More thoughts on the world as external memory

I’ve been reading through J. Kevin O’Regan’s book Why red doesn’t sound like a bell: Understanding the feel of consciousness. In the fall semester of this past year, I took a cognitive neuroscience and philosophy of mind class in the same semester and it was a really neat opportunity to see how thinking using vastly different methods on essentially the same topic can be insightful in different ways. In a sense, the philosophy of mind course was about consciousness—after all, who cares about the mind if you ignore consciousness—but still, I got the sense that in both philosophy and neuroscience, consciousness is such an intractable issue that we’re so ill-equipped to thinking about that facing it head-on tends to be only marginally fruitful. Nonetheless, those two classes left me in the search for theories of consciousness—the grand-unified theories of the mind that promise to finally explain our very experience as conscious things. I’ve read quite a bit about consciousness. As I’ve gone along, though, I’ve done my best to keep gravitating towards thinkers that touch on my own areas of interest in psychology and neuroscience and certainly expect a good amount of neuroscientific rigidity in the theories that are presented even if they’re mostly speculation.

It's pretty funny to me, then, that I’ve finally stumbled onto J. Kevin O’Regan’s sensorimotor theory of consciousness. Sensorimotor neuroscience is exactly what I’ve done all summer. The promise of the keys to understanding consciousness lying in the very sensorimotor systems I’ve spent hundreds of hours thinking, reading, and writing about over the last few months is almost too good to be true.

Many of the arguments O’Regan makes really speak to me. The idea of the world as external visual memory is obviously something that speaks to me and the idea of our perception formation process involving implicit questions we ask about the scene is neat. Insofar as details about the visual world are near-instantaneously available to us following the posing of a question, that piece of detail can be said to be a part of our visual world, just not exactly in the photographic way we might assume. Likewise, though, if some detail about the world is not determinable, then I think we’d be hard-pressed to consider it a part of our visual world at all, photograph or not.  

Sometimes, I really wonder what the purpose of just making these theoretical points is. It’s not like we can definitively prove that the sensorimotor theory of consciousness is correct. In fact, like every other grand-unifying theory of consciousness, it is bound to be incorrect in significant ways. I think at the end of the day, though, this theoretical, armchair-esque psychology can be really valuable. By really trying to uncover what’s at the core of our theories, we reveal any contradictions or unwelcome homunculi hiding in the shadows. They keep us on our feet and require us to question the very assumptions that are motivating our scientific inquiries.

As a young person just starting to really get involved with research in psychology and neuroscience, I do value seeing these diverse perspectives and being challenged to question my implicit views about the nature of the things that I study. Maybe by coming into it all with these more radical ideas as my baseline, I’ll be able to form new kinds of intuitions that I would not otherwise have. Maybe I’m going to fall down a rabbit hole of flawed thinking that will explode in my face five to ten years from now. We’ll have to see.