Likewise, if we consider production of speech, no one has ever found any evidence at all, neurological or otherwise, to support an hypothesis that it operates by the use of symbols represented somehow in the brain. The more realistic alternative is to suppose that what is internal is not symbolic representations of words or morphemes or the like, but the means of producing such forms (as speech or writing).
No Images in the Brain
On this model, there are no images in the brain — nor in the mind.[1] There are neuronal firing patterns. Some of these patterns correlate with differentiations of the visually perceivable. Their firing correlates with experiencing such differentiations — that is, with having visual experiences.[2]
Reactivation of past patterns can produce visual experience in the absence of the originally perceived differentiables. When multiple such past patterns are selectively regenerated and integrated, new visual experiences may be constructed — imagined. These imagined experiences can be expressed through the skeleto-muscular system as pictorial images, which others can then perceive and categorise.
More generally: to remain congruent with this model, we must abandon the notion that there are symbols or representations in brains.[3] Brains contain cells and tissues, not things like words or pictures. What they do is perform functions. It is only through bodily expression — skeleto-muscular action — that symbols and representations become possible: as perceivable expressions that can be categorised, recategorised, and re-expressed.
Lamb (2005), modelling language in neurological terms, makes the point explicitly:
“Likewise, if we consider production of speech, no one has ever found any evidence at all, neurological or otherwise, to support an hypothesis that it operates by the use of symbols represented somehow in the brain. The more realistic alternative is to suppose that what is internal is not symbolic representations of words or morphemes or the like, but the means of producing such forms (as speech or writing).”
Footnotes:
[1] The term mind is often used in this context, but since the mind is not a detectable material entity, it cannot be congruently construed as a place within the material universe modelled by science. See the later discussion of mind-as-process.
[2] See Edelman & Tononi (2000: 202–3).
[3] Claims that this is merely metaphorical (e.g. Hofstadter, Ramachandran) fail to provide a congruent reformulation.
[4] The idea that symbols exist in brains aligns with both the instructionist model and with naïve realism — the belief that the world consists of real categories that are somehow mirrored inside the brain.