- seCtIon one: tHe PRoBLem
as a kind of picture-viewing); this led naturally to conceiving
of pictures inside the eye and the head. Leonardo da Vinci
compared the eye to a camera obscura – a dark chamber,
popular at the time, into which an image of the world is
projected. Then, in the early seventeenth century, Kepler
explained the optics of the eye but said he would leave to
others the job of explaining how the image ‘is made to appear
before the soul’ (Lindberg, 1976). This is what Descartes tried
to do. He studied actual images by scraping off the back of
an ox’s eye so that he could see them form on the retina and
then showed, in his famous sketches, how he thought these
images are transmitted to the non-material mind.
The details of Descartes’ scheme were overthrown, but the
idea of pictures in the head remained, and it was updated by
cognitive psychologists in the twentieth century, who talked
of internal screens or models as well as pictures. Dennett
calls the idea of pictures in the head ‘an almost irresistible
model of the “end product” of visual perception’, but also a
‘ubiquitous malady of the imagination’ (1991, p. 52). Alva Noë
and the French psychologist Kevin O’Regan are similarly con-
fident that ‘The supposed fact that things appear pictorial to
us in no way requires there to be pictures in the head’ (2001,
p. 947). Indeed, they even challenge the idea that it really seems to us as though
we are looking at a picture: ‘it is just bad phenomenology to assert that we take
ourselves to have a 3D-model or picture in the head when we see’ (p. 962).
One of the tricky questions raised by picture-in-the-head theories is what the
information in the picture is for: are there some structures in the brain which
make up the picture and others which read off the information contained in it?
This risks requiring a whole mind-within-a-mind, often referred to as a ‘homuncu-
lus’: a little person inside your head. And arguably the little person in your head
looking at your pictures also needs one in its head looking at its internal pictures,
so we have only pushed the required explanation back a level. So, if you do think
that seeing must involve having a conscious stream of pictures like a high-defi-
nition movie playing in the head, you will not be alone, but could you be wrong?
Only from time to time the pupil’s shutter
Will draw apart: an image enters then,
To travel through the tautened body’s utter
Stillness – and in the heart to end.
(Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘The Panther’ [Der Panther], 1902, our translation)To sum up, there are three assumptions made about vision in much of the scientific
tradition of its study, and all three may also figure in our intuitions about vision:
1) visual experience is richly detailed, 2) there are things that are in and out of our
visual experience, and 3) vision operates by representing the world in the mind or
the brain. Perhaps these assumptions seem unremarkable. However, they can land‘It is important to
avoid the temptation
of thinking that eyes
produce pictures in the
brain’
(Gregory, 1966/1997, p. 5)
FIGURE 3.3 • Descartes believed that pictures
were transmitted through the
eyes to the pineal gland where
they entered the mind. His theory
has generally been rejected but
the idea of pictures in the head
remains popular.