You don't need an explicitly volumetric representation in the brain to account for the volumetric nature of experiences. There could be some more fluid and/or distributed representation of 3-D space. In the brain what are typically found are cells whose preferred position is modulated by things like task, eye position, neck position, head orientation, etc., and the collective activation of those many cells corresponds to our experience of phenomenal space.
That is easy enough to say in the abstract, but the devil is in the details. But in any case, whether you choose an explicitly spatial, or analogical representational strategy, or whether you express that same spatial information in a non-spatial or symbolic form, the volumetric information content of visual experience must be expressed in the representation, and it turns out that expressing that spatial information in a non-spatial form is so inefficient as to be practically impossible, as explained in...
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© 2003 Steven Lehar, Manchester, MA USA. All rights reserved.