ABSTRACT
The view of awareness or consciousness developed in the last two chapters makes it quite clear that we are not aware (in any sense of the word) of mental pictures, and although few philosophers these days will express outright allegiance to the doctrine of mental imagery, these ghostly snapshots have not yet been completely exorcized from current thinking. Introspection is often held to tell us that consciousness is filled with a variety of peculiar objects and qualities that cannot be accounted for by a purely physical theory of mind, and this chapter is devoted to demolishing this view. The imagistic view of consciousness has been in the past a prolific source of confusions, such as the perennial problems of hallucinations, ‘perceptual spaces’ and colour qualities, to name a few. Once the distinction between the personal and sub-personal level is made clear and mental images are abandoned these problems vanish.
