Representation
For most of the history of psychology and cognitive science, the great thinkers, from
William James to
Michael Gazzaniga to
Stephen Kosslyn to
David Marr, were certain that our ideas, especially our images, were somehow
represented in the mind.
If one could only look into the neocortex, with
FMRI or
MEG, one should be able to see the thoughts or images
They all ignored the great warning of Gottfried Leibniz whose words in the
Monadology anticipate the work of today's computational neuroscientists to buid a machine that can see, think, and feel like a human being.
Suppose that there were a machine so constructed as to produce thought, feeling, and perception, we could imagine it increased in size while retaining the same proportions, so that one could enter as one might a mill [e.g., a flour mill]. On going inside we should only see the parts impinging on one another; we should not see anything which would explain a perception.
Monadology, in Leibniz Philosophical Writingd, Dent & Sons, London, 1973, p.181
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