[Wittrs] Mental Maps (Was Re: When is "brain talk" really dualism?)
- From: "swmaerske" <SWMirsky@xxxxxxx>
- To: wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 06 Sep 2009 01:25:58 -0000
--- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, Glen Sizemore <gmsizemore2@...> wrote:
>
>
Glen writes: "Take, for example, the notion of 'cognitive maps'.
Animals (and humans) are often said to get from one place to another, by
consulting 'maps' in their minds or brains. But does this make sense?"
I think there's a basic misunderstanding in the above. We can certainly speak
of mapping in brains without any notion of "consulting" a map as part of how we
"use" it. My wife and I have a standing joke. She is abysmally bad when it
comes to figuring out where she is and gets lost very easily. Her solution is
to learn landmarks or, absent this, to ask lots of people. I, on the other
hand, can generally find my way around in new places. I just need a general
idea of what the lay of the land looks like. I describe this to her as "having
a map in my head".
Of course I don't literally mean I have one folded up inside or even a perfect
picture I can conjure up at will of a given area with all the details, etc. I
can visualize a general, somewhat vague picture if I've seen maps of the area
before (or envision one just from a general knowledge of the area). I can
recollect important details of such mental maps at times, too, but I certainly
don't have anything like a real map in my head. I would say that I have a
better ability than she does to visualize physical space and to remember
important aspects of it. My experience of doing this leads me to say that it
isn't mere behavior at work either. When we're driving in a new area and, after
getting my bearings vis a vis some general sense of where we are, I can get us
to where we need to be by doing just this kind of visualization. Nor do I think
this is especially unique. Many, I'm sure, have this ability as two of my three
children seem to have good sense of directions, too. But one of them does not.
She takes after her mother.
So speaking of this phenomenon is certainly one way we may speak of mental
mapping, a way that is certainly not consistent with a classical behaviorist
account since mental imaging, at least in my own experience, is an integral
part of it. On the other hand, perhaps Glen or Girardo would want to subsume
this within the expanded behaviorism they seem to be defending here. But that
aside, the mere fact of this phenomenon suggests that speaking of maps in one's
head is not a matter of applying the wrong grammar. It's just a different
grammar.
But, of course, when we speak about mapping or picturing in our brains from the
standpoint of what is called cognitive science or even neuroscience, we are not
referring to this mental imaging and retention re: particular physical layouts.
Something less explicit, less accessible to the conscious mind is actually at
issue in such a case, i.e., the proposal that the way (or part of the way) the
mind works is by developing various structured representations of the stimuli
being received through one's sensory apparatus.
Thus, on such a view (though probably not to our resident behaviorists) it
makes sense to theorize (and this is only theory, of course, because we cannot
actually access this kind of process) that, for mental features like awareness,
intentionality, selfhood, etc., to occur there has to be some complex system of
representations (sensory signals becoming brain signals) which are integrated
with a host of others (incoming and previously received) to form various linked
structural pictures of what is.
These would presumably include mappings of different aspects of the world at
large, of particular types of sensory inputs, of the elements we take to be the
self in ourselves and, of course, various cross combinations and maps of other
maps.
This notion of mapping or picturing is, as noted, entirely theoretical, being
one proposed way in which we might be able to explain how the brain manages to
produce the totality of our experiences (being a subject).
So neither idea about mapping involves any notion that we are talking about the
kinds of maps we sometimes make or buy in a store and carry around with us to
make reference to when someone, like my wife, gets lost. Given this, there is
no grammatical confusion to note, only a realization that our words, including
words like "map" or "mapping", have more than one use and that, merely because
we sometimes use "map" to refer to a folded piece of paper with various lines
on it with certain established conventions for reading it, we are supposing
that we doing the same thing when we speak of mapping in our heads.
By the way and for what it's worth, my wife can't read maps in her hands
anymore than she can in her head so there does seem to be a difference in the
cognitive functions of her brain and mine in this regard.
SWM
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