Blog - page 2

This paper (available here) has been a journey—rejected two times since the first draft and two years in the making, it has grown into something different than we initially planned with Krzysiek, when I sent him the Chalmers’ meta-problem paper and he asked if we want to write a comment together, but it turned out much more exciting!

In the current version we begin by pointing out that the meta-problem approach laid out by Chalmers is significantly flawed, as any solution it may arrive at depends on the assumptions about what intuitions are. Then we advance a novel and alternative program of investigating folk views on phenomenal consciousness, centering their positive intuitions. Instead of asking what consciousness is not, as Chalmers proposes—which could at best verify some of the extant approaches—we propose to ask what consciousness is (or how consciousness is). In this way, we believe, experimental philosophy could help generating new alternatives to entrenched views in consciousness debates.

Last week my first paper (!) finally came out in Synthese, you can read it here. The paper synthesizes the initial theoretical research of my project on space perception, focusing on phenomenological aspects that Rick Grush termed “spatial purport” of perceptual experience (Grush 2007).

Space perception has been widely studied in the context of allocentric frame of reference (think O’Keefe, Moser & Moser, place cells, hippocampus), however egocentric space perception differs significantly in that it is multimodal, closely tied to action, doesn’t have topographic structure, and ties closely with phenomenal experience of space. Grush offered a high-level model of spatial purport, however this model: a) was never explicitly tested and b) discards a significant part of spatial purport - experience of object-motions (motions induced by sources external to the perceiving subject). In the paper, I analyze the concept of “spatial purport” that Grush left largely underspecified, and show how basic aspect of experience of the world it is (and how it can be usefully operationalized for the purpose of future studies). Then I proceed to use insights from predictive processing to offer a novel extension of Grush’s skill theory, which takes my criticism (most significantly the issue of object-motions) into account. The model is a high-level proposal, but spelled out in formal terms which should enable its computational and empirical examination. My main project now is to develop simulations to compare the operation of Grush’s ST2.0 and the PHiST, and I will be posting here once there is some progress and results.