Does the Brain Really "Encode" Stimuli?

When I say "the visual neurons encode a stimulus," it might sound like the philosophical position "the mind constructs a representation the world". In fact I am making a much more specific and restricted claim:

My assumption is that if two visual images can be discriminated perceptually, they must have caused different patterns of electrical pulses within the population of visual neurons in the brain.

If this is true, then in this sense, there is a "code" by which patterns of light in the world are related reproducibly to patterns of electrical activity in the brain.

I do not imagine that the brain activity has any similarity to the thing it "encodes" or even that the resulting percept is qualitatively "like" the object perceived. I do not claim that every difference in the world is captured by a difference in brain activity, but merely that every perceptible difference does so. Valid perceptual discrimination arises precisely because there is a causal relationship between stimuli and some aspect of brain activity.

copyright 1995 Pam Reinagel

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