Blindsight is the ability of patients with an impaired visual cortex to perform visually in their blind field without acknowledging that performance. This ability has been interpreted as a sign of the absence of phenomenal consciousness, and neuroscientific studies have extensively studied cases of it. Different proposals separate visual form recognition from motion perception, and attempt to show that either the former or the latter is solely responsible for blindsight performance. However, a review of current experimental evidence shows that a (...) poor performance (on both form and motion) is accompanied by poor awareness. Blindsight cases do not influence the qualia debate, because they denote a severe visual performance deficit, and not because of a purportedly non-phenomenal nature of consciousness. (shrink)

The debate concerning the individuating role of the external environment in propositional content has turned to Marr’s computational theory of vision for either verification or disproof. Although not all the relevant arguments concerning the determining role of environmental constraints that Marr invokes in his visual account may succeed, the paper argues that Marr divides his computational explanation into two parts, the information processing “what” and the constraint introducing “why” aspect. It is the second part where separate claims concerning the necessity (...) and sufficiency of constraints are advocated, and initiate a specific computational process. The above explanation becomes subordinate to a conception of inference that closely resembles deduction. (shrink)

Can some films be genuine thought experiments that challenge our commonsense intuitions? Certain filmic narratives and their mise-en-scène details reveal rigorous reasoning and counterintuitive outcomes on philosophical issues, such as skepticism or personal identity. But this philosophical façade may hide a mundane concern for entertainment. Unfamiliar narratives drive spectator entertainment, and every novel cinematic situation could be easily explained as part of a process that lacks motives of philosophical elucidation. -/- The paper inverses the above objection, and proposes that when (...) the main cinematic character resists spectator engagement (a crucial source of cinematic entertainment), emotionally challenged spectators also question their commonsensical beliefs about his/her actions, and detect a conceptually novel situation as such. -/- A case study is Mike Leigh’s film Happy-Go-Lucky (2008), in which the main female character presents an unrelenting but eccentric version of 'feel good' happiness. Spectators gradually detect that the previously unexamined, commonsensical version of subjective happiness comes at the price of individual eccentricity, and that the choice of a subjective theory of happiness leads to consequences hitherto unacknowledged. (shrink)

Biological motion is the phenomenon of recognizing a human form out of moving point-light dots, where both bottom–up and top–down processing mechanisms have been reported. This study reviews available psychological and neuroscientific evidence, and it assesses attempts either to assimilate biological motion to other structure-from-motion cases or to include biological motion into a visual “social cognition” subsystem . While neither theoretical option seems to accommodate all relevant psychological results, the study proposes that biological motion may be an object recognition task, (...) inside the framework of Pylyshyn’s sequence of data-driven and cognitive mechanisms. This implies that a bottom–up object construction out of two-dimensional stimulus information precedes a top–down, but emotionally significant categorization of a particular human movement. Recognition of biological motion may be an example of visual processing in general. (shrink)

Descartes’ account of emotion conflict in the Passions of the Soul has recently been the subject of Shapiro’s essay (2003), who claims that agent evaluation of the human good operates as an explanatory factor for the reformation of existing mind-body associations. On the contrary, it is here argued that this passion reformation involves explicit reasoning processes, and that the tendency to promote the good of the human being either denotes the cause and not the reason for the original passion formation (...) or is a specific reasoning method. Passion reformation does not seem to be essentially related to the problem of mind-body union. (shrink)