I do not experience the world as a simultaneously present volumetric whole

You claim that the entire world around you is represented simultaneously and in parallel in your brain in a 3D volumetric form. As far as personal experience goes, consider when I enter a new room with lots of stuff in it, and I am given a few minutes to look around and build my "visual experience". At this point I should have a 3D voxel-by-voxel picture of the room in my brain, right? Well now you ask me to close my eyes and then immediately ask me a question like "where is the gray book on conscious experience in relation to the blue book on neurophysiology." Without being allowed to look at the bookshelf containing the books, I will almost certainly be unable to answer that question. In other words, I don't really have a full 3D volumetric picture in my head that covers the entire world around me that I can reference in order to answer your question (even the part of the world that I was just looking at the instant before you asked me the question). Instead I need to refer back to the world (which is its own 3D model) to answer detailed spatial questions like that. This sort of thing has been shown psychophysically as well in the phenomenon of change blindness. My own phenomenological experience of space is much more like a flitting focus of attention that can be moved to different objects or spaces (e.g. the space of the room I am in, or the orientation space of an object in the room that I might grasp). It does not simultanously include all of the world around me in a 3D voxel-by-voxel form.

So although we do not see everything clearly simultaneously in all directions, whatever we do see, we see as a volumetric spatial structure. And we see that structure located at a specific location in the 3-D framework of surrounding space.

As for change blindness, it is often cited as evidence that our conscious experience contains a lot less information than it seems to, which is why the naïve realists are all going ga-ga over this new trendy apparent confirmation of their untenable position. But although the phenomenon is real, the conclusion is wrong, as I point out in

Change Blindness

And the same thing with your description of your experience of a room. Of course you can't see the room when you close your eyes and try to remember it. But that is because you can't remember it, not because you can't see it when your eyes are open. The fact that sensory experience requires sensory input does not change the fact that it is an experience of an internal representation.

© 2003 Steven Lehar, Manchester, MA USA. All rights reserved.