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Inquiring into, ‘If the brain does not function through images, what happens to the concept of ‘representation’, biologists Umberto Maturana ’s and Francisco Varela ’s (Maturana and Varela 1991) put out radical hypothesis that perception is not representation , because the brain does not build models of an external reality, but it generates activity patterns that maintain its own operational closure while coupled with an environment. Maturana (1997) later states: “Speaking of a representation of the environment, or the surroundings, in the organization of a living system, it may be useful as a metaphor ; however, representation is inadequate to reveal the actual organization of an autopoietic [self-organizing living] system.” (Maturana 1997, p 94). This potentially paradigm altering study results in a proposal to differentiate Representation as a metaphor designating what apparently occurs when comparing an image, photographic or artistic reproduction, with its original in nature; and (Mental) Representation as a metaphor designating what an observer assumes is happening in the mind of a subject, who may be the observer himself/herself. Writing specifically on the Concept of Representation , Marcos Herrera (2023) uses an example of the woodblock print “Fine Wind, Clear Morning”, also known as “Red Fuji” by Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai (1830-32), which is known as a representation of Mount Fuji . According to Roger Perrón , (2002), representation involves two relationships: On the one hand, the representation is similar to the object represented in such way that it can evoke it: the arrangement of the points in the drawing corresponds to the arrangement of the object in reality. On the other hand, the representation symbolically replaces the represented object. Thus, the print is not Mount Fuji itself, but rather a substitute for that object, which it evokes. For this reason, a fundamental condition for understanding and using the concept of representation is to differentiate between the representation and what is represented (Herrera, 2023). In philosophy, psychology, and psychoanalysis, there is a recognition of mental representation , defined as an internal image, within the mind, of an external object that one perceives and can evoke even when it is no longer present. Until the nineteenth century, philosophers and psychologists referred to such a mental or internal representation as an “idea.” In this regard, Hume distinguished between impressions or sensations on the one hand, and their faint reproductions formed by the imagination on the other, which he called “ideas” in English (Röd, 1996; Prechtl and Burkard, 1996; Herrera, 2010). Like other forms of representation, mental representation resembles the external object and can evoke it in its absence. In the same way, the mental representation symbolically replaces the represented object—it stands in place of the external object. In consequence, mental representations serve as instruments of thought. As with other types of representation, a fundamental condition for understanding a mental representation and using it for thinking is the ability to distinguish it from the object it represents (Herrera, 2023).
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