In the perceptual model of mystical experience, the mystics are said to “perceive” God much like ordinary people perceive physical objects. The model has been used to defend the epistemic value of mysticism, and it has been championed most vigorously by William Alston in his work Perceiving God. This paper is a critique of the model from a phenomenological perspective. Utilizing insights from Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, I show that models like Alston’s are based on an inadequate notion of perception, which (...) fails to distinguish perception from other modes of intentionality; the result is that even if we assume the mystics have directly experienced God, it is not clear why we should say they have “perceived” God. Then, using a better and richer concept of perception, I show that the mystical experiences under discussion cannot be truly perceptual, because they lack some salient features of perception. The conclusion is that talks of “perceiving God” can only be analogical or metaphorical, but not literal. (shrink)

The aim of the experiment was to evaluate the adaptive responses of biomechanical and electromyographic parameters to vertical unloading when walking during the 4-month isolation experiment SIRIUS-19 in the ground-based space station model. The study involved 6 healthy international crew members of the SIRIUS-19 project aged 34 ± 6.2 years. Body Weight Unloading conditions was created by the h/p/cosmos airwalk system. The locomotor test included walking with a sequential change of BWU modes: 5-min walking with 0% BWU, 5-min walking with (...) 65% BWU and 5-min walking with 85% BWU. Ground Reaction Force was recorded by the h/p/cosmos treadmill device. Muscle Lab Model 4000e device was used to record the electromyographic signals of the hip and shin muscles. The locomotor test was performed twice before GBI, monthly during GBI and 1 week after leaving isolation. The results obtained before GBI demonstrate that the changes of support and proprioceptive afferentation signals play significant role in reorganizing of the biomechanical structure of motor acts and the development of new movement patterns. The results of the study are consistent with the previously obtained results of other studies in this direction. Despite the fact that during the GBI the participants of the experiment performed regular physical training, a decrease in the performance indicators values was detected, especially pronounced after 100 days of GBI. This is probably due to limited space of a space station model, as well as the development of a special motor stereotype in it. Noteworthy are the results obtained after the 4th session of the experiment, indicating the effect of sensorimotor learning. We think that the data obtained in this study will be useful in research both in gravitational physiology and in clinical medicine. (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)

Mohan Matthen holds that visual perceptual content is divided into descriptive and referential elements. Descriptive content is our awareness of sensory features belonging to objects located in the visual field. Matthen conceives of this in terms of an image. The referential element is a demonstrative form of content, by which we pick out those objects as particulars and assert their physical presence. Matthen terms this ‘the feeling of presence’. Together, they make up the ‘assembled message’ that visual states present to (...) the perceiver in perceptual experience. I argue that the two elements cannot play together as Matthen envisages. Beginning with the referential element, I show that the feeling of presence is unable to both provide demonstrative reference and assert that the visual state reflects how things are. Turning to the descriptive element, I argue that Matthen is committed to a view on which descriptive (or image) content is a mental entity, a reified image. This is a common element across perceptual experience, episodic memory and visual imagination. The mental entity proves a defective ingredient in assembling perceptual content that purports to present reality. There are problems integrating the depicted viewpoint with the subject’s actual viewpoint, and problems maintaining a coherent notion of assertion. I argue that the project of assembling perceptual experience from descriptive and referential elements is unworkable. (shrink)

Today many philosophers of mind accept that the two cortical streams of visual processing in humans can be distinguished in terms of conscious experience. The ventral stream is thought to produce representations that may become conscious, and the dorsal stream is thought to handle unconscious vision for action. Despite a vast literature on the topic of the two streams, there is currently no account of the way in which the relevant empirical evidence could fit with basic Husserlian phenomenology of vision. (...) Here I offer such an account. In this article, I show how the empirical evidence ought to be understood in a way that is informed by phenomenology. The differences in the two streams are better described as differences in spatial and temporal processing. Rather than simply “unconscious,” the dorsal stream can be better described as making a special contribution to what Husserl identified as the visual horizon. (shrink)

I argue that conscious visual experience is essentially a non-representational demonstration of a skill. The explication and defense of this position depends on both phenomenological and empirical considerations. The central phenomenological claim is this: as a matter of human psychology, it is impossible to produce a conscious visual experience of a mind-independent object that is sufficiently like typical cases, without including concomitant proprioceptive sensations of the sort of extra-neural behavior that allows us to there and then competently detect such objects. (...) I then argue that this view, which is a version of enactivism, best explains the temporality of conscious experience—what is often called the specious present. (shrink)