In Consciousness and Persons: Unity and Identity, Michael Tye takes on the thorny issue of the unity of consciousness and answers these important questions: What exactly is the unity of consciousness? Can a single person have a divided consciousness? What is a single person? Tye argues that unity is a fundamental part of human consciousness -- something so basic to everyday experience that it is easy to overlook. For example, when we hear the sound of waves crashing on a beach (...) and at the same time see a red warning flag, there is an overall unity to our experience; the sound and the red shape are presented together in our consciousness. Similarly, when we undergo a succession of thoughts as we think something through, there is an experience of succession that unifies the thoughts into a conscious whole. But, Tye shows, consciousness is not always unified. Split-brain subjects, whose corpus callosum has been severed, are usually taken to have a divided or disunified consciousness. Their behavior in certain situations implies that they have lost the unity normal human subjects take for granted; it is sometimes even supposed that a split-brain subject is really two persons.Tye begins his account by proposing an account of the unity of experience at a single time; this account is extended over the succeeding chapters to cover bodily sensations at a single time and perceptual experience, bodily sensations, conscious thoughts, and felt moods at a single time. Tye follows these chapters with a discussion of the unity of experience through time. Turning to the split-brain phenomenon, he proposes an account of the mental life of split-brain subjects and argues that certain facts about these subjects offer support for his theory of unity. Finally, addressing the topic of the nature of persons and personal identity, Tye finds the two great historical accounts -- the ego theory and the bundle theory -- lacking and he makes an alternative proposal. He includes an appendix on the general representational approach to consciousness and its many varieties, because of the relevance of representationalism to the theory of unity being adanced. (shrink)

In discussions of perception and its relation to knowledge, it is common to distinguish what one comes to believe on the basis of perception from the distinctively perceptual basis of one's belief. The distinction can be drawn in terms of propositional contents: there are the contents that a perceiver comes to believe on the basis of her perception, on the one hand; and there are the contents properly attributed to perception itself, on the other. Consider the content.

In "Things and Places," Zenon Pylyshyn argues that the process of incrementally constructing perceptual representations, solving the binding problem (determining which properties go together), and, more generally, grounding perceptual ...

Drawing on the findings of neuroscience, this text proposes and defends the hypothesis that the various modalities of sensation share a generic form that the author, Austen Clark, calls feature-placing.

Most philosophers believe that we have experiences as of temporally extended phenomena like change, motion, and succession. Almost all theories of time consciousness explain these temporal experiences by subscribing to the doctrine of the specious present, the idea that the contents of our experiences embrace temporally extended intervals of time and are presented as temporally structured. Against these theories, I argue that the doctrine is false and present a theory that does not require the notion of a specious present. Furthermore, (...) I argue that the different aspects of temporal experiences arise from different mechanisms operating separately. If the theory is true, then temporal experiences do not tell us anything special about the nature of consciousness and its temporal properties per se. (shrink)

What makes an object the same persisting individual over time? Philosophers and psychologists have both grappled with this question, but from different perspectives—philosophers conceptually analyzing the criteria for object persistence, and psychologists exploring the mental mechanisms that lead us to experience the world in terms of persisting objects. It is striking that the same themes populate explorations of persistence in these two very different fields—e.g. the roles of spatiotemporal continuity, persistence through property change, and cohesion violations. Such similarities may reflect (...) an underlying connection, in that psychological mechanisms of object persistence (especially relevant parts of mid-level visual object processing) may serve to underlie the intuitions about persistence that fuel metaphysical theories. This would be a way for cognitive science to join these two disparate fields, helping to explain the possible origins and reliability of some metaphysical intuitions, and perhaps leading to philosophical progress. (shrink)

According to conventional wisdom, the split-brain syndrome puts paid to the thesis that consciousness is necessarily unified. The aim of this paper is to challenge that view. I argue both that disunity models of the split-brain are highly problematic, and that there is much to recommend a model of the split-brain—the switch model—according to which split-brain patients retain a fully unified consciousness at all times. Although the task of examining the unity of consciousness through the lens of the split-brain syndrome (...) is not a new one—such projects date back to Nagel’s seminal paper on the topic—the time is ripe for a re-evaluation of the issues. (shrink)

Object perception deploys a suite of perceptual capacities that constrains attention, guides reidentification, subserves recognition, and anchors demonstrative thought. Objects for perception—perceptual objects—are the targets of such capacities. Characterizing perceptual objects for multisensory perception faces two puzzles. First is the diversity of objects across sensory modalities. Second is the unity of multisensory perceptual objects. This paper resolves the puzzles. Objects for perception are structured mereologically complex individuals. Perceptual objects are items that bear perceptible features and have perceptible parts arranged to (...) form a unified whole. This circumscribes the targets of object perception where neutral talk concerning intentional objects and objects of perception cannot. Nonetheless, it is more permissive than identifying perceptual objects with material bodies, which excludes too much and leans too heavily on vision. The account thus is tailored to capture the role of objects in perception beyond vision: tactual, auditory, and olfactory objects are individuals with differing structures. Its flexibility also enables the account to accommodate shared objects for multisensory perception: multisensory perceptual objects are mereologically complex individuals with hybrid structure. For instance, one can bimodally perceive a common whole with parts accessible to one but not both modalities. Each sense provides a partial perspective on a complex whole that is perceptible through the coordinated use of multiple senses. Understanding perceptual objects as structured mereologically complex individuals thus provides a theoretically useful notion of an object for multisensory perception that resolves the puzzles of diversity and of unity. (shrink)

This paper provides a categorization of cross-modal experiences. There are myriad forms. Doing so allows us to think clearly about the nature of different cross-modal experiences and allows us to clearly formulate competing hypotheses about the kind of experiences involved in different cross-modal phenomena.

Multisensory processing encompasses all of the various ways in which the presence of information in one sensory modality can adaptively influence the processing of information in a different modality. In Part I of this survey article, I begin by presenting a cartography of some of the more extensively investigated forms of multisensory processing, with a special focus on two distinct types of multisensory integration. I briefly discuss the conditions under which these different forms of multisensory processing occur as well as (...) their important perceptual consequences and interrelations. In Part II, I then turn to examining of some of the different possible ways in which the structure of conscious perceptual experience might also be characterized as multisensory. In addition, I discuss the significance of research on multisensory processing and multisensory consciousness for philosophical attempts to individuate the senses. (shrink)

In this paper I will argue that the gender properties expressed by human voices are part of auditory phenomenology. I will support this claim by investigating auditory adaptational effects on such properties and contrasting auditory experiences, before and after the adaptational effects take place. In light of this investigation, I will conclude that auditory experience is not limited to low-level properties. Perception appears to be much more informative about the auditory landscape than is commonly thought.

The “looks” of things are frequently invoked (a) to account for the epistemic status of perceptual beliefs and (b) to distinguish perceptual from inferential beliefs. ‘Looks’ for these purposes is normally understood in terms of a perceptual experience and its phenomenal character. Here I argue that there is also a nonexperiential sense of ‘looks’—one that relates to cognitive architecture, rather than phenomenology—and that this nonexperiential sense can do the work of (a) and (b).

Philosophers and cognitive scientists of perception by custom have investigated individual sense modalities in relative isolation from each other. However, perceiving is, in a number of respects, multimodal. The traditional sense modalities should not be treated as explanatorily independent. Attention to the multimodal aspects of perception challenges common assumptions about the content and phenomenology of perception, and about the individuation and psychological nature of sense modalities. Multimodal perception thus presents a valuable opportunity for a case study in mature interdisciplinary cognitive (...) science. This chapter aims to raise these issues against the background of unimodal approaches in the study of perception. It presents some of the central empirical findings concerning multimodality, and it explains the philosophical implications of these findings. Foremost, it aims to encourage and open avenues for future research. (shrink)

Cross-modal perceptual illusions occur when a stimulus to one modality impacts perceptual experience associated with another modality. Unlike synaesthesia, cross-modal illusions are intelligible as results of perceptual strategies for dealing with sensory stimulation to multiple modalities, rather than as mere quirks. I argue that understanding cross-modal illusions reveals an important flaw in a widespread conception of the senses, and of their role in perceptual experience, according to which understanding perception and perceptual experience is a matter of assembling independently viable stories (...) about vision, audition, olfaction, and the rest. (shrink)

This paper defends two theses about sensory objects. The more general thesis is that directly sensed objects are those delivered by sub-personal processes. It is shown how this thesis runs counter to perceptual atomism, the view that wholes are always sensed indirectly, through their parts. The more specific thesis is that while the direct objects of audition are all composed of sounds, these direct objects are not all sounds—here, a composite auditory object is a temporal sequence of sounds (whereas a (...) composite visual object is a spatial composite). Many composite objects are directly heard in the sense just mentioned. There is a great variety of such composite auditory objects—melodies, harmonies, sequences of phonemes, individual voices, meaning-carrying sounds, and so on. This diversity of auditory objects has an important application to aesthetics. Perceivers do not naturally or easily attend simultaneously to auditory objects that overlap in time. Yet, aesthetic appreciation depends on such an allocation of attention to overlapping objects. (shrink)

This paper contrasts three different schemes of reference relevant to understanding systems of perceptual representation: a location-based system dubbed "feature-placing", a system of "visual indices" referring to things called "proto-objects", and the full sortal-based individuation allowed by a natural language. The first three sections summarize some of the key arguments (in Clark, 2000) to the effect that the early, parallel, and pre-attentive registration of sensory features itself constitutes a simple system of nonconceptual mental representation. In particular, feature integration--perceiving something as (...) being both F and G, where F and G are sensible properties registered in distinct parallel streams--requires a referential apparatus. Section V. reviews some grounds for thinking that at these earliest levels this apparatus is location-based: that it has a direct and nonconceptual means of picking out places. Feature-placing is contrasted with a somewhat more sophisticated system that can identify and track four or five "perceptual objects" or "proto-objects", independently of their location, for as long as they remain perceptible. Such a system is found in Zenon Pylyshyn's fascinating work on "visual indices", in Dana Ballard's notion of deictic codes, and in Kahneman, Treisman, and Wolfe's accounts of systems of evanescent representations they call "object files". Perceptual representation is a layered affair, and I argue that it probably includes both feature-placing and proto-objects. Finally, both nonconceptual systems are contrasted with the full-blooded individuation allowed in a natural language. (shrink)

My thesis is that perceptual awareness is richly multisensory. I argue for this conclusion on the grounds that certain forms of multisensory perceptual experience are incompatible with the claim that each aspect of a perceptual experience is associated with some specific sensory modality or another. First, I explicate what it is for some feature of a conscious perceptual episode to be modality specific. Then, I argue based on philosophical and experimental evidence that some novel intermodal features are perceptible only through (...) the coordinated use of multiple senses. I appeal to cases that involve consciously perceptible feature instances and feature types that could not be perceptually experienced through the use of individual sense modalities working on their own or simply in parallel and co-consciously. Finally, I offer an account of how to type perceptual experiences by modality that makes room for richly multisensory experiences. (shrink)

Our auditory experience involves the experience of auditory objects—sequences of distinct sounds, or parts of continuous sounds—that are experienced as grouped together into a single sound or “stream” of sounds. In this paper I argue that it is not possible to explain what it is to experience an auditory object as such—i.e. to experience a sequence of sounds as grouped—in purely auditory terms; rather, to experience an auditory object as such is to experience a sequence of sounds as having been (...) (apparently) produced by the same source. (shrink)

The first part of this survey article presented a cartography of some of the more extensively studied forms of multisensory processing. In this second part, I turn to examining some of the different possible ways in which the structure of conscious perceptual experience might also be characterized as multisensory. In addition, I discuss the significance of research on multisensory processing and multisensory consciousness for philosophical debates concerning the modularity of perception, cognitive penetration, and the individuation of the senses.

Is consciousness multisensory? Obviously it is multisensory in certain ways. Human beings typically possess the capacity to have experiences in at least the five familiar sensory modalities, and quite possibly in a number of other less commonly recognised modalities as well. But there are other respects in which it is far from obvious that consciousness is multisensory. This chapter is concerned with one such respect. Οur concern here is with whether consciousness contains experiences associated with distinct modalities at the same (...) time. We will describe those who endorse a positive answer to this question as endorsing a multisensory view (MSV) of the structure of consciousness, and those who endorse a negative answer to this question as having a unisensory view (USV) of the structure of consciousness. (shrink)

Recent work on non-visual modalities aims to translate, extend, revise, or unify claims about perception beyond vision. This paper presents central lessons drawn from attention to hearing, sounds, and multimodality. It focuses on auditory awareness and its objects, and it advances more general lessons for perceptual theorizing that emerge from thinking about sounds and audition. The paper argues that sounds and audition no better support the privacy of perception’s objects than does vision; that perceptual objects are more diverse than an (...) exclusively visual perspective suggests; and that multimodality is rampant. In doing so, it presents an account according to which audition affords awareness as of not just sounds, but also environmental happenings beyond sounds. (shrink)

It is tempting to hold that perceptual experience amounts to a co-conscious collection of visual, auditory, tactual, gustatory, and olfactory episodes. If so, each aspect of perceptual experience on each occasion is associated with a specific modality. This paper, however, concerns a core variety of multimodal perceptual experience. It argues that there is perceptually apparent intermodal feature binding. I present the case for this claim, explain its consequences for theorizing about perceptual experience, and defend it against objections. I maintain that (...) just as one thing may perceptually appear at once to jointly bear several features associated with the same sense modality, one thing also may perceptually appear at once to jointly bear features associated with different sense modalities. For instance, just as something may visually appear at once to be both red and round, or to have a red part and a green part, something may multimodally perceptually appear at once to be both bright and loud, or to have a red part and a rough part. The main lesson, I argue, is that perceiving is not just co-consciously seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, and smelling at the same time. And perceptual phenomenal character is not on each occasion exhausted by that which is distinctive to or associated with a given modality, along with that which accrues thanks to simple co-consciousness. Not all ways of perceiving are modality specific. I defend this account against three main objections: that singular content theorists avoid my conclusions; that apparent infusion of perceptible features is required for perceptually apparent binding but does not occur intermodally; and that the diversity of objects across modalities makes perceptually apparent intermodal binding rare. (shrink)

Forthcoming publication in Auditory Perception and Sounds.

This paper presents forms of multimodal perceptual experience that undermine the claim that each aspect of perceptual experience is modality specific. In particular, it argues against the thesis that all phenomenal character is modality specific (even making an allowance for co-conscious unity). It concludes that a multimodal perceptual episode may have phenomenal features beyond those that are associated with the specific modalities.

The paper argues that material objects are the primary referents of visual states -- not places, as Austen Clark would have it in his A Theory of Sentience.

In the case of ventriloquism, seeing the movement of the ventriloquist dummy’s mouth changes your experience of the auditory location of the vocals. Some have argued that cases like ventriloquism provide evidence for the view that at least some of the content of perception is fundamentally multimodal. In the ventriloquism case, this would mean your experience has constitutively audio-visual content (not just a conjunction of an audio content and visual content). In this paper, I argue that cases like ventriloquism do (...) not in fact warrant that conclusion. I then try to make sense of crossmodal cases without appealing to fundamentally multimodal content. (shrink)

The last couple of years have seen a rapid growth of interest in the study of crossmodal correspondences – the tendency for our brains to preferentially associate certain features or dimensions of stimuli across the senses. By now, robust empirical evidence supports the existence of numerous crossmodal correspondences, affecting people’s performance across a wide range of psychological tasks – in everything from the redundant target effect paradigm through to studies of the Implicit Association Test, and from speeded discrimination/classification tasks through (...) to unspeeded spatial localisation and temporal order judgment tasks. However, one question that has yet to receive a satisfactory answer is whether crossmodal correspondences automatically affect people’s performance , as opposed to reflecting more of a strategic, or top-down, phenomenon. Here, we review the latest research on the topic of crossmodal correspondences to have addressed this issue. We argue that answering the question will require researchers to be more precise in terms of defining what exactly automaticity entails. Furthermore, one’s answer to the automaticity question may also hinge on the answer to a second question: Namely, whether crossmodal correspondences are all ‘of a kind’, or whether instead there may be several different kinds of crossmodal mapping . Different answers to the automaticity question may then be revealed depending on the type of correspondence under consideration. We make a number of suggestions for future research that might help to determine just how automatic crossmodal correspondences really are. (shrink)

Object files (OFs) are hypothesized mid-level representations which mediate our conscious perception of persisting objects—e.g. telling us ‘which went where’. Despite the appeal of the OF framework, not previous research has directly explored whether OFs do indeed correspond to conscious percepts. Here we present at least one case wherein conscious percepts of ‘which went where’ in dynamic ambiguous displays diverge from the analogous correspondence computed by the OF system. Observers viewed a ‘bouncing/streaming’ display in which two identical objects moved such (...) that they could have either bounced off or streamed past each other. We measured two dependent variables: (1) an explicit report of perceived bouncing or streaming; and (2) an implicit ‘object-specific preview benefit’ (OSPB), wherein a ‘preview’ of information on a specific object speeds the recognition of that information at a later point when it appears again on the same object (compared to when it reappears on a different object), beyond display-wide priming. When the displays were manipulated such that observers had a strong bias to perceive streaming (on over 95% of the trials), there was nevertheless a strong OSPB in the opposite direction—such that the object files appeared to have ‘bounced’ even though the percept ‘streamed’. Given that OSPBs have been taken as a hallmark of the operation of object files, the five experiments reported here suggest that in at least some specialized (and perhaps ecologically invalid) cases, conscious percepts of ‘which went where’ in dynamic ambiguous displays can diverge from the mapping computed by the object-file system. (shrink)

Psychophysics and neuroscience demonstrate that different sensory systems interact and influence each other. Perceiving involves extensive cooperation and coordination among systems associated with sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste. Nonetheless, it remains unclear in what respects conscious perceptual awareness is multisensory. This paper distinguishes six differing varieties of multisensory awareness, explicates their consequences, and thereby elucidates the multisensory nature of perception. It argues on these grounds that perceptual awareness need not be exhausted by that which is associated with each of (...) the respective sensory modalities along with whatever accrues thanks to simple co-consciousness. (shrink)

What is the relationship between sounds and time? More specifically, is there something essentially or distinctively temporal about sounds that distinguishes them from, say, colors, shapes, odors, tastes, or other sensible qualities? And just what might this distinctive relation to time consist in? Apart from their independent interest, these issues have a number of important philosophical repercussions. First, if sounds are temporal in a way that other sensible qualities are not, then this would mean that standard lists of paradigm secondary (...) qualities offered by Locke, Galileo, and other modern philosophers — lists which include colors, odors and sounds without any significant distinctions — overlook significant metaphysical differences. This, in turn, would threaten to undermine the coherence of the modern understanding of secondary qualities itself. Moreover, a number of authors have recently urged that the essential temporality of sounds makes it impossible to understand sounds as properties (except on a trope theory of properties; see note 3). If true, and given the more or less universal view that colors are properties, this last conclusion would make potentially inapplicable to sounds much of the comparatively well-developed philosophical taxonomy and apparatus that has arisen in philosophical disputes over the status of colors (for presentations of this taxonomy and apparatus see, for example, Byrne and Hilbert (2003); Cohen (2008b)).1 Therefore, the conclusion that sounds are distinctively temporal would be a serious blow to hopes for a theoretically unified treatment of the sensory qualities.2 For all these reasons, quite a lot seems to hang on the question of the temporality of sounds. (shrink)

In this paper we offer a theory of cross-modal objects. To begin, we discuss two kinds of linkages between vision and audition. The first is a duality. The the visual system detects and identifies surfaces ; the auditory system detects and identifies sources . Surfaces are illuminated by sources of light; sound is reflected off surfaces. However, the visual system discounts sources and the auditory system discounts surfaces. These and similar considerations lead to the Theory of Indispensable Attributes that states (...) the conditions for the formation of gestalts in the two modalities. The second linkage involves the formation of audiovisual objects, integrated cross-modal experiences. We describe research that reveals the role of cross-modal causality in the formation of such objects. These experiments use the canonical example of a causal link between vision and audition: a visible impact that causes a percussive sound. (shrink)

This article is concerned with the alleged incompatibility between presentism and specious present theories of temporal experience. According to presentism, the present time is instantaneous (or, near-instantaneous), while according to specious present theories, the specious present is temporally extended—therefore, it seems that there is no room in reality for the whole of a specious present, if presentism is true. It seems then that one of the two claims—presentism or the specious present theory—has to go. I shall argue that this kind (...) of worries is mislead. Once we understand properly how our phenomenal experience as of passage and as of change, such as it is understood by specious present theorists, comes into being, the apparent phenomenologico-metaphysical conflict will disappear. In short, the mistake here is to presuppose that there is a link between phenomenology and metaphysics stronger than it actually is. Presentism is a metaphysical theory about what exists. Specious presentism is a phenomenological theory about how things appear to us in experience. As we will see, the two claims are not in conflict, and are in fact entirely orthogonal. (shrink)

It seems intuitive that in situations of perceptual recognition additional properties are represented. While much has been written about the significance of such properties for perceptual phenomenology, it is still unclear (a) what is the relation between recognition-based properties and lower-level perceptual properties, and (b) whether it is justified to classify them as kind-properties. Relying on results in cognitive psychology, I argue that recognition-based properties (I) are irreducible, high-level properties, (II) are kind properties by virtue of being sortal properties, but (...) (III) they supervene on lower-level properties and so are unlikely to be natural kind properties. (shrink)

In _On The Soul_ (425a-b), Aristotle drew a distinction between those qualities that are perceptible only via a single sense and those that are perceptible by more than one. The latter qualities he called.

It might be suggested that in auditory experience elements of the material world are not apparent to us in the way they are in vision and touch, and that this constitutes a shortcoming in the kind of cognitive contact with the world provided by auditory perception. I develop this suggestion, and then set out a way of thinking about the appearances of sound-producing events that might provide a response.

The doctrine of the specious present, that we perceive or, at least, seem to perceive a period of time is often taken to be an obvious claim about perception. Yet, it also seems just as commonly rejected as being incoherent. In this paper, following a distinction between three conceptions of the specious present, it is argued that the incoherence is due to hidden metaphysical assumptions about perception and time. It is argued that for those who do not hold such assumptions, (...) so long as we are clear about what the doctrine is really saying, we can make perfect sense of the specious present doctrine. (shrink)

How should interaction between the senses affect thought about them? I try to capture some ways in which non sense-specific perception might be thought to make it impossible or pointless or explanatorily idle to distinguish between senses. This task is complicated by there being more than one view of the nature of the senses, and more than one kind of non sense-specific perception. I argue, in particular, that provided we are willing to forgo certain assumptions about, for instance, the relationship (...) between modes or kinds of experience, and about how one should count perceptual experiences at a time, at least one way of thinking about the senses survives the occurrence of various kinds of non sense-specific perception relatively unscathed. (shrink)

If we assume that the operation of each sense modality constitutes a different experience – a visual experience, an auditory experience, etc – we are faced with the problem of how those distinct experiences come together to form a unified perceptual encounter with the world. Michael Tye has recently argued that the best way to get around this problem is to deny altogether that there are such things as purely visual (and so forth) experiences. Here I aim to show not (...) simply that Tye’s proposed solution fails, but that its failure is highly instructive because it allows us to see that the transparency thesis, which lies at the heart of the case against qualia, and of most representationalist theories of experience, is more problematic than is often supposed. (shrink)