There has been a recent surge in interest in two questions concerning the nature of perceptual experience; viz. the question of whether perceptual experience is sometimes cognitively penetrated and that of whether high-level properties are presented in perceptual experience. Only rarely have thinkers been concerned with the question of whether the two phenomena are interestingly related. Here we argue that the two phenomena are not related in any interesting way. We argue further that this lack of an interesting connection between (...) the two phenomena has potentially devastating consequences for naïve realism. Finally, we consider the possibility of a disunified view of experience that takes perceptual experience to be a matter of both being directly perceptually related to mind-independent objects and property instances as well as consciously representing these entities. (shrink)

There is a debate between David Barnett and Rory Madden concerning the features that “our naïve conception of conscious subjects” has. While Barnett claims that our conception demands that conscious subjects be simple (that is, not composed of parts), Madden holds that our conception demands that conscious beings be topologically integrated (meaning, roughly, that you can travel from any proper part of the conscious subject to any other without breaking the subject’s boundaries). In this paper, I aim to bring some (...) empirical results concerning the rubber-hand illusions and bilocation illusions to bear on this topic. While I do not reach a definitive resolution to the dispute between Barnett and Madden, I suggest that, provisionally, the empirical results favor Barnett’s proposal. (shrink)

This paper argues that even though massive technological unemployment will likely be one of the results of automation, we will not need to institute mass-scale redistribution of wealth (such as would be involved in, e.g., instituting universal basic income) to deal with its consequences. Instead, reasons are given for cautious optimism about the standards of living the newly unemployed workers may expect in the (almost) fully-automated future. It is not claimed that these predictions will certainly bear out. Rather, they are (...) no less likely to come to fruition than the predictions of those authors who predict that massive technological unemployment will lead to the suffering of the masses on such a scale that significant redistributive policies will have to be instituted to alleviate it. Additionally, the paper challenges the idea that the existence of a moral obligation to help the victims of massive unemployment justifies the coercive taking of anyone else’s property. (shrink)

“The Epistemic Significance of Perceptual Learning” defends the view that perceptual experiences generate justification in virtue of their presentational phenomenology, preserve past justification in virtue of the influence of perceptual learning on them, and thereby allow new beliefs formed on their basis to also be partly based on that past justification. “The Real Epistemic Significance of Perceptual Learning” mounts challenges to these three claims. Here we explore some avenues for responding to those challenges.

In this paper I argue that the phenomenal character of a mood experience wholly depends on affective modifications (appropriate for the mood in question) to the phenomenal characters of one's non-mood experiences. I argue that this view accounts for all distinctive aspects of mood phenomenology, in contrast to currently existing accounts of moods, each of which faces trouble accounting for some distinctive aspect of mood experience. I also explain how my view allows for holding both that moods seemingly lack intentional (...) objects and that their phenomenal character reduces to intentional content nonetheless. (shrink)

Kant, Wittgenstein, and Husserl all held that visual awareness of objects requires visual awareness of the space in which the objects are located. There is a lively debate in the literature on spatial perception whether this view is undermined by the results of experiments on a Balint’s syndrome patient, known as RM. I argue that neither of two recent interpretations of these results is able to explain RM’s apparent ability to experience motion. I outline some ways in which each interpretation (...) may respond to this challenge, and suggest which way of meeting the challenge is preferable. I conclude that RM retains some awareness of the larger space surrounding the objects he sees. (shrink)

In this paper, I will examine the question of the space of visual imagery. I will ask whether in visually imagining an object or a scene, we also thereby imagine that object or scene as being in a space unrelated to the space we’re simultaneously perceiving or whether it is the case that the space of visual imagination is experienced as connected to the space of perceptual experience. I will argue that the there is no distinction between the spatial content (...) of visualization and the spatial content of visual perception. I will base my conclusion on two uncontroversial, empirically confirmed aspects of imagery: the perspectival character of imagery, and the possibility of superimposing an imagined object upon the perceived scene. (shrink)

In “Moods Are Not Colored Lenses: Perceptualism and the Phenomenology of Moods” Francisco Gallegos presents a challenge to popular view about the phenomenology of being in a mood that he calls “perceptualism”. In this essay, I offer a partial defense of perceptualism about moods and argue that perceptualism and Gallegos’s preferred Heideggerian alternative need not be viewed as in opposition to one another.