Re: Motor Imagery

From: Harnad, Stevan (harnad@cogsci.soton.ac.uk)
Date: Tue Oct 31 1995 - 12:34:28 GMT


> From: "Matsers, Kate" <CMM93PY@psy.soton.ac.uk>
> Date: Tue, 31 Oct 1995 10:26:29 GMT

> If we accept that our mind is our experience which is also our
> intention we then can see that the problem of imagining moving versus
> actually moving is a subset of the mind/body problem. Therefore this
> analysis is a practical way of researching some [something missing]

Looking for regularities in what subjects report experiencing is
actually not a new form of analysis: Psychophysics, for example, uses it
in analyzing everything from signal detection to color perception. But
notice it is not the subject who is analyzing his own experience, it is
the experimenter who is analyzing the subject's reports and
performance. (The regularities are in the behaviour: the analysis would
be exactly the same if there were no experiences going on, and it were
all happening unconsciously.)

> Are the images we "see" in our heads mere recapitulations of the
> neurological "jangling" we had at the time of that action/vision in the
> first place or are they separate "mental" entities?

Why would they not be separate mental entities if they were
recapitulations? When you actually look at objects and see them, you
have an experience. When you remember seeing them, you have another
experience. If they share some neural machinery, that's interesting to
know. Same for real and imagined movement.

> So we are still left with the ongoing question : there seems to be this
> separate "mind" science tells us that there must be an explanation -
> what is it!?

Well, the explanation turned out not to be available from introspective
analysis, nor from behavioural analysis: The question here is whether it
is available from neural analysis. Is it?



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