“Believe it or not, for some decades, there was a serious debate about whether people really had mental images in their mind—an actual picture of a chair somewhere—or if people just naively thought they had mental images (having been misled by “introspection”, a very bad forbidden activity), while actually just having a little “chair” label, like a LISP token, active in their brain”—AFAIK, you misrepresent the debate. It was rather about what is primary and what is secondary. Sure, your brain paints a chair—but does it first paint the chair and then search for its properties, or is the mental image merely one of the properties of a pre-found concept (the correspondence to the options you represent is _in the order given_)? Not _that_ silly, is it? (It still has a right answer, but it happens to be the second one not the first one.)
“Believe it or not, for some decades, there was a serious debate about whether people really had mental images in their mind—an actual picture of a chair somewhere—or if people just naively thought they had mental images (having been misled by “introspection”, a very bad forbidden activity), while actually just having a little “chair” label, like a LISP token, active in their brain”—AFAIK, you misrepresent the debate. It was rather about what is primary and what is secondary. Sure, your brain paints a chair—but does it first paint the chair and then search for its properties, or is the mental image merely one of the properties of a pre-found concept (the correspondence to the options you represent is _in the order given_)? Not _that_ silly, is it? (It still has a right answer, but it happens to be the second one not the first one.)