- seCtIon tWo: tHe BRAIn
not necessarily aware of carrying out those rotations. Although imagery is often
thought of as quintessentially conscious, similar processes must be going on
whether we feel the rotation is done consciously or not.
If you are tempted to think that there must be a mental screen on which the
rotated image is projected and that ‘you’ either do or do not consciously look at
the screen and explore its contents, then ask yourself where and what you and
the screen could be. If you are a conscious entity looking at the screen, then the
classic homunculus problem arises. The inner ‘you’ must have inner eyes and
brain, with another inner screen looked at by another inner you and so on – to an
infinite regress.
Crick and Koch claim that there is no infinite regress if the front parts of the
brain are ‘looking at’ the sensory systems at the back. These two areas involve
competing coalitions of neurons that interact but not entirely reciprocally, and
so give rise to ‘[t]he illusion of a homunculus in the head looking at the sensory
activities of the brain’ (Crick and Koch, 2003, p. 124). This would mean that CM
really does reflect something about the organisation of the brain. Even so, the
nature of this new kind of ‘looking’ still has to be explained, as does its relationship
‘mental imagery may
involve the same kinds
representations [sic] as
does vision, and yet in
neither case need these
representations be
pictorial’
(Pylyshyn, 2003, p. 335)
FIGURE 5.4 • Imagining pictures in the head means having someone inside who looks at the pictures. That means having
someone else inside them looking at their pictures, and another and another, leading to an infinite regress of
homunculi.‘in the sensorimotor
approach, imaging
involves being mentally
poised to rehearse
exploration of an object’
(Foglia and O’Regan, 2015,
p. 192)