““There are no images.” This was the first time I noticed Riccardo Manzotti. It was a conference on art and neuroscience. Someone had spoken about the images we keep in our minds. Manzotti seemed agitated. The girl sitting next to me explained that he built robots, was a genius. “There are no images and no representations in our minds,” he insisted. “Our visual experience of the world is a continuum between see-er and seen united in a shared process of seeing.””
“Manzotti is what they call a radical externalist: for him consciousness is not safely confined within a brain whose neurons select and store information received from a separate world, appropriating, segmenting, and manipulating various forms of input. Instead, he offers a model he calls Spread Mind: consciousness is a process shared between various otherwise distinct processes which, for convenience’s sake we have separated out and stabilized in the words subject and object. Language, or at least our modern language, thus encourages a false account of experience.”
“His favorite example is the rainbow. For the rainbow experience to happen we need sunshine, raindrops, and a spectator. It is not that the sun and the raindrops cease to exist if there is no one there to see them. Manzotti is not a Bishop Berkeley. But unless someone is present at a particular point no colored arch can appear. The rainbow is hence a process requiring various elements, one of which happens to be an instrument of sense perception. It doesn’t exist whole and separate in the world nor does it exist as an acquired image in the head separated from what is perceived (the view held by the “internalists” who account for the majority of neuroscientists); rather, consciousness is spread between sunlight, raindrops, and visual cortex, creating a unique, transitory new whole, the rainbow experience. Or again: the viewer doesn’t see the world; he is part of a world process.”
“consciousness is a coming together of brain and world: the physical process begun at the window is continuing in memory and dream”
“Consciousness is the mingling of mind process with the processes we call objects that are all in a state of flux, however fast or slow.”
“If, as I believe, the orthodox, internalist vision of consciousness is false and even naive, then we have to ask why so many intelligent people hold it. It’s not hard to understand. By locating consciousness exclusively within the brain we can imagine that the subject, me, at some very deep level, is not subject to the same law of constant change that evidently governs the phenomena around me. The subject accrues and sheds attributes, but remains in essence him or herself. This allows for the notion of someone’s being responsible, even for actions carried out years ago, and hence gives rise to a particular moral universe; it also creates the comforting illusion that perhaps the self could survive separate from the world. Behind it all there is the desire to deny change in ourselves, perhaps to survive death. Anyway, to be an entity outside the world.”