By SIMON BARON-COHEN [Entelechy] – Imagery may be necessary for human imagination. It has been suggested that all the products of the imagination are derived from imagery, following some transformation of the basic imagery. For example, Rutgers’ psychologist Alan Leslie, when he worked in London in the 1980s, proposed that imagination essentially involves three steps: Take what he called a ‘primary’ representation (which, as we have already established, is an image that has truth relations to the outside world). Then make a copy of this primary representation (Leslie calls this copy a ‘second-order’ representation). Finally, one can then introduce some change to this second-order representation, playing with its truth relationships to the outside world without jeopardising the important truth relationships that the original, primary representation needs to preserve. For Leslie, when you use your imagination, you leave your primary representation untouched (for important evolutionary reasons that we will come onto), but once you have a photocopy of this (as it were), you can do pretty much anything you like with it.ii
Let’s make this more concrete. Your eye looks at a fish. This causes your brain to form a visual image of a fish. So far, your primary representation ‘fish’ still has accurate truth relations with the outside world. The real fish has fins, eyes and gills, and so does your image of the fish. Or your eye looks at a woman, and this causes your brain to form a visual image of the woman. Now you not only have a primary representation of a fish, but you also have a primary representation of a woman. This image, like the one of the fish, is also truthful. The woman you looked at has long hair and an alluring smile, and so does your primary representation of the woman.
In Leslie’s important theory, to create such images or primary representations, the only hardware needed is a visual system that starts with an eye and ends in the visual cortex of the brain. But recall that that is only the first of his three steps. To move beyond imagery to imagination, to progress to steps two and three, one now needs an extra, special neurological mechanism. This extra mechanism can take each of the two primary representations (fish, and woman), and make copies of them. Whereas our brain previously just had two primary representations, it now has two second-order representations as well. So that was step two accomplished.
Finally, enter step three. This same special mechanism can now introduce modifications to the second-order representations at whim. It can for example delete some features on each of these second-order representations. Let’s delete the head of the fish and delete the legs of the woman. And whilst we’re at it, let’s delete her long hair. Clearly these second-order representations are no longer veridical, that is, they no longer refer to anything in the outside world truthfully. But that’s precisely the point.
Continued at Entelechy | More Chronicle & Notices.
