>If I'm not mistaken you admit that the horse you try to imagine gets rebuilt from bits and pieces that are stitched together. In my opinion foundation of that

>If I'm not mistaken you admit that the horse you try to imagine gets rebuilt from bits and pieces that are stitched together. In my opinion foundation of that construct is that internal abstract representation of a horse concept. The way I imagine this works is that our sensory input fires some particular set of neurons which accounts for our sensory experience of the horse. When we recall a mental image of a particular horse, our brain attempts to recreate as best it can the neural firing pattern from the actual sensory input. Of course, this pattern gets distorted as we do not remember specific images as a whole (unless one has a photographic memory), but pieces of images that represent certain abstractions over portions of a subject. These patterns are recreated by firing certain "bootstrap" neurons (memories units) that downstream cause the recreated pattern. Expanding on this further, I can imagine our image-storage system being something like a many-dimensional quadtree, except instead of just spacial dimensions it also extracts colors, shapes, patterns, textures, etc. So different meaningful concepts are stored in different layers of the neural network, and some approximation to the original can be recreated on demand. This can certainly be considered an abstract representation, yet it is still tied to and semantically similar to a raw 2d mapping of the image. The difference is mainly storage efficiency due to compressing similar concepts learned from our experiences.