This 1992 article gives an idea what MVT (Median Vision Theory) is about, but does not include more recent work (MA on R.E.M. & dreams, and PHD paper on Real Time, Connectionist self-organisation).
MEDIAN VISION (aka Phantom Eye) THEORY:
An Answer to the ‘Mind-Body Problem’
I hope to show how the ability to have mental representations first occurred in early evolution, and how this basic trick becomes more refined as the ages pass. A delineation of this ‘trick’ or ‘mechanism,' I contend, clears up a whole cluster of related questions which Schopenhauer called "the world-knot." If MVT can be shown true (by experiments or by development of applications, then it provides us a simplifying and elegant Inter-Theoretic Reduction.
Apart possibly for Jerrison’s Recency Theory, there are few if any alternative evolutionary narratives for the emergence of modern self-referential consciousness.
MVT can be summarised that “the neural netware of the brain instantiates (from neural information) not only our experience of the world (qualia) but also a virtual Sense Organ from the Primal eye evolutionary blueprint. The fact that seer and seen are both part of the same process overcomes the Dualist objections leveled against Descartes’ very different Pineal GLAND theory, particularly Leibnitz objection that “Like can only interact with Like”, and that to be fully identical, the two things must be interchangeable.
Copyright Steve Nichols (1979 - 2006)
