Experience

2019 ◽  
pp. 121-153
Author(s):  
Casey O'Callaghan
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Phenomenal Character ◽  
Phenomenal Consciousness ◽  
Multisensory Perception ◽  
Perceptual Consciousness ◽  
The Senses

This chapter argues that perceptual experience is richly multisensory. In particular, phenomenal consciousness is constitutively and irreducibly multisensory. The reason is that the phenomenal character of a conscious multisensory episode can include more than what is associated with each of the respective senses plus whatever accrues due to simple co-consciousness. Exercising multisensory capacities thus makes a phenomenal difference to perceptual consciousness. This difference can obtain whether or not it would enable a subject to discriminate between two otherwise equivalent experiences. It follows that the character of a perceptual episode is not exhausted by what belongs to each of the senses. Therefore, not all perceptual experience is modality specific. Coordination among the senses thus makes possible new forms of perceptual consciousness. Multisensory perception extends the varieties of experience.

Perceptual Experience, Conscious Content, and Non-Conceptual Content

2004 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Uriah Kriegel ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Phenomenal Character ◽  
Representational Content ◽  
Conceptual Content ◽  
Perceptual Consciousness ◽  
The Face ◽  
Content Of Experience ◽  
Representational Approach

One of the promising approaches to the problem of perceptual consciousness has been the representational theory, or representationalism. The idea is to reduce the phenomenal character of conscious perceptual experiences to the representational content of those experiences. Most representationalists appeal specifically to non-conceptual content in reducing phenomenal character to representational content. In this paper, I discuss a series of issues involved in this representationalist appeal to non-conceptual content. The overall argument is the following. On the face of it, conscious perceptual experience appears to be experience of a structured world, hence to be at least partly conceptual. To validate the appeal to non-conceptual content, the representationalist must therefore hold that the content of experience is partly conceptual and partly non-conceptual. But how can the conceptual and the non-conceptual combine to form a single content? The only way to make sense of this notion, I argue, leads to a surprising consequence, namely, that the representational approach to perceptual consciousness is a disguised form of functionalism.

Perception

2019 ◽  
pp. 74-112
Author(s):  
Declan Smithies
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Phenomenal Character ◽  
Phenomenal Consciousness ◽  
Justify Belief ◽  
Perceptual Representation ◽  
Evil Demon ◽  
De Re ◽  
Epistemic Role ◽  
New Evil Demon Problem

Chapter 3 explores the epistemic role of consciousness in perception. Section 3.1 argues that unconscious perceptual representation in blindsight cannot justify beliefs about the external world. Section 3.2 argues that this is because phenomenal consciousness, rather than access consciousness or metacognitive consciousness, is necessary for perceptual representation to justify belief. Section 3.3 argues that perceptual experience has a distinctive kind of phenomenal character—namely, presentational force—that is not only necessary but also sufficient for perception to justify belief. Section 3.4 uses a version of the new evil demon problem to argue that the justifying role of perceptual experience supervenes on its phenomenal character alone. Section 3.5 defends this supervenience thesis against the objection that phenomenal duplicates who perceive distinct objects thereby have justification to believe different de re propositions.

Senses

2019 ◽  
pp. 154-179
Author(s):  
Casey O'Callaghan
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Information Gathering ◽  
Multisensory Perception ◽  
Activity Type ◽  
The Senses ◽  
The Way

Multisensory phenomena have been used to challenge the distinctness of our senses. Perceptual processes interact extensively and perform joint functions, while perceptual experience is constitutively and irreducibly multisensory. This chapter presents an account of the senses and what differentiates them. According to this proposal, each sense is a family of perceptual capacities unified and distinguished by the way in which those capacities are exercised. The relevant manner is an information-gathering activity type individuated by the information it functions to extract and the medium from which it does so. Perceiving involves exercising perceptual capacities in one or more sensory manners. Thus, perceptual episodes and experiences may be typed accordingly, without appealing to their phenomenology. The key to this approach is distinguishing the task of individuating senses from that of ascribing modalities to experiences. This account rejects the independence of the senses while preserving their distinctness. It illuminates richly multisensory perception and captures why it matters.

Reply to Keith A. Wilson

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Representational Content ◽  
The Senses

In my essay, ‘The Silence of the Senses’ (2004, revised 2013) I argued that perceptual experience has no representational content, or at least none if you exclude the content of a perceiver’s, or experiencer’s responses to his experience, e.g., in a case of perceiving, recognizing...

scholarly journals Extending the extended consciousness debate: perception, imagination, and the common kind assumption

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Deery
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Phenomenal Consciousness ◽  
Psychological Theory ◽  
Predictive Processing ◽  
Mental Event ◽  
The World ◽  
Predictive Approach ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Brain

AbstractFor some, the states and processes involved in the realisation of phenomenal consciousness are not confined to within the organismic boundaries of the experiencing subject. Instead, the sub-personal basis of perceptual experience can, and does, extend beyond the brain and body to implicate environmental elements through one’s interaction with the world. These claims are met by proponents of predictive processing, who propose that perception and imagination should be understood as a product of the same internal mechanisms. On this view, as visually imagining is not considered to be world-involving, it is assumed that world-involvement must not be essential for perception, and thus internalism about the sub-personal basis is true. However, the argument for internalism from the unity of perception and imagination relies for its strength on a questionable conception of the relationship between the two experiential states. I argue that proponents of the predictive approach are guilty of harbouring an implicit commitment to the common kind assumption which does not follow trivially from their framework. That is, the assumption that perception and imagination are of the same fundamental kind of mental event. I will argue that there are plausible alternative ways of conceiving of this relationship without drawing internalist metaphysical conclusions from their psychological theory. Thus, the internalist owes the debate clarification of this relationship and further argumentation to secure their position.

scholarly journals The Efference Copy Signal as a Key Mechanism for Consciousness

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giorgio Vallortigara
Keyword(s):  
Sensory Input ◽  
Phenomenal Consciousness ◽  
Efference Copy ◽  
Sense Organs ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
Evaluative Response ◽  
Sensory Structures ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Carbon Copy

Animals need to distinguish sensory input caused by their own movement from sensory input which is due to stimuli in the outside world. This can be done by an efference copy mechanism, a carbon copy of the movement-command that is routed to sensory structures. Here I tried to link the mechanism of the efference copy with the idea of the philosopher Thomas Reid that the senses would have a double province, to make us feel, and to make us perceive, and that, as argued by psychologist Nicholas Humphrey, the former would identify with the signals from bodily sense organs with an internalized evaluative response, i.e., with phenomenal consciousness. I discussed a possible departure from the classical implementation of the efference copy mechanism that can effectively provide the senses with such a double province, and possibly allow us some progress in understanding the nature of consciousness.

Perceptual knowledge

2019 ◽  
pp. 279-308
Author(s):  
Georges Dicker
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Perceptual Knowledge ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Carry Over ◽  
Sensitive Knowledge ◽  
Rule Out

This chapter critically analyzes Locke’s views on “sensitive knowledge.” Its main theses are: (1) Locke sometimes confuses the legitimate question (Q1), “When we perceive a body, how can we know that we aren’t hallucinating instead?” with the faulty “veil-of-perception” question, (Q2) “How do we know bodies exist, since we can’t perceive them?” (2) When Locke does mention (Q1), he sometimes just dismisses it, because he holds that simple ideas of sensation are by definition produced by bodies. (3) At other times, Locke humors the skeptic, and offers a defense of the senses, in the form of an inference to the best explanation. (4) It’s doubtful that he could successfully rule out other possible explanations of our perceptual experience, like Descartes’s deceiver scenario and its contemporary variants. (5) There are reasons for this weakness, and they carry over to any attempt to defeat skepticism by an inference to the best explanation.

scholarly journals Perceiving Exploding Tropes

2016 ◽  
Vol 93 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Almäng
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Phenomenal Character ◽  
Property A ◽  
Qualitative Nature ◽  
Sense Of Identity ◽  
Over Time

The topic of this paper is the perception of properties. It is argued that the perception of properties allows for a distinction between the sense of the identity and the sense of the qualitative nature of a property. So, for example, we might perceive a property as being identical over time even though it is presented as more and more determinate. Thus, you might see an object first as red and then as crimson red. In this case, the property is perceived as identical over time, even though the sense of the qualitative nature (the redness, the crimson redness) of the property is changing. The distinction between the sense of identity and the sense of quality is explicated in terms of perceiving a particular property, a trope, and perceiving it as an instance of a universal. It is subsequently argued that the perceived tropes cannot constitute the phenomenal character of the perceptual experience.

scholarly journals The methodological puzzle of phenomenal consciousness

2018 ◽  
Vol 373 (1755) ◽  
pp. 20170347 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Study ◽  
Natural Kind ◽  
Phenomenal Consciousness ◽  
Negative Answer ◽  
Partial Report ◽  
Fundamental Issue ◽  
Theme Issue ◽  
Perceptual Consciousness ◽  
Cognitive Access ◽  
Theoretical Proposal

Is phenomenal consciousness constitutively related to cognitive access? Despite being a fundamental issue for any science of consciousness, its empirical study faces a severe methodological puzzle. Recent years have seen numerous attempts to address this puzzle, either in practice, by offering evidence for a positive or negative answer, or in principle, by proposing a framework for eventual resolution. The present paper critically considers these endeavours, including partial-report, metacognitive and no-report paradigms, as well as the theoretical proposal that we can make progress by studying phenomenal consciousness as a natural kind. It is argued that the methodological puzzle remains obdurately with us and that, for now, we must adopt an attitude of humility towards the phenomenal. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Perceptual consciousness and cognitive access’.

The Intricate Interplay of Spatial Attention and Expectation: a Multisensory Perspective

2020 ◽  
Vol 33 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 383-416 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arianna Zuanazzi ◽  
Uta Noppeney
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Attention ◽  
Multisensory Perception ◽  
Critical Question ◽  
Perceptual Inference ◽  
Attentional Resources ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Almost All ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Brain

Abstract Attention (i.e., task relevance) and expectation (i.e., signal probability) are two critical top-down mechanisms guiding perceptual inference. Attention prioritizes processing of information that is relevant for observers’ current goals. Prior expectations encode the statistical structure of the environment. Research to date has mostly conflated spatial attention and expectation. Most notably, the Posner cueing paradigm manipulates spatial attention using probabilistic cues that indicate where the subsequent stimulus is likely to be presented. Only recently have studies attempted to dissociate the mechanisms of attention and expectation and characterized their interactive (i.e., synergistic) or additive influences on perception. In this review, we will first discuss methodological challenges that are involved in dissociating the mechanisms of attention and expectation. Second, we will review research that was designed to dissociate attention and expectation in the unisensory domain. Third, we will review the broad field of crossmodal endogenous and exogenous spatial attention that investigates the impact of attention across the senses. This raises the critical question of whether attention relies on amodal or modality-specific mechanisms. Fourth, we will discuss recent studies investigating the role of both spatial attention and expectation in multisensory perception, where the brain constructs a representation of the environment based on multiple sensory inputs. We conclude that spatial attention and expectation are closely intertwined in almost all circumstances of everyday life. Yet, despite their intimate relationship, attention and expectation rely on partly distinct neural mechanisms: while attentional resources are mainly shared across the senses, expectations can be formed in a modality-specific fashion.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document