Does the mind take up volume in space?
I’m asking this from the point of view of the subjective experience of mind, not from a materialist point of view. The question came to me after pondering over some points made in this thread.
I tried to argue in that thread that certain experiences the mind is capable of having - chiefly the perception of motion - seem of necessity to be temporally extended, and therefore consciousness itself is of necessity temporally extended, and that what we experience as ‘now’ is not a point in time but a very small interval of time of some minute duration (I’m not really doing this idea justice - you really have to read through the thread to understand).
I gave an example of an experience that might contrast with those that of necessity have temporal extension - namely, the perception of color. I said that although every experience we have is experienced for a certain duration of time, one can at least imagine (without paradox or incoherency) taking a single point in time during that experience and saying that the experience is had even at that temporal point. If one were to perceive a red object, for example, it makes sense to say that at time t (where t is a singular point) the experience of seeing red was had. This cannot be said for the experience of seeing motion, for in order to experience motion, to fully experience it, one needs a minimum non-zero interval of time.
But on think about this, it occurs to me that if I am to say that in virtue of the necessary temporal extension of the experience of motion, consciousness itself is temporally extended, then by the same token, the contrasting example I gave (about seeing color) can be said to be spatially extended (for how can one see color unless on a surface extended in at least two dimensions), and therefore consciousness must have spatial extension.
Now at first, I thought this spelt the death of my time-extended-consciousness theory - surely, consciousness doesn’t also take up volume in space - but on second thought, I realized as absurd as the idea sounds, I couldn’t dismiss it either.
I thought to myself: how could a visual perception of anything which is spatially extended - whether that be color, objects, motion from one point to another - not itself require space in order to be had, that is in order to be “layed out” in our minds? Even if a visual experience, or any state of mind, is not a physical object out in objectively real space, or literally takes up volume therein, doesn’t it need some spatial array in order for it to have experiences which are, in their very character, spatially extended?
Consider a photograph of a group of people. We wouldn’t say the people are real - just that it tends to give of the illusion of real people - and so the space in which we find them, that is the space which they occupied when the picture was initially taken - is not real in the photograph. Nevertheless, the picture, as a plastering of color blotches on a two-dimensional surface, which must take up some space - must also be spatially extended, even though the space taken up is not the same as that initially taken by the people themselves.
Of course, the space taken up by the picture is a portion of the same space (and time) as that occupied by the original people (even though they occupied a different portion). When it comes to visual perception (maybe even visual images in the imagination), if they are not physical entities taking up space in the objective real space out there, then they must have their own space - maybe they generate their own space - a sort of ‘mental’ space, but a space of some kind nonetheless. If you were to hallucinate an object, it obviously wouldn’t exist in objectively real space, but just to have the hallucination, it needs some room to manifest its extended character.
Is there such a thing as a ‘mental’ space, which although different from objectively real space, is nonetheless a true space of some sort? Is the mind, or at least part of the mind, spatially extended? I honestly don’t know how to answer that question.