to us as a tree-like image in a view but we know that a tree itself is a collection of atoms at a particular place in the world. The tree-like image in our experience has an entirely different arrangement from the trees themselves because the image in our experience only has one side and occurs in a peculiar arrangement of things that we call a "view".
It is astonishing that the majority of philosophers and neuroscientists have convinced themselves that there can be no images or views in the brain despite the evidence of their own experience. This false belief is responsible for the lack of progress in explaining our reality. It will be shown below that our experience of the world is real.
Steve,
Thanks very much for your article. Will take me a while to digest it, but you are clearly a thoughtful guy with a good grasp of the subject.
Lockwood and I arrived at the same conclusion (found below), independently of one another. Our views comport with everything I know about the relevant physics, philosophy, neuroscience & etc.
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Consciousness, in other words, provides us with a kind of ‘window’ on to our brains, making possible a
transparent grasp of a tiny corner of a material reality that is in general opaque to us, knowable only at
one remove. The qualities of which we are immediately aware, in consciousness, precisely are some at
least of the intrinsic qualities of the states and processes that go to make up the material world — morespecifically, states and processes within our own brains.
The psychologist Pribram . . . has made an interesting attempt to revive an idea originally put forward
around the turn of the century by the Ge stalt psychologists: namely that it is certain fields, in the
physicist’s sense, within the cerebral hemispheres, that may be the immediate objects of introspective
awareness ... What it would amount to, in terms of the present proposal, is that we have a ‘special’ or
‘privileged’ access, via some of our own brain activity, to the intrinsic character of, say,
electromagnetism. Put like that, the idea sounds pretty fanciful. But make no mistake about it: whether
about electromagnetism or about other such phenomena, that is just what the Russellian view ostensibly commits one to saying.
~Lockwood, 'Mind, Brain & Quantum'
See also the work of Devalois on retinotopic maps.