Projections into inner space.

'When figures appear in your dreams, what are these thoughts made of? [...] In what ways do a phantasm in the mind and an image made of light resemble each other?'

Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria

In this section, I want to discuss what I will call constructs of the imagination - real things that are of imaginary things; we might also say that they represent imaginary things. Common and unproblematic examples are things such as representational works of art, e.g., narrative films, story songs, fiction books, and so on.

It is probably obvious that we can interact with these constructs, e.g., we watch a film, pick up a book, or turn down the volume on a radio. And, in all such cases, these constructs are physical things, e.g., a film has weight, chemical composition and shape (it's a strip of treated plastic); a CD is a circular silvery disc, etc. They are also public things: the same copy of a film or book can be perceived by many differently people, passed around, picked up, or even sat on (though people, particularly artists, tend not to appreciate doing the last thing).

As such, thinking of an image itself as a physical thing is not a general problem. How the image is displayed, what it is made of, where it is located - these are questions that can, in principle, be answered in a physical way. In addition, the pictures and images themselves exist, and have shape, colour and weight, e,g., film stock, even if what they are images of do not, e.g., The Balrog in Lord of the Rings.

(Five) Senses of Images

I call these constructs, in general, images but I do not restrict this to visual images. I also mean by this constructs for other senses as well - e.g., sound-images: voices on the radio, violinists pulling on their bows. Through recordings, we hear Yehudi Menuhin or Nirvana playing at a particular time and place; or, if the recording is a mix of different sessions, we hear an amalgam of times and places (a difference we will talk about later). In either case, we seem to hear them playing; given the most fabulous surround sound, we seem to hear them playing over there . Or, at least, for convenience, we would say we hear them play over there. Yet, they are not over there; they are not anywhere now; they are gone. Only the recordings, not the actual players, not the moments they played, remain. What we hear is really the recordings. (Again, we can say something similar about seeing pictures of things; what is pictured does not exist. But the picture does).

For the other senses, there are less familiar examples. Consider the tactile sense, i.e., the sense of touch. There are not so obvious examples of what you might call a feeling-picture or feeling-image. But there are one or two, mainly related to infant's games and toys (perhaps adults just don't play so easily with such personal space).

I bought a book for my niece several years ago which had circles of texture on each page (it was about 'Spot the Dog', I think). On the first page, they had a picture of a dog, with a little circle of fur; on the next page, a picture of a red ball with a little circle of red rubber. Here, the child is presented with the 'feeling of dog fur', of rubber balls, and so on, with no actual dogs or balls being there (we hope; one would hope the fur is not actually dog, given the mass production of these books). Trying to find my book's name, I found this on Amazon - I'm a Dog, but this not the same one; it's done by Art Spiegelman; but it also seems to be a tactile book - but I haven't actually felt the book, so I can't really say.

But, despite what the last book claims, there are no dogs, rubber balls or dog-bits and rubber ball-bits in these books. There are just representations of dogs, rubber balls or dog- and ball- bits.

Another example of a 'touch-image' (as I will keep calling it here) is a children's game. This game uses the feeling of one thing to stand for the feeling of another. Do you remember 'itsy bitsy spider'? A parent slowly walks their fingers up the kid's arm, all the time reciting a rhyme -'itsy bitsy spider, went up the water-spout' -, to the mounting excitement/worry of the child. The parent, of course, is pretending that there is a viciously poisonous spider crawling up their arm. As is often said about these things, there is probably an evolutionary reason why parents do this to their kids: Through this game, the child is taught the terrifying truth that small, furry, cute creatures such as house-spiders may actually be lethal (in Ireland, this is a terrible falsehood). And they do it in a very safe way: in this case, there is no actual spider (of course, in Ireland, an actual spider would be just as safe).

(There is a version with a bear; isn't there? The bear is walking up the kid's arm from their palm. But this version never made sense to me).

There is a more modern example of touch-images. A certain type of computer-game joystick/controller/handle vibrates in response to certain situations in the game: if it's a driving game, it vibrates when the 'car' 'goes over' 'rough' 'terrain'.

What about the other of the traditional five senses - 'taste-pictures' and 'smell-pictures'? Again, what we need is a situation where what we taste or smell is not some particular thing but only represents it in some way. For smell: On my way home in the old days in Cork, I used walk past the Gate cinema and get a fantastic popcorn smell from its air-conditioning blowing out on to the street. I have never tasted popcorn like that, certainly not in that cinema. The taste never matched the smell (popcorn never does, in my experience).

However, this is not the example I'm looking for. What I've done here is used how something smells to make a judgement about how it tastes. This is related to what I'm talking about - such associations are likely to be part of our overall idea about what we think we are smelling, tasting, hearing, seeing, etc - but it is a different situation to what I'm concerned with. Instead of taking the actual smell of popcorn to mean something about its taste, I am concerned with where what we smell is not popcorn but only smells like it.

One example of this would be table polish. I grew up with a brand of table polish which smelled like pine needles, but wasn't actually pine needles; nor am I sure that the pressurised gas in the container was made from pine needles. Similarly, air-fresheners usually have some sort of sea/wood/meadow smell, as do types of shower gel, shampoo. Then there's aftershave and perfume, including, if they worked, pheromene sprays. (There is a bottle of tea tree shampoo in the shower room; I don't know what tea tree is; I'd like to say it's...what tea comes from. But is it? Anyway, I've never smelled a tea tree, except in these bottles - if that's how it smells). In general, with these: something smells like Fantastic Y but is actually just a sprayed Average X.

I just thought of another one: chocolate-smelling erasers (in the shape of bourbon creams); boy, did I want to eat them (until I ate one).

And the same, of course, with taste. As Schlosser discusses in Fast Food Nation (Amazon listing), we can make synthetic versions of nearly all flavours: vanilla, strawberry, beef, chicken (human blood, maybe?); we can then stick it in something else, particularly something bland, e.g., crisps, cereal, to everyone's delight.

All of these constructs represent but are not the real thing. For the most case, we - at least, adults - know that they are not really what they seem like. But we smell, taste, hear, see and feel them all the same as being like the real thing; after all, this is why they are even made like this.

Seeing Images

As said, in a very important way, constructs are not especially different regarding our awareness of them and what they represent. Films, books, music, perfumes and fake flavours all work on the sensory organs of our body the way everything else we sense works on them. I will discuss that in more detail later, but a brief example will do here.

Very sketchily, when I see a horse, this happens: light travels from the horse to my eye, stimulating nerves attached to my eye; these nerves then set off neural processing in my brain; this neural processing then, somehow, causes, or is, my seeing of the horse. When I see a picture of a horse, light travels from the picture to my eye, stimulating nerves attached to my eye; these nerves then set off neural processing in my brain; this neural processing then, somehow, causes, or is, my seeing of a picture of a horse.

You can do this with other sensory modes as well - taste, touch, smell, and so on - but like all philosophers only slightly educated in the ways of neuroscience, cognitive science, and psychology, I'm sticking with vision for most of this.

In order, then, to get this image or representation of something, we just open our eyes and look at it. In addition, the image is out there, and public, and physical. We see it because light shines on it. Or we hear it because of vibrations on its surface, or we feel it because it touches our skin - whatever we say, the image is experienced the way we experience other things that are real.

As such, thinking of an image itself as a physical thing is not a general problem. How the image is displayed, what it is made of, where it is located - these are questions that can, in principle, be answered in a physical way.

But, now, of when we imagine - when we dream, hallucinate, voluntarily or by request picture 'in our mind's eye', or when we day-dream; what can we say about the physics of what we experience there? Can we say the same about our experience of those images as films, perfume and children's books?

Imagine a horse; imagine seeing it. What colour is the horse? How far away is it? Which way is it facing? What is behind it? Does it fit to say this about what you experience? -: light travels from the image of the horse to your eye, stimulating nerves attached to your eye; these nerves then set off neural processing in your brain; this neural processing then, somehow, causes, or is, your seeing the image of the horse. And that is what happens when you imagine the horse.

Or consider remembering seeing a horse. Consider some day when you saw one for real; or, if you have never done so, imagine the last time you saw a picture of a horse. Can you say that you see the image of the remembered horse by the following process: light travels from the image of the remembered horse, stimulating nerves attached to your eye; these nerves then set off neural processing in your brain; this neural processing then, somehow, causes, or is, your seeing the image of the horse.

This can't be what's going on for what we imagine or remember.

The Non-existence of Imagined Things

Earlier, I discussed the idea that memories/imaginings and perceptions were different in terms of vivacity of sensation. I gave a few reasons to not think of this as the big difference; notably, it sometimes seems as if we are seeing, hearing, etc. things vividly when there is nothing there.

There is, however, a significant difference between the experience in remembering/imagining and the experience in perceiving. What we perceive exists now*; what we remember or imagine does not.

[*This is not a simple claim; given a certain understanding of 'now', half of my thesis argues against the claim. One of the arguments of that thesis, from assumptions in contemporary physics and cognitive science, can be also found in my forthcoming paper in the Journal of Consciousness Studies. But never mind that for now].

This is also true of what is represented in films, recordings, and games about spiders: what we perceive exists now; what is represented in film, music, and games does not. But the big difference between experiencing those sorts of things and experiencing what we remember and imagine is, in the former cases, something in the world stimulates the senses. The parent's fingers, the flickering projection on the wall, the low-volume vibrations in the ear-piece - all of these operate on our senses, setting off the chain of events that lead to our feeling, seeing or hearing them.

But when it comes to imagining and remembering then, no matter how compelling or overwhelming these experiences are, there is nothing stimulating our senses now. When you imagined the horse - or imagined the tactile book I described earlier - you experienced something which was not out there, out in the world which you share with me and everyone else; it was not outside your head, now.

This probably seems obvious and hardly needs stating. But I do for this reason: in the last entry, I talked about when we imagine something, e,g., a rabbit on a blue square, we are experiencing something, I have suggested that whatever we are experiencing seems to be combinations of things that are rabbit-shaped, blue-coloured and square-shaped.

But if we do experience such things, there are several questions about them: first, if they are not actually rabbits or blue squares, then what are they?  And if they're not out there in the world, aren't they somewhere? So, where are they?

Mental Space

According to Warner, the medieval (and, if he is the same person alchemical) scholar Fludd thought that, when we imagine something, we did not just see it as we see public things. Nothing we imagine seeing comes through our senses from the world. Instead, we experience an image projected from somewhere in ourselves onto something in our mind. In medieval times, such images of our imaginings would be compared to images from a magic lantern, These days, they are better compared to the images from a film projector. If we put this in the terms here, what we see, hear, etc., then, is literally a projection. This is what we have when we imagine something.

Fludd's concern with projection suggests that there is another view to which he is responding: images operate just like perceptions - we see visual images, hear sound images, etc. Fludd's revision is that we cause them in some way, rather than they happen to us. But what underlies both kinds of thinking is the idea that the images in our mind are just as see-able, touch-able, etc., as objects in the world. It's just that they are projection in our minds.

But does this tell us where what we imagine is located? Not really. All it says is this: what we imagine is projected 'in' our minds. But 'in our minds'? - where is that?

We might start by saying that image is where it seems to be. This raises yet another question. Where does the image seem to be? By 'seem to be' we could mean one of two things: where what the image is of seems to be or where the image itself seems to be.

The location of what the image is about doesn't seem relevant: it is commonly somewhere public and certainly not 'just' in our minds. Think back to imagining the horse - where did you imagine seeing it again? Is that also where what you're the image is when you imagine the horse? Or, say you dream about being out in the depth of space fighting aliens, were the images you saw in your dream really in the depth of space?

It seems as if what we imagine can be anywhere in this world. It can even be in places that don't exist, e.g., Gotham City, Bognor Regis. So, where what we dream about or imagine takes place could be anywhere, even somewhere non-existent. But I don't think the image can be in these places. If we experience it, it can't be somewhere that doesn't exist. And even if what we imagine is somewhere that exists, it sounds bizarre to think that the image is there as well just for that reason. This would be claiming that, if you imagine the horse as standing outside the back door, then the image, what you are experiencing, is also outside the back door.

So, we still have the original question: where is what we experience when we imagine something? Where is the image?

We might, at this stage, ask where the image itself seems to be. But this is where I find things get difficult. When I imagine a horse standing outside the back door, the imagined location is easy - outside the back door. But where the image seems to be...I'm not sure I've any idea at all about that one. First thought is this: if it seems only to be an image, it doesn't seem to be in the world I can interact with; it doesn't seem to be in the world that you and I share. But, other than this negative appearance - it doesn't seem to be somewhere I can go to, or tell you to go - I can't with any certainty say anything about where it seems to be.

By default, I suppose I'd say that the image is in me, i.e., the image is in my mind or in my head. It is, after all, my image, my imagining, my imagination - so it seems fair enough that it is somewhere inside of me, if it's anywhere. And I think most people would at least speak that way - 'the mind's eye', again - and understand such references when asked to picture things. Say I ask you to imagine or remember the horse, and you start drawing a picture of the horse. I can tell you 'no, don't draw it; just picture it in your head', I think you'd understand what I mean - I mean 'imagine it'.

On the face of it, I think that this is a fairly common thing to say. It might very well be where images are (which I'll discuss in a later section). I do, however, think it also raises certain commitments which cause problems. But this concerns either what we're in the habit of saying or else how the images really are. But, think for a moment: when you're imagining, does the image seem to be in your head? Do you have that sense of place for your imagination?

What makes something seem to be in your head? Is there anything like that? Well how about this. Say you have a headache - you can easily locate that pain. It's there, behind your temple. Say your eyes are tired - you can feel the weariness, ache and soreness on your lids. I had neuralgia once - my face sagged and I could feel the sharp and constant pain down one side of it. There's the throbbing of blood in your ears. And the taste of chocolate can seem to be in the mouth, which is in the head, so...some things can seem to be located in my head.

But does a mental image seem located like this? If so, it should seem to be located at some place in our heads; or even if it's not at any particular fixed location, we should have a vague sense of it being somewhere  in our heads. Such imprecise 'it's in here somewhere' can be compared to the most awful of awful toothaches (anyone who's had one knows what I'm saying).  Imagine a sunny day last year. If we're right about how images seem, I can say, just by how it seems, that the image seems to be located somewhere, e.g., in the front right corner of my head, just above and behind my right eye. Or it seems to be spread around the middle of my head, i.e., throughout my brain.

Is this something you have experienced when you imagine? Would you be surprised if someone told you 'you know - when you imagine seeing a sunny day, it actually happens in your heart. Or in the back of you neck.' Would you think 'what? How strange! It has always seemed to me to be just behind my throat!'

For myself, I don't have this sense of location for images. I do have it for what I imagine (to some extent; something I also want to talk about). But images themselves: they just don't seem to be  something whose spatial location is as identifiable as (i) what I perceive in the world, e.g., the stuffed pheasant staring right at me now, or (ii) what the images represent, e.g., the horse in the field used throughout this discussion (this is imagined; there are no horses (or pictures of them) at all in view). If this is right of people in general, we can't tell where images are from where they seem to be - because they don't clearly seem to be anywhere.

So, again, where are images?

Let's go back to the medieval alchemist Fludd. According to the view I'm taking (or possibly just adapting) from Fludd, the location of images is literally in some sort of private space; this is where they are projected. This space is not connected to the public space you see, hear, touch and so on.

In this private space, all our imaginings occur: all our dreams, nightmares, easy wish-fulfillments, half-baked fantasies, hallucinations, overwhelming memories. And we might have a similar process for how we see them. We may be stimulated by them, which then sets off neural processing, and so on, until we see them.

So, where we have a physical eye for the public world, we now also have a 'mind's eye' for the private one; and this mind's eye is stimulated by visual images, e.g., imagined blue squares. Where we have a physical ear for the public world, we now also have a 'mind's ear' for the private one; and this mind's ear is stimulated by sound-images, e.g., hallucinated voices, the complex sounds Beethoven heard in his head in the last few years of his life; he wrote as symphonies, even though he was deaf and so never heard them in the public and physical world.

We could think of this space as a little theatre if we wished, perhaps as a 'Cartesian' theatre; I'll discuss that view in more depth later. But why suppose the private space is 'little'?  A little theatre would suggest that there is some obvious limit to a private space. But if it's a private space, what could that limit be? The limits of the brain? But the brain is in the public space; the idea here is that what is in the private space is not what is in the public one. This is just why our images can occur without there being anything in the world.  So, if you go for this view, this private space could be any size, even as big as the public one (whatever we could say that size is).

Do you think that this solves our problem about where images are?

No.

Are there any problems with it?

Yes.