SpeedOfSound wrote:When I attend to that square yellow shape then the rest seem to dim down. But I never get the sense that I see a yellow shape and all else has disappeared. It is a continuum in my head but seems not to be so in yours?
Why would you ever have a sense of that which you are not aware having disappeared? TO notice it disappear you have to be aware of it initially. If you are unaware of it you don't notice it's absence. If you aren't watching the apple than obviously you don't notice it disappear if the monkey swipes it.
SpeedOfSound wrote:I do not imagine I see richly detailed scenes, I see them. I know, and as Matthew pointed out he does to, the difference between seeing and imagining sight. If I think I see it then I bloody well see it.
Not sure how to sort this with you. Look at a complex visual scene. Now close your eyes. Do you still see it? If you don't then something connected to your primary visual sensory cortex has changed and you are aware of the change. You know this and you have protested when I put it this way. But I think you gloss over the significance and then what follows from you is not clear to me at all.
A 'recognition network' is present in every minicolumn of your striate cortex. In fact millions of such recognition's are there. If you want to call it that. I think the word recognition is a bit of misleading folk psychology and I don't like it. You have a dozen or more matrices of neuronal groups in your brain that map your entire retina. Spatially. Some are in charge of color, others lines and others differences in brightness. Some are color. Some control what your eyes are doing. Another has been shown to work in what we choose to attend to or what chooses it for us. Forty percent of your brain is given to millions of such recognizers of visual details. They are arranged in hierarchies and heterarchies. They feed back and forward in a chain and then some areas jump a few links both back and forward. Fifteen percent of the energy your body uses each day processes visual scenery.
Yep. Lots of complex stuff going on. Is any of that it actually subjective experience? Is the bit that detects lines also having line-seeing experiences? Does a gonit that detects a red blob know what it's like to be a subject seeing red?
SpeedOfSound wrote:Yet you insist we are only seeing what we remember that we saw?
You are going to have to get much finer grained and specific about what is recognized.
The important bit is, I think, what is recognised as salient subjective events. Not lines or apples, but what is the distinctive shape of this brain's response to lines or apples.
You have some of that with narrow attention. You describe "an equal bit of attention" and that's what I'm talking about. Those bits of attention can include a lot of stuff, but it isn't inherent in the function of the sensory cortices that they have a bit of attention on what's salient in GW. The salient peaks in GW have to be identified, just as the contrasty bits in the visual field have to surpass a detection threshold. Why wouldn't that apply?