[From Bruce Nevin (20000211.1244 EST)]
Richard Kennaway (20000211.1720 GMT)]
···
At 05:32 PM 02/11/2000 +0000, Richard Kennaway wrote:
"It is not necessary to believe that anything whatever is transmitted
along the optic nerve in the activity of perception...
I am baffled by the first sentence. Surely it *is* necessary to believe
that something is transmitted along the optic nerve, because you can stick
electrodes in and observe signals flowing along it. It is also necessary
to believe that these signals are involved in the activity of (visual)
perception, because if they are blocked, so is perception.
FWIW, my reading of this was that there is nothing like "a chunk of
information" that is passed along in a unitary way for processing -- in
other words, analog rather than digital, and in a continuous loop (as the
rest of the quotation says) rather than in discrete stages of processing.
Bruce Nevin