A radical reduction of the brain's role in memory
This essay argues that brain activity is something the mind interprets rather than something that brings mind into existence, and that much of what we attribute to the brain is mere recall.
When knowledge is mediated, its appearance is a re-presentation. Objects in consciousness are just these representations, not the unmediated thing-in-itself.
We can speak of a scale in this regard, in the sense that a topographic representation possesses greater verisimilitude to the thing it is representing—it in some sense reflects it—whereas a mere symbol (in the same manner as the degeneration from Egyptian hieroglyphs to the modern Latin alphabet) is nothing more than a forced association with a given percept. It is an arbitrary reminder, no more descriptive of, for example, my personhood than the arbitrary name “Tom” ascribed to me.
Altogether, we can regard signs, symbols, nouns, words, etc, as second-hand reminders of first-hand perceptions. They are blunt associations, a forced habit of conjunction, a coinciding pattern, which takes advantage of the fact that our mind holds together many features at once and coheres things together into a simultaneous unity. Our mind, possessing this overall unity, holds an intrinsic sense of these conjunctions and creates order on this basis.