On representation

[Magical Realist]

What does it mean to say that such and such is represented by an image or object? That a totally unique and perceived thing can be allowed to stand in for another thing or state as if it were present? For example I see your face. I almost unconsciously compute at lightning speed the geometrical configuration of your facial details--the eye brows and mouth mainly--as representing a certain subjective mood or emotion inside you. This is something we have learned from years of experience with watching faces and seeing them as expressing certain invisible subjective states to us. We can say that these facial expressions "represent" those states. That they stand in for the actual presence of those states in our own consciousness.

Or we hear someone utter something. The words and how they are spoken immediately represent to us some state that is not itself experienced but only imagined. Representation then seems to pivot on this capacity for things or actions or events to "RE-present" in the sense of presenting something only thru the being of something else. That something else can only represent to the extent that conceals it's own being. The facial expressions and the uttered words are not experienced "in themselves" as present. They are the media thru which something else is made present. Ironically what represents only does so by seeming not to be present and instead immediately referring to something else. The image or thing NOT experienced as a thing in itself but more like an icon or link that immediately takes us somewhere else. Thoughts?

[C C]

[...] Representation then seems to pivot on this capacity for things or actions or events to "RE-present" in the sense of presenting something only thru the being of something else. That something else can only represent to the extent that conceals it's own being. The facial expressions and the uttered words are not experienced "in themselves" as present. They are the media thru which something else is made present. Ironically what represents only does so by seeming not to be present and instead immediately referring to something else. The image or thing NOT experienced as a thing in itself but more like an icon or link that immediately takes us somewhere else. Thoughts?

All knowledge (or meaning) seems to just be different modes of phenomenal experience reciprocally engaging with each other. For instance, if I see a picture of an historical figure, an inner voice (the auditory mode) responds to that phantasm of the visual mode by declaring that it is Abraham Lincoln. That in turn might trigger additional inner images and narrative-like thoughts which relate that particular "sound presentation" to other information expressed by those back-and-forth exchanges between modes.

Of course, the above interactions are purely what's taking place at the empirical or overtly "shown" level of consciousness. In terms of what is covertly transpiring in the brain with respect to neural patterns and electrochemical activity, that concreteness would be rendered into a bunch of abstract diagrams and technical nomenclature radically different from the direct play and theater of those socializing manifestations.

And people suffering from aphantasia and anendophasia would lack those private thoughts expressed as images and inner voices. Sometimes having to speak aloud or write it down or act it out in order to be sure what they are thinking (in their private darkness or silence).

[confused2]

The image or thing NOT experienced as a thing in itself but more like an icon or link that immediately takes us somewhere else. Thoughts?

Reading! He wrote, having just emerged from a castle built by giants. Much more than just Abe Lincoln or not. Trees, dogs, 700 Jehar warriors sparring with practice swords. Friendship, fear - all there. Just words on a page.

[Magical Realist]

For instance, if I see a picture of an historical figure, an inner voice (the auditory mode) responds to that phantasm of the visual mode by declaring that it is Abraham Lincoln. That in turn might trigger additional inner images and narrative-like thoughts which relate that particular "sound presentation" to other information expressed by those back-and-forth exchanges between modes.

There is somehow an unconscious process of signification going on between the visual experience of the image of Abe Lincoln and the experience of the verbally encoded data it triggers. The phenomenality of the picture itself (as just being a picture of a man) is replaced with the phenomenality of all these ideas and facts associated with it. Blinded to the presence of the sign, we are transported to the inwardly-voiced data of its relations with the real world. Phenomenality itself, as the immediate awareness of the thing in itself, supplanted by the conceptuality of remembered ideas and facts it conjures in our minds. Perceptual experience transformed instantaneously into abstract linguistic meaning. It all happens so autonomously and mechanistically, as if it is something we have been conditioned for.

All knowledge (or meaning) seems to just be different modes of phenomenal experience reciprocally engaging with each other.

Reminds me of RR's observation:

"There is nothing to be known about anything except an initially large, and forever expandable, web of relations to other things. Everything that can serve as a term of relation can be dissolved into another set of relations, and so on for ever. There are, so to speak, relations all the way down, all the way up, and all the way out in every direction: you never reach something which is not just one more nexus of relations."-----Richard Rorty