Philosophy of Perception

Fred Dretske has formulated a representational (or indirect realist ) account of perception that includes the following two features: Fred Dretske (1) Representational Vehicles/Contents Dretske first distinguishes between representational vehicle  and representational contents  as follows: "There are representational vehicles —the objects, events, or conditions that represent—and representational contents —the conditions or situations the vehicle represents as being so" (Dretske 68). (2) Qualia Secondly, Dretske appeals to qualia: "qualia are properties that physical objects, the ones we experience, normally have. They are not properties that experiences have" (Dretske 69). Michael Huemer In contrast to Dretske, Michael Huemer formulates and defends a version of direct realism in his book Skepticism and the Veil of Perception . Huemer gives the following rough characterization of direct realism: “Direct realism holds that in perception, we are ...

Hallucinations & Representationalism Representationalism is the theory that the world we know and see in our minds is not a direct perception of the external world, and rather a representation, or replica, produced by our minds. A hallucination is a perception created by the mind without external stimulus. It appears real, yet it is not tangible. I recommend everyone re-watch this at home where the graphics are better and the lights are on. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MH8fPqkpQbI Naive Realism vs. Representationalism The world cannot be exactly as we perceive it to be because there are multiple illusions such as this one, and actual hallucinations, that disprove its reality. Voila!

          For my class presentation I demonstrated the McGurk effect. If you watched the video in class, you should have heard the speaker say “tha-tha” or “da-da” as you watched the speaker, and “ba-ba” as closed your eyes. This is due to the McGurk effect, an illusion that demonstrates our perception of speech is influenced not only by the auditory sensation of speech, but also visual information about the speaker’s mouth forming the words. This is an example of multi-modal perception: perception formed by inputs from more than one sense modality, such as hearing and sight. The McGurk illusion is created by dubbing “ba-ba” over video of a speaker saying “ga-ga.” The auditory input of “ba-ba” and the visual input of “ga-ga” fuse into a perception of “da-da” as the brain tries to make sense of the conflicting information.           The McGurk effect is interesting among examples of multi-modal perception because the conflicting i...

My in-class experiment of the phenomenon known as "change blindness". This is a theory in which the human mind may not be aware of simple changes that occur right before our very eyes. In this experiment, I told the class that they would be watching some short videos about visual illusions. While they were distracted by the videos, I made some pretty obvious changes to my presentation that only a handful of them noticed by the end. Go ahead and watch the video to find out what they changes were!

Change blindness: is a perceptual phenomena that occurs when a change in the visual stimulus is introduced and the observer does not notice it. Inattentional blindness: the event that which an individual does not recognize an unexpected stimulus in plain sight. www.invisiblegorilla.com

Synesthesia is an uncommon perceptual anomaly in humans where one stimulus creates more than one perceptions. There are many different types of synesthesia that range from Grapheme (color/ character), to Lexical gustatory(word/ taste). This 'disorder' of sorts is very interesting for perceptual philosophy for many reasons. It has many aspects of both cognitive science and philosophical inquiry. This cognitive phenomenon is not fully understood in terms of how it works by science. There are a few theories and the most commonly accepted one explains why it can be both inherited and it can also happen while on certain psychotropic drugs. This theory is about how the brain starts off with all the senses in one spot and they migrate to different spots. The wires sometimes get crossed and Psychotropic drugs along with genetics can mix wires in the brain up at times causing synesthesia. This video from Michal Levy is an interesting depiction of an artistic remake of what it is like t...