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A special case of invariance involves the issue I have called Brain Anchoring. One of the most disturbing properties of the phenomenal world for models of the perceptual mechanism involves the subjective impression that the phenomenal world rotates relative to our perceived head as our head rotates relative to the world, and that objects in perception are observed to translate and rotate while maintaining their perceived structural integrity and recognized identity in their motions through the perceived world.
If we assume that the structural percept of the world is represented by a spatial pattern of activation of some sort in the tissue of the brain, this suggests that the internal representation of external objects and surfaces is not anchored to the tissue of the brain, as suggested by current concepts of neural representation, but is free to rotate and translate coherently relative to the neural substrate, as suggested in Köhler's field theory (Köhler & Held 1947). In other words the perceptual picture of the world can move relative to the representational substrate, and discrete patterns of perceptual structure can move relative to that background while maintaining their perceptual integrity and recognized identity.
Exactly how this property is achieved in the brain poses perhaps the greatest challenge to contemporary neuroscience.
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