How Can Brains in Vats Experience a Spatial World? A Puzzle for Internalists

In Blockheads! (2019)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

In this chapter, Pautz raises a puzzle about spatial experience for phenomenal internalists like Ned Block. If an accidental, lifelong brain-in-the-void (BIV) should have all the same experiences as you, it would have an experience as of items having various shapes, and be able to acquire concepts of those shapes, despite being cut off from real things with the shapes. Internalists cannot explain this by saying that BIV is presented with Peacocke-style visual field regions having various shapes, because these would have to be non-physical sense data. They might instead explain this by saying that BIV “phenomenally represents” various shape properties. But since BIV lacks any interesting physical relations to shapes, this would imply that phenomenally representation is an irreducible relation.

Links

PhilArchive

External links

  • This entry has no external links. Add one.
Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

The Qualitative Character of Spatial Perception.Douglas B. Meehan - 2007 - Dissertation, Graduate Center, City University of New York
Spatial Experience and Special Relativity.Brian Cutter - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 174 (9):2297-2313.
An Argument for Shape Internalism.Jan Almäng - 2017 - Erkenntnis 82 (4):819-836.
Acting on (bodily) experience.Adrian J. T. Smith - 2009 - PSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research On Consciousness 15 (1):82 - 99.
Egocentric Spatial Representation in Action and Perception.Robert Briscoe - 2009 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 79 (2):423-460.
Shape Properties and Perception.Kirk Ludwig - 1996 - Philosophical Issues 7:325-350.
A puzzle about seeing for representationalism.James Openshaw & Assaf Weksler - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (9):2625-2646.

Analytics

Added to PP
2020-01-21

Downloads
463 (#37,569)

6 months
72 (#53,638)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Adam Pautz
Brown University

References found in this work

Writing the Book of the World.Theodore Sider - 2011 - Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
Origins of Objectivity.Tyler Burge - 2010 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
On a confusion about a function of consciousness.Ned Block - 1995 - Brain and Behavioral Sciences 18 (2):227-–247.

View all 70 references / Add more references