![]() Perceptualism about the imagination says that when you close your eyes and imagine a ripe, yellow banana, you are in a visual state-you are visualising. Let us call a theory of the imagination ‘perceptualist’ just in case it claims that states of the imagination are a species of perceptual experience. While experiments conducted on healthy, neurotypical subjects indicate substantial neural overlap, there is extensive clinical evidence of dissociations between imagery and perception in the brain, most notably in the case of aphantasia. ![]() ![]() Current neuropsychology is shown to be equivocal at best on this matter. The paper also defuses a recent, influential argument for perceptualism based on the ‘discovery’ that visual perception and mental imagery share a significant neural substrate: circuitry in V1, the brain’s primary visual cortex. The arguments are based on high-level perceptual content and, distinctly, cognitive penetration. This paper labels such a view ‘perceptualism’ about the imagination and supplies new arguments against it. mental imagery, are a proper subset of perceptual experience. How tight is the conceptual connection between imagination and perception? A number of philosophers, from the early moderns to present-day predictive processing theorists, tie the knot as tightly as they can, claiming that states of the imagination, i.e. ![]()
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