Visual Phenomenology by Madary Michael;

Author:Madary, Michael;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2017-02-27T16:00:00+00:00

In the remaining part of this section, I would like to address two possible objections about what I have claimed with regard to attention and premise (2). These objections have to do with subliminal perception and the relevance of my Main Argument for empirical psychology.

The first objection is that I have made no room for well-known behavioral effects of stimuli that have behavioral effects but are not consciously perceived. It may not be immediately clear how unconscious priming (Mattler 2003), for example, might fit with the framework of anticipation and fulfillment. My reply to this objection is that the ongoing process of anticipation and fulfillment characterizes both conscious and unconscious perceptual content. Some anticipations can be fulfilled without conscious awareness. In general, the less determinate anticipations are the least conscious anticipations. Since indeterminacy comes in degrees, it may be most helpful to understand visual awareness also as admitting of degrees. This line of thinking brings up an important, but often overlooked, conceptual point about unconscious visual processing: when a stimulus has an influence on behavior but is not consciously perceived, the mental processing of that stimulus may be highly indeterminate.12 In other words, the content of unconscious percepts might differ from the content of conscious percepts of the exact same stimulus because there is a difference in the level of determinacy in the visual anticipations. Although I will not pursue this idea further here, I would like to note that this way of thinking about unconscious perceptual processing marks a departure from standard approaches in the consciousness literature, approaches that assume that the difference between conscious and unconscious representations is not a difference in content. This assumption can be found, for instance, in higher-order thought theories (Gennaro 2004) as well as Prinz’s intermediate-level theory (2012).

The second objection is that my description of this evidence in terms of anticipation and fulfillment fails to explain how we perceive the world. That is, I have said little about the details of the mechanisms that enable visual perception. Although some implementational details will be covered in the next chapter, this objection is fair, since I do leave out details. In exchange for details, I have offered a thesis about the general structure of the processing that enables visual perception, and I have explained how this general structure can accommodate some of the most important empirical results from human visual psychophysics. If what I am suggesting is along the right lines, then there are particular questions about the details that ought to be empirically tractable. For example, it seems clear that visual anticipation is not entirely penetrable by cognitive states. Nonetheless, visual anticipation must be driven by some kind of stored background knowledge. One interesting question, then, is what kinds of information can be put to use in the stirring up of visual anticipations. Are there contexts in which some information can drive visual anticipation and others in which it cannot? Relatedly, are there hysteresis effects in the generation of visual anticipations? These and similar

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