It is responsible for everything from our ability to answer wrenching existential questions with a bible and a pin to our inability to avoid seeing every dog as looking like its owner. But when it comes to explaining the mind, it is not clear whether this Polonian predilection of ours is a boon or a bain. It is fashionable these days to blame this problem on Descartes, but the much more ancient pedigree of religion and belief in the immaterial soul hint that the problem may be more deeply rooted than anything planted in our minds in the seventeenth century. Worse still, the nets implemented on computers are usually discrete, serial simulations of what are intended to be continuous, parallel, distributed systems. Each of these senses has detectors, with complex sensations involving the activity of combinations of them.
Color is a familiar example.
Among the cones in the retina there are some that are selectively activated by red, others by green, and still others by blue. Leaving out a few complicating details, it can be said that linear combinations of the activation levels of each of those three detectors will generate all the colors we are capable of seeing. It accordingly seems correct to describe color space vectorially as a sensory activation space. As a similar story can be told about the other senses, it seems reasonable to think of all sensory input as vector activations of some kind. Churchland next moves a level higher than raw sensory processing to the more complex case of face recognition.