MACKAY'S BOTTLE ANALOGY
An internal replica or representation of the bottle seems entirely unnecessary. According to Alva Noë (2000) the bottle is continuously “out there”:
[T]he bottle is right there, in your hands, to be probed as occasion arises. Why should the brain build models of the environment if the environment is present and so can serve as its own model, as an external but accessible repository for information?
“Change blindness” expert Kevin O’Regan was an originators of the “environment as its own model” idea. In his seminal (1992) paper he writes:
If I desire further details about some part of the bottle, I move my hand there. But until I actually wonder about them, I am unaware of their not being present in my consciousness, so I feel no lack... the bottle amounts to an outside memory store that can be interrogated or explored, and the feeling of “perceiving” comes from the exploratory activity itself.
O'Regan urges us to:
abandon the idea that “seeing” involves passively contemplating an internal representation of the world that has metric properties like a photograph or scale model... seeing constitutes an active process of probing the external environment as though it were a continuously available external memory.
Clark, Andy (1998) Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again. A Bradford Book The MIT Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts.
MacKay, D.M. (1967) Ways of Looking at Perception. In W. Wathen-Dunn (Ed.), Models for the Perception of Speech and Visual Form (pp.25-43). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Noë, Alva (2000). Experience and Experiment in Art. In Journal of Consciousness Studies. 7 (8-9): 123-136.
O'Regan, J. Kevin (1992) Solving the "real" mysteries of visual perception: the world as an outside memory. Canadian Journal of Psychology, 46:3: 461-488)
Andy Clark (1998: 30) casts touch “as an exploratory tool darting hither and thither so as probe and reprobe the local environment.” For Clark this extends “naturally to vision and to perception in general.” He cites Mackay's much quoted example in which fragmentary touch perceptions guide further explorations:
Imagine you are touching a bottle, with your eyes shut and your fingertips spread apart. You are receiving tactile input from only a few spatially separated points. Why don’t you have the sensation of feeling an object with holes in it, corresponding to the spaces between your fingers? The reason is, in a sense, obvious. We use touch to explore surfaces, and we are accustomed to moving our fingertips so as to encounter more surface—especially when we know that what we are holding is a bottle.