When characterizing the content of a subject’s perceptual experience, does their seeing an object entail that their visual experience represents it as being a certain way? If it does, are they thereby in a position to have perceptually-based thoughts about it? On one hand, representationalists are under pressure to answer these questions in the affirmative. On the other hand, it seems they cannot. This paper presents a puzzle to illustrate this tension within orthodox representationalism. We identify several interesting morals which (...) may be drawn in response, each of which teaches us something interesting and important about perceptual experience and its interface with cognition and related phenomena. (shrink)

Among the exciting prospects raised by advocates of predictive processing [PP] is the offer of a systematic description of our neural activity suitable for drawing explanatory bridges to the structure of conscious experience. Yet the gulf to cross seems wide. For, as critics of PP have argued, our visual experience certainly doesn’t seem probabilistic.While Clark proposes a means to make PP compatible with the experience of a determinate world, I argue that we should not rush to do so. Two notions (...) of determinacy are conflated in the claim that perception is determinate: ‘univocality’ and ‘full detail’. The former, as Clark argues, is only to be expected in any PP agent that models its world for the purpose of acting on it. But as Husserl argued, and as perceptual psychology has borne out, we significantly overestimate the degree of detail with which we perceive a univocal world.This second form of indeterminacy is due not to the probabilistic nature of PP’s model, but rather to its hierarchical structure, with increasingly coarse-grained representations as we move further from the sensory periphery. A PP system may, or may not, deliver a univocal hypothesis at each of these levels. An action-oriented PP system would only be expected to do so only at the level needed for successful action guidance. A naïve reporter’s overestimation of the degree of determinate detail in their visual experience can thereby be accounted for with a more gradual version of the ‘refrigerator light’ effect: we experience determinate details just to the degree that they’re needed – immediately as they’re needed. (shrink)

The Indian realists argue for the unique claim that universals are perceptible. The possibility of allowing perceptual access to universals puts pressure on the Nyāya theory of perception. The Nyāya philosophers introduced the notion of nirvikalpaka pratyakṣa (non-conceptual perception) to accommodate the perceptibility of universals. Since there is no direct introspective evidence for non-conceptual perception, it is difficult, if not impossible, to specify the content of nirvikalpaka pratyakṣa or non-conceptual perception. This paper addresses this concern by turning to Ned Block's (...) work in contemporary philosophy of perception. Using Block's arguments, I propose that we have an independent empirical route to specify the content of a non-conceptual perception which is not subject to the ‘myth of the given’ objection. (shrink)

Are there logically possible types of conscious experience that are nomologically impossible, given independently justified assumptions about the neural underpinnings of consciousness in human beings? In one sense, this is trivial: just consider the fact that the types of perceptual experiences we can have are limited by our sensory organs. But there may be non-trivial types of conscious experience that are impossible. For instance, if there is a basic type of self-consciousness, corresponding to a phenomenal property that is nomologically necessary (...) for consciousness, then experiences lacking this phenomenal property will be impossible. More generally, it may be that there are causal dependencies between the neural mechanisms that are required to instantiate distinct phenomenal properties. If this is the case, instantiating one of these phenomenal properties without certain others may be impossible, which means there are non-trivial cases of nomologically impossible types of conscious experience. This paper clarifies this hypothesis, outlines a general methodology for its investigation, and relates it to research on radical disruptions of self-consciousness. (shrink)

According to perceptual accounts of mindreading, we can see, rather than cognize, other people's mental states. On one version of this approach, certain mental properties figure in the contents of our perceptual experiences. In a recent paper, Varga has appealed to empirical research to argue that intentions and emotions can indeed be seen, rather than cognized. In this paper, I argue that none of the evidence adduced to support the perceptual account of mindreading shows that we see mental properties, as (...) opposed to non‐mental properties. (shrink)