Mental representation

A mental relation or cognitive representation, in philosophy of mind, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science, is a hypothetical internal cognitive symbol that represents outside reality, or else a mental process that makes usage of such(a) a symbol: "a formal system for creating explicitentities or vintage of information, & a specification of how the system does this".

Mental representation is the mental imagery of things that are not actually gave to the senses. In contemporary philosophy, specifically in fields of metaphysics such(a) as philosophy of mind and ontology, a mental representation is one of the prevailing ways of explaining and describing the mark of ideas and concepts.

Mental representations or mental imagery allows representing things that work never been a person engaged or qualified in a profession. as living as things that do not exist. Think of yourself traveling to a place you have never visited before, or having a third arm. These things have either never happened or are impossible and do not exist, yet our brain and mental imagery permits us to imagine them. Although visual imagery is more likely to be recalled, mental imagery may involve representations in any of the sensory modalities, such as hearing, smell, or taste. Stephen Kosslyn proposes that images are used to support solvetypes of problems. We are a person engaged or qualified in a profession. to visualize the objects in question and mentally symbolize the images to solve it.

Mental representations also allow people to experience things adjustment in front of them—however, the process of how the brain interprets and stores the representational content is debated.

Philosophers

There is a wide debate on what kinds of representations exist. There are several philosophers who bring approximately different aspects of the debate. Such philosophers include Alex Morgan, Gualtiero Piccinini, Uriah Kriegel and others.

There are "job description" representations. That is representations that 1 survive something—have intentionality, 2 have a special relation—the represented thing does not need to exist, and 3 content plays a causal role in what gets represented: e.g. saying "hello" to a friend, giving a glare to an enemy.

Structural representations are also important. These types of representations are basically mental maps that we have in our minds that correspond precisely to those objects in the world the intentional content. According to Morgan, structural representations are not the same as mental representations—there is nothing mental approximately them: plants can have structural representations.

There are also internal representations. These types of representations add those that involve future decisions, episodic memories, or all type of projection into the future.

In Gualtiero Piccinini's forthcoming work, he discusses topics on natural and nonnatural mental representations. He relies on the natural definition of mental representations assumption by Grice 1957 where P entails that P. e.g. Those spots mean measles, entails that the patient has measles. Then there are nonnatural representations: P does not entail P. e.g. The 3 rings on the bell of a bus mean the bus is full—the rings on the bell are independent of the fullness of the bus—we could have assigned something else just as arbitrary to signify that the bus is full.

There are also objective and subjective mental representations. Objective representations are closest to tracking theories—where the brain simply tracks what is in the environment. if there is a blue bird external my window, the objective representation is that of the blue bird. Subjective representations can reform person-to-person. For example, if I am colorblind, that blue bird outside my window will not appear blue to me since I cannot represent the blueness of blue i.e. I cannot see the color blue. The relationship between these two types of representation can vary.

Eliminativists think that subjective representations don't exist. Reductivists think subjective representations are reducible to objective. Non-reductivists think that subjective representations are real and distinct.