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Blindsight and the Role of Phenomenal Qualities
Philosophy Posted by Aelhswith on Thursday April 13, @09:37AM
from the zombie-vision dept.
Ralph Schumacher's summary of this philosophy of mind document:
The aim of this paper is to defend a broad concept of visual perception, according to which it is a sufficient condition for visual perception that subjects receive visual information in a way which enables them to give reliably correct answers about the objects presented to them. According to this view, blindsight, non-epistemic seeing, and conscious visual experience count as proper types of visual perception. This leads to two consequences concerning the role of the phenomenal qualities of visual experiences. First, phenomenal qualities are not necessary in order to see something, because in the case of blindsight, subjects can see objects without experiences phenomenal qualities. Second, they cannot be intentional properties, since they are not essential properties of visual experiences, and because the content of visual experiences cannot be constituted by contingent properties.


http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Mind/MindSchu.htm

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    Re: Blindsight and the Role of Phenomenal Qualities
    by Joseph on Thursday April 27, @08:42AM
    This is the kind of paper that requires careful consideration. The reason is that one of the fundamental errors which has been made, and continues to be made, in philosophy is the distinction between phenomenal and noumenal perceptible things. Immanuel Kant is, in history, the man who made this distinction popular in our time.

    But he was wrong. There is no such distinction. A bottle of water, with no label, a white cap and half-filled with water is going to appear that way to human perception. What is sensed is independently existent in relation to the senser. And that which is sensed is sensed in the exact same way by every human senser. subjectively each senser can, and does, attribute an arbitray meaning to what is sensed. But what is sensed remains, as it initially appears.

    To accept this, of course, one must believe that it is possible to be possessed of a perfect, personal human structure. In other words, it is necessary to assume the possibility of a perfect human being. For it is only in that perfection of structure that all things are perceived as they should be.

    Let know one assume they constitute such a perfect specimen! For we know too little about ourselves (and an obviously a stunted race) to be able to formulate criteria for judging a thing perfect.
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