This doesn't sound like an inherent part of a "representational" approach, because you are talking about separating consciousness from the rest of what the brain is doing in regard to perception. Before we were talking about a representation as something that separated the brain's response from behavioral interactions with the environment.

Basically, a simplistic approach to the whole thing would be to say we have three separate pieces to perception, we have what is being perceived (the environment and behavior), what is assembling the perception (the brain function), and what is recording the perception in our consciousness (perhaps emergent from brain function, or perhaps connected to by brain function). Of course these are not independent aspects, it is just a picture, which only leads to concrete results when specific approaches are selected to examine it. A cognitive science approach only allows us to look at the middle part, so that's where the focus is-- representational. The behavioral approach only sees the first part, so that's where the focus is-- nonrepresentational. So invoking where the third part gets into the picture doesn't seem to have anything to do with either representational or non-representational thinking-- we could tack that onto the results of behavioral analyses as easily as we could onto the results of brain scans.
I don't see any elements to the way a non-representational analysis would be undertaken that is inconsistent with a Faculty of Awareness at the end, because the non-representational approach is interested in what creates the behavior we observe, and has little or nothing to say about how the person generates an awareness, it merely defines the question away by saying "that which acts aware is aware". That's the classic example of what I mean by taking a projection-- we define what we are interested in, like a silhouette, and project the rest into oblivion. We must not then conclude that since our methods are blind to a particular aspect of the reality, that the reality does not contain that aspect-- yet this fallacy appears almost everywhere we see methods applied.

In principle it requires everything that has happened since the Big Bang to make that happen. Shall we make cosmology mandatory for potential music critics?

The value of taking projections is that we achieve a finer focus, the disadvantage is we have ignored something. This is always the case, and is just as true for behavioral approaches compared to physiological approaches compared to introspective approaches. To think that any of these projections is the whole story is as wrong as ruling out the contribution of any. I claim that the introspective view, leading to an image of a Faculty of Awareness, is what we used to define the basic terms we use, including "consciousness" itself. The cognitive science view is what we use to understand and treat pathologies in the process, and the behavioral approach is how we learn about the ramifications of consciousness on the larger context of society and life. They each afford benefits at the personal, medical, and societal levels, and no doubt a more complete view of cognition and consciousness comes from exposure to all three, and others too, including nonscientific avenues.
I'm not sure that isn't simply because the way you use the word "representation" doesn't have any meaning. Otherwise, it sounds like you are claiming that our ability to create environmentally-inspired mental images of things we have encountered is a "superfluous" ability, and of course you could not be saying something so obviously incorrect. The real question here, as I'm saying in as many ways as I can think of, is when does it behoove us to ask the question "what mental representation of reality is this person forming in this situation", versus asking "what parts of his/her brain is participating in this process and how", versus asking "how is this person interacting with that reality at this time". To everything, there is a season.
What if there are close connections between the two? What if the act of a brain generating measurable "endpoints" is related to the concept of "creating a copy" of reality? I think this is no happenstance connection between the words, to a very real extent they are talking about the same thing, the former is merely an informal picture we can use to stand in for the more specific correlates of the latter. The core issue is, how do we gain by separating the mind of the subject from its interactions with the environment including the whole social, societal, and cosmological context of what is happening.

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If we understood everything going on in the head of a pin... we still wouldn't know not to step on the pointy end.

People think the problem with models is that they are limited by our minds, but the greater problem is that our minds are limited by our models.

Well, Dennett has great fun at everyone's expense. There's more than a hint of the straw-man in some of his funnier lampoons.
But you did seem to be attempting to tar the whole of cog-sci with some sort of Cartesian brush, so it's useful to know that isn't your intention.

And yet both Doodler and FriedPhoton have also talked about consciousness as an emergent property of brain function, so they have a more complicated picture in mind than you're trying to make out.
With reference to Müller-Lyer, there's no doubt at all that something in the brain codes the lines as being of different lengths: lines of the same length are projected on the retina, and the words "These lines are different lengths" come out of the mouth. Between those two events lies nothing but brain activity (if you'll allow me to include retinal processing under the umbrella of the brain). So saying that somewhere in the brain the lengths of the lines are perceptually altered is a truism, unless you believe that there really is a "liar" in Müller-Lyer.

It's a style of expressing the failure, certainly. But in my experience, people just as often blame themselves, incorporating the cognitive failure into their own person; or they blame their sense organs, or (in performance related tasks) blame their effector organs.

So from where I stand you seem to be tilting at non-existent windmills.

Grant Hutchison

Functionality seems to be distributed in well-defined regions of the cortex, so you can lose fairly large chunks of brain and remain "the same person" (as assessed by yourself and others). If you lose your occipital cortex, for instance, you generally seem to remain the same person but acquire a disability (cortical blindness).
The anterior part of the frontal lobes does appear to be involved in "personality", in the sense of controlling the range of emotions individuals characteristically exhibit: a pattern that becomes recognizable to others and which is one feature of "personality". Hence the unfortunate vogue for Walter Freeman's prefrontal lobotomies, applied to people with various behavioural problems in the 40s and 50s.

The most famous prefrontal lobotomy patient in the world is probably Phineas Gage, who underwent the procedure under uncontrolled circumstances. While he was working as a railway construction foreman, an explosion sent a tamping iron straight through his head: there's a diagram of the extent and nature of of his injury here. He recovered consciousness almost immediately, and lived for another 12 years, but his personality had changed completely. Although this is often quoted as an example of the prefrontal cortex's role in the generation of personality, I've always felt there was a significant confounding factor involved: the guy had had a metal rod blown through his face and out the top of his head, for crying out loud! That might just change your outlook on life, all on its own.

Grant Hutchison

Wow...just wow...

I don't know if this applies as a pre-frontal cortex sitution or not, but my father's personality dramatically shifted in his thirties, along with some physical symptoms, like blackouts, that were later attributed to a benign cyst on the exterior right hand side of his head just aft of the cheek. The doctors postulated that it was pressure from this on a part of his brain in that region that drove him to hair trigger temper and near psychotic violence. After it was removed, his personality 180'd. Completely controlled and cool. It was definitely not very deep inside the brain, in fact, based on the descriptions I've heard, I believe it was on the surface.

Now, it could have been a chemical issue, but that would indicate the potential to alter personality through pressure somewhere other than the interior of the brain.

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I'm not completely heartless, the doctor who removed it told me he'd never be able to get it all.

António Damásio talks about Phineas' case and other intriguing ones in Descartes' Error.

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

One also wonders about the role of pain. I realize most people are not psychotic in the presence of pain, but the temper sure shortens. (I am glad your father's problems were so easily put right, that would be a hard way to grow up.)

The non-representational approaches deny this very model of perception. In these views, there is no "assembled perception" and hence no need to record it.

The common, traditional (representational) view of vision may go something like this: Although I think I see objects around me, all I really know for sure is that I am having a conscious experience of there being objects. Science tells us that the world is really a colorless cloud of atoms, but I see the world in vivid color. Consciousness, then, must be a creation of my brain. It creates these phenomena, qualia, appearances, or representations as philosophers call them. Because I perceive only representations, any reality or noumemon that may ultimately be behind them must necessarily remain unknown.

Experiences we take as visual failure like misreading a word, optical illusions, and so on are explained by the brain creating the wrong representation or creating a representation that fools us.

Non-representational approaches don't consider perception as a thing, and certainly not a thing created or assembled by the brain. Remember one of the earlier quotes: Perception is an achievement of the individual and not an experience the theater of consciousness.

Take a look at the abstract on the first page:

A Sensorimotor Account of Vision and Visual Consciousness (PDF)

In the 1960's, psychologist JJ Gibson proposed studying perception from an ecological viewpoint. He suggested studying visual perception in terms of the ambient optic array, that is, the patterned radiation that converges on your position as well as how it changes as you move about (optical texture flow). He thought that most if not all of what we think is created in the head actually exists in the environment as higher-order information that animals can detect and take advantage of.

Here is an excerpt from his book. You can glance at the pictures and the captions to get a sense of his interests:

The Causes of Deficient Perception

The abstract I referenced earlier points out that positing representations still leaves visual consciousness unexplained. Non-representational approaches are attempts to step up and supply an explanation.
The idea is that we attribute the composition to the person. However, when people think about it in a "how was it done?" way they don't want to believe that a person--a body--can do such things. Indeed, the accomplishment is remarkable and perhaps beyond our ability to explain. So over the course of history people have attributed the actual act of composition to something hidden from view, be it an inner spirit, a gift of the Muses, the mind, or in the modern incarnation of the same epistemology: the brain or neurons in the brain. It's the dualism that is in question.

I think there is a justified fear of attributing the act of composition to a mere machine (which the body may seem to us at times). Gilbert Ryle showed the premise to be misguided. He wrote in The Concept of Mind: "Man need not be degraded to a machine by being denied to be a ghost in a machine. He might, after all, be a sort of animal, namely, a higher mammal. There has yet to be ventured the hazardous leap to the hypothesis that perhaps he is a man."

True, but representations don't add any information. They are sometimes charged with being virtus dormitiva explanations after a play by Moliere in which a character explains why opium puts people to sleep: because it has a sleep-causing power.

Non-representational approaches examine the possibility that the brain does not need to create a copy of the world, that the world can stay where it is and serve as its own copy that you explore with greater or lesser degrees of success.

Oh, I dunno, Freudian psychology?

Do you really believe there's an explanation somewhere in what you've been saying? Because it looks like nothing more than dodging the issue.
The phrase "perception is an achievement of the individual" is neatly analogous to the guilty child's explanation of the broken mirror: "It just broke."

Grant Hutchison

Welp, it wasn't discovered till years after the divorce, which meant even though it was fixed, it still sucked (I was seven when that happened, early teens when the surgery occurred).

As for pain, there wasn't that, just pressure on the brain itself. He had absolutely no localized awareness anything was going on upstairs. The brain itself is insensate, so I've read.

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I'm not completely heartless, the doctor who removed it told me he'd never be able to get it all.

I am trying to illustrate the differences between representational and non-representational philosophy and to list some examples of why proponents of the latter find the former unsatisfactory. If neither side produces anything resembling a useful explanation, then, well, that wouldn't be the first time that happened in philosophy.

Edited to add: By the way, Ken, Grant's response, which is a fair one from the representational side, is what I had in mind with the "Hey, where are the vortexes?" Newton-era analogy. The representational side will always think that there is a hard problem of consciousness that non-representationalists are skirting.

It's just difficult to see how non-representational models could produce a useful explanation. They're stuck with "It just broke."

Well, I'm not coming "from the representational side", and I don't really know anyone who does. But what I was pointing out is that your "non-representationalists" are not just skirting Chalmers' hard problem, but that they're skirting a lot of the easy problems, too.

Grant Hutchison

I realize that. The point is, "denying" something is often interpreted as saying it doesn't exist, but in fact it merely does not appear in that particular projection. If my shadow on the ground "denies" that my shirt has color, what should I conclude from that? The idea that I do not "assemble" a perception is no less naive than that I do.
I'm with you so far, a very useful model.I do not see how this logically follows from your syllogism, but I also don't see why it's relevant-- we are talking about perception, not consciousness. Sounds like a fine model whose value is unquestionable. Are you going to point out weaknesses in it, as any model should have, or are you going to say it is "wrong"?
Again, an effective model used in many places, including psychology.
I think you've been clear on the choices made by the non-representational approach. What is missing is the demonstration that this model trumps the other one in all situations, as you appear to claim.
The defining sentence of the approach is "The experience of seeing occurs when the organism masters what we call the governing
laws of sensorimotor contingency." In other words, seeing is as seeing does. A classic example of what I have called "a projection". It is perfectly obvious to me that this projection may reveal interesting things about vision, just as it is equally obvious that it will leave out important pieces of the puzzle. It's the perfect example of the kind of logic I've been objecting to-- arguing that since a shadow is a good way to understand a person's outline, the color of their shirt must be a delusion of some kind.
That "theory" is pretty absurd in the 1960's-- it might have had something to say in the Renaissance! Does this guy know Maxwell's equations? There's not a whole lot of mystery in the "patterned radiation" that surrounds us.
What you are calling an "explanation", I am calling "defining the question away". In the shadow analogy, it is just like attacking the difficult question "what gives a shirt its color" by saying "when we recognize that the shadow on the ground is the right way to look at a shirt, we see that the issue of what gives it its color is simply projected out of importance". Nice explanation, that.
No one is disputing that the body is involved in forming the representation. I do not see how that distinguishes representational an non-representational approaches, again the only difference I see is whether or not one chooses to treat the subject and the object of the perception separately.
If the argument is "dualism is wrong", it is a strawman. If the argument is "dualism was not crucial in the forming of the words we use in this context", or "dualism is not convenient in how we model what is happening", or "all of the accomplishments of a dualistic approach can be achieved non-representationally", then I say you have made none of those cases.
Now I'm confused. A moment ago you seemed to be arguing against the idea of a perceptive consciousness as a kind of "ghost in the machine" (did Ryle coin that phrase? If so, he has my respect for it, but if he just borrowed it, I don't see that the above quote says much at all). If everything emerges from interactions with the environment, I'd call that pretty much the definition of a machine with no ghosts in it.
It is not the job of a representation to "add information", observations do that. The word merely refers to the information in an organized way-- it implies a useful projection. I argue that all our common words relating to perception and consciousness stem from a representational picture, and you have used that to demonstrate the widespread problem of this insidious misconception. But if it inspired the very words we use, it's hard to see how it has not been of value, though it certainly wouldn't want to "add information". When words add information, we call it "make believe".Are you asking me if Freudian psychology is the only one that works by separating what is going on in a person's mind from what is happening around them at the time? If so, the answer is no, it isn't.

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If we understood everything going on in the head of a pin... we still wouldn't know not to step on the pointy end.

People think the problem with models is that they are limited by our minds, but the greater problem is that our minds are limited by our models.

It surprises me to hear you say that, because as I understand the term, you would be "coming from the representational side" any time you ask someone "does this hurt", instead of waiting for them to moan or kick or interact with the environment in some way. I'm not saying that you need to adopt a philosophical stance on consciousness each time you ask that question, merely you pop on a hat because of its immediate advantages. Indeed, the whole idea of adopting a general philosophical stance is what I'm criticizing, and perhaps that's what you mean when you say you are not "coming from" any particular philosophical stance, be it representational or otherwise. Also, psychotherapy almost always treats the patient's mind as if it were a separate entity from whatever is going on around it-- the techniques of psychotherapy are intended to work in a wide array of environmental situations, without the therapist actually encountering that environment at all, and seems pretty "representational" to me.

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If we understood everything going on in the head of a pin... we still wouldn't know not to step on the pointy end.

People think the problem with models is that they are limited by our minds, but the greater problem is that our minds are limited by our models.