Contrary to Block's assertion, “identity-crowding” does not provide an interesting instance of object-seeing without object-attention. The successful judgments and unusual phenomenology of identity-crowding are better explained by unconscious perception and non-perceptual phenomenology associated with cognitive states. In identity-crowding, as in other cases of crowding, subjects see jumbled textures and cannot individuate the items contributing to those textures in the absence of attention. Block presents an attenuated sense in which identity-crowded items are seen, but this is irrelevant to the debate about (...) phenomenal experience of an object in the absence of object-attention. Finally, even unconscious object perception in identity-crowding likely involves an attention-like selective process. (shrink)

Tyler Burge presents an original study of the most primitive ways in which individuals represent the physical world. By reflecting on the science of perception and related psychological and biological sciences, he gives an account of constitutive conditions for perceiving the physical world, and thus aims to locate origins of representational mind.

In the final essay, the "intrinsic" nature of "qualia" is compared with the naively imagined "intrinsic value" of a dollar in ...

If the phenomenality of consciousness admits of degrees and can be partial and indeterminate, then Block's inference to the best explanation may need to be revaluated both in terms of the supposed data on phenomenal overflow and the range of alternatives against which his view is compared.

In many theories in contemporary philosophy of mind, attention is constitutively linked to phenomenal consciousness. Ned Block has recently argued that ‘identity crowding’ provides an example of subjects consciously seeing something to which they are unable to attend. Here I examine the reasons that Block gives for thinking that this is a case of a consciously perceived item that we are unable to attend to, and I offer a different interpretation.