O presente artigo trata de uma investigação acerca da teoria do filósofo Alva Noë sobre a percepção visual e como ela responde à seguinte questão: “o cego realmente vê com o uso do sistema de substituição tátil-visual?”. Conhecido como TVSS em inglês, é uma prótese construída nos anos 70 pelo neurocientista Bach-y-Rita capaz de recuperar a capacidade visual de cegos ao transformar dados sensoriais táteis em visuais com o uso de uma câmera e eletrodos conectados à uma parte do (...) corpo do usuário. As imagens de um objeto são convertidas em sinais elétricos e transmitidos para um eletrodo. O cérebro, por fim, identifica os sinais elétricos e, conforme o usuário habitua-se com os sinais táteis, o cérebro interpreta-os como sinais visuais. Esta reflexão remete ao problema de Molyneux, proposto à Locke, o qual questiona se um cego que tem sua visão restaurada é capaz de reconhecer objetos que antes reconhecia apenas pelo tato. O problema não possui uma resposta conclusiva e o aparelho de TVSS de Bach-y-Rita é considerado uma boa resposta para a questão. Sobre a teoria de Noë, para perceber visualmente é necessário que utilizemos de movimentos corporais para que a percepção seja utilizada em sua capacidade plena. Não há hierarquia perceptual na teoria de Noë: a visão não é mais importante do que o tato. Perceber, para o filósofo, é agir. Portanto, intenta-se, aqui, apresentar o ponto de vista do filósofo com a finalidade de expor uma visão alternativa acerca de problemáticas da filosofia da percepção. (shrink)

Analisa-se a articulação entre a proposição de políticas públicas de saúde mental e as estratégias para a reorientação do modelo assistencial em saúde mental a partir dos movimentos pela Reforma Psiquiátrica brasileira. Parte-se da perspectiva genealógica de Michel Foucault, o que implica descrever ..

Este artigo introduz as principais ideias da semântica inferencialista de três níveis proposta por Robert Brandom, apresentando-a segundo os conceitos de inferência, substituição e anáfora, relativos a cada nível da análise. Inicia-se discutindo o nível sentencial e em seguida mostram-se as principais razões para analisar os níveis semânticos subsentenciais da linguagem.

Sensory Individuals: Unimodal and Multimodal Perspectives provides an interdisciplinary, well-balanced, and comprehensive look at different aspects of unisensory and multisensory objects, using both nuanced philosophical analysis and informed empirical work. The research presented in this book represents the field's progression from treating neural sensory processes as primarily modality-specific towards its current state of the art, according to which perception, and its supporting neural processes, are multi-modal, modality-independent, meta-modal, and task-dependent. Even within such approaches sensory stimuli, properties, brain activations, and corresponding (...) perceptual phenomenology can still be characterized in a modality-specific way. The book examines the basic building blocks of human perception, and whether they are best understood as sense modality dependent units of different forms or multimodal perceptual objects. The book combines a variety of innovative and integrative angles to explore the topic and acts as a catalyst for an increasingly diverse field of research, which is in an exciting phase of growth and advancement. New questions are arising as quickly as they are being answered, and the collection Sensory Individuals provides an original and up-to-date addition to the field. (shrink)

O artigo examina a descriçáo e a crítica nietzscheanas do método dialético socrático, bem como o método de investigaçáo nietzscheano – a genealogia. Nietzsche considera o ser humano um criador de conceitos e de métodos de investigaçáo. Os métodos de investigaçáo, por sua vez, sáo associados a tipos humanos e a suas formas de relacionamento com a realidade efetiva. A genealogia analisa a vontade de potência que produz os conceitos e a considera como sintoma de um tipo humano. Nietzsche critica (...) o método dialético socrático, principalmente, por ser criaçáo de um tipo humano decadente. (shrink)

Many philosophers doubt that one can provide any successful explanation of sensory qualities - of how things look, feel, or seem to a perceiving subject. To provide such an explanation, one would need to explain qualitative facts in non-qualitative terms. Attempts to construct such explanations have seemed, in principle, doomed. Austen Clark examines the strategy used in psychophysics, psychometrics, and sensory neurophysiology to explain qualitative facts. He argues that this strategy could succeed: its structure is sound, and it can answer (...) the various philosophical objections lodged against it. On this basis Professor Clark presents an analysis of senosry qualities that offers the possibility of explaining at least some qualia, and he sketches how this scheme might eventually reduce to neurophysiology. If he is correct, we are not doomed to an eternity of mere acquaintance with our qualia. (shrink)

Philosophers of perception have been readier to postulate the existence of a visual field than to acknowledge sensory fields in other modalities. In this paper, I argue that the set of phenomenal features that philosophers have relied on when positing a visual field aptly characterise, mutatis mutandis, bodily sensation. I argue, in particular, that in localised bodily sensations we experience the body as a sensory field. I first motivate this claim for the case of haptic touch, and then generalise it (...) to other kinds of bodily sensation. I demonstrate the theoretical fruitfulness of this notion of a bodily field for the debate on the phenomenology of bodily ownership. (shrink)

In the paper, I argue that the notion of sensory representation that Pautz defines (via the Ramsey method) has incompatible features. The notion is defined in terms of its ability to explain both the phenomenal character of experience and its ability to give us cognitive access to perceptible properties, all while being existence-neutral. I argue that there is strong reason to conclude that no worldly relation could play all three roles simultaneously.

Sensory substitution devices make use of one substituting modality to get access to environmental information normally accessed through another modality . Based on behavioural and neuroimaging data, some authors have claimed that using a vision-substituting device results in visual perception. Reviewing these data, we contend that this claim is untenable. We argue that the kind of information processed by a SSD is metamodal, so that it can be accessed through any sensory modality and that the phenomenology associated with the use (...) of a SSD is best described in terms of spatial phenomenology, only. (shrink)

Synaesthesia is a strange sensory blending: synaesthetes report experiences of colours or tastes associated with particular sounds or words. This volume presents new essays by scientists and philosophers exploring what such cases can tell us about the nature of perception and its boundaries with illusion and imagination.

Some sensory experiences are pleasant, some unpleasant. This is a truism. But understanding what makes these experiences pleasant and unpleasant is not an easy job. Various difficulties and puzzles arise as soon as we start theorizing. There are various philosophical theories on offer that seem to give different accounts for the positive or negative affective valences of sensory experiences. In this paper, we will look at the current state of art in the philosophy of mind, present the main contenders, critically (...) compare and contrast them. In particular, we want to examine how they handle the reason-giving power of affective states. We will look into two representationalist proposals (Evaluativism and Imperativism) and a functionalist proposal, and argue that, contrary to their own advertisements, the representationalist proposals don’t have good accounts of why and how sensory affect can motivate, rationalize, and justify subsequent behavior and intentional mental activity. We will show that our own functionalist proposal does a much better job in this regard, and that when the representationalist proposals are modified to do a better job, they fare better not because of their representationalist credentials but due to their functionalist ones. (shrink)

Drawing on work in psychophysics, psychometrics, and sensory neurophysiology, Clark analyzes the character and defends the integrity of psychophysical explanations of qualitative facts, arguing that the structure of such explanations is sound and potentially successful.

Do sensory measurements deserve the label of “measurement”? We argue that they do. They fit with an epistemological view of measurement held in current philosophy of science, and they face the same kinds of epistemological challenges as physical measurements do: the problem of coordination and the problem of standardization. These problems are addressed through the process of “epistemic iteration,” for all measurements. We also argue for distinguishing the problem of standardization from the problem of coordination. To exemplify our claims, we (...) draw on olfactory performance tests, especially studies linking olfactory decline to neurodegenerative disorders. (shrink)

Is the brain the biological substrate of consciousness? Most naturalistic philosophers of mind have supposed that the answer must obviously be «yes » to this question. However, a growing number of philosophers working in 4e (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive) cognitive science have begun to challenge this assumption, arguing instead that consciousness supervenes on the whole embodied animal in dynamic interaction with the environment. We call views that share this claim dynamic sensorimotor theories of consciousness (DSM). Clark (2009) a founder and (...) leading proponent of the hypothesis of the extended mind, demurs, arguing that as matter of fact the biology of consciousness doesn’t allow for a brain, body and world boundary crossing architecture. We begin by looking at one of the arguments for DSM, the variable neural correlates argument. We then outline two criticisms that Clark has made of this argument and endorse his criticisms. However we finish up by using the case of sensory substitution to argue that something of this argument for DSM nevertheless survives. We suggest that Clark ought to concede sensory substitution as a case in which the conscious mind extends. (shrink)

Do sensory measurements deserve the label of “measurement”? We argue that they do. They fit with an epistemological view of measurement held in current philosophy of science, and they face the same kinds of epistemological challenges as physical measurements do: the problem of coordination and the problem of standardization. These problems are addressed through the process of “epistemic iteration,” for all measurements. We also argue for distinguishing the problem of standardization from the problem of coordination. To exemplify our claims, we (...) draw on olfactory performance tests, especially studies linking olfactory decline to neurodegenerative disorders. (shrink)

Teleological accounts of sensory normativity treat normal functioning for a species as a standard: sensory error involves departure from normal functioning for the species, i.e. sensory malfunction. Straightforward reflection on sensory trade-offs reveals that normal functioning for a species can exhibit failures of accuracy. Acknowledging these failures of accuracy is central to understanding the adaptations of a species. To make room for these errors we have to go beyond the teleological framework and invoke the notion of an ideal observer from (...) vision science. The notion of an ideal observer also sheds light on the important distinction between sensory malfunction and sensory limitation. (shrink)

This is the text of an invited talk exploring the connections between two apparently distinct notions of affect, sensory versus core affect. It is basically a progress report. It is exploratory and tentative. It starts from a mild puzzle about the apparent mismatch between the notion of affect that affective neuroscientists generally deploy and the notion of affect that emotion psychologists deploy. The notion favored by psychologists is the notion of core affect. The phenomenon studied by affective neuroscientists is usually (...) the notion of sensory affect. It's not clear how these two notions are related to each other. I'll present the main outlines of both notions, make some critical observations, and raise a few questions at the end. (shrink)

It is hoped that modern sensory substitution and augmentation devices will be able to replace or expand our senses. But to what extent has this been achieved to date? To what extent are the experiences created by sensory substitution devices like the sensory experiences that we are trying to replace? To what extent can we augment people’s senses providing them with new information and new experiences? The first aim of this introduction is to delve deeply into this question to discover (...) the usefulness of these devices, to outline the different sorts of experience that might be created, and what the evidence tells us about these experiences. While there are some reasons to be hopeful about the powers of sensory substitution devices, there are also reasons to wonder whether they will ever really have the practical applications that we hope they might have. The second aim is to look to see whether the study of modern sensory substitution and augmentation devices can shed light on the nature of our senses and perception in general. Much of the philosophical, psychological, and neuroscientific work that takes place concerning sensory substitution and augmentation is keenly aware of the possibility that it might help our understanding and it seeks to comprehend many different aspects of perception. (shrink)

As recently highlighted, despite a burgeoning field of sensory ethnography, the practices, production, and accountability of the senses in specific social interactional contexts remain sociologically under-explored. To contribute original insights to a literature on the sensuous body in physical–cultural contexts, here we adopt an ethnomethodologically sensitive perspective to focus on the accomplishment, social organization, and accountability of sensoriality in interaction. Exploring instances of the senses at work in social interaction, we utilize data from two ethnographic research projects to investigate the (...) production of running-together and swimming-together by skilled, experienced practitioners. We focus on two interlinked sensory modalities: auditory attunement, and vision and intercorporeality, identified as key dimensions of sensory embodiment and “togethering” in these particular domains. (shrink)

Many philosophers use findings about sensory substitution devices in the grand debate about how we should individuate the senses. The big question is this: Is “vision” assisted by (tactile) sensory substitution really vision? Or is it tactile perception? Or some sui generis novel form of perception? My claim is that sensory substitution assisted “vision” is neither vision nor tactile perception, because it is not perception at all. It is mental imagery: visual mental imagery triggered by tactile sensory stimulation. But it (...) is a special form of mental imagery that is triggered by corresponding sensory stimulation in a different sense modality, which I call “multimodal mental imagery.”. (shrink)

Sensory Individuals: Unimodal and Multimodal Perspectives provides an interdisciplinary, well-balanced, and comprehensive look at different aspects of unisensory and multisensory objects, using both nuanced philosophical analysis and informed empirical work. The research presented in this book represents the field's progression from treating neural sensory processes as primarily modality-specific towards its current state of the art, according to which perception, and its supporting neural processes, are multi-modal, modality-independent, meta-modal, and task-dependent. Even within such approaches sensory stimuli, properties, brain activations, and corresponding (...) perceptual phenomenology can still be characterized in a modality-specific way. The book examines the basic building blocks of human perception, and whether they are best understood as sense modality dependent units of different forms or multimodal perceptual objects. The book combines a variety of innovative and integrative angles to explore the topic and acts as a catalyst for an increasingly diverse field of research, which is in an exciting phase of growth and advancement. New questions are arising as quickly as they are being answered, and the collection Sensory Individuals provides an original and up-to-date addition to the field. (shrink)

This article seeks the origin, in the theories of Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen), Descartes, and Berkeley, of two-stage theories of spatial perception, which hold that visual perception involves both an immediate representation of the proximal stimulus in a two-dimensional ‘‘sensory core’’ and also a subsequent perception of the three dimensional world. The works of Ibn al-Haytham, Descartes, and Berkeley already frame the major theoretical options that guided visual theory into the twentieth century. The field of visual perception was the first area (...) of what we now call psychology to apply mathematics, through geometrical models as used by Euclid, Ptolemy, Ibn al-Haytham, and Descartes (among others). The article shows that Kepler’s discovery of the retinal image, which revolutionized visual anatomy and entailed fundamental changes in visual physiology, did not alter the basic structure of theories of spatial vision. These changes in visual physiology are advanced especially in Descartes' Dioptrics and his L'Homme. Berkeley develops a radically empirist theory vision, according to which visual perception of depth is learned through associative processes that rely on the sense of touch. But Descartes and Berkeley share the assertion that there is a two-dimensional sensory core that is in principle available to consciousness. They also share the observation that we don't usually perceived this core, but find depth and distance to be phenomenally immediate, a point they struggle to accommodate theoretically. If our interpretation is correct, it was not a change in the theory of the psychology of vision that engendered the idea of a sensory core, but rather the introduction of the theory into a new metaphysical context. (shrink)

When a user integrates a sensory substitution device into her life, the process involves perceptual learning, that is, ‘relatively long-lasting changes to an organism’s perceptual system that improve its ability to respond to its environment’ (Goldstone 1998: 585). In this paper, I explore ways in which the extensive literature on perceptual learning can be applied to help improve sensory substitution devices. I then use these findings to answer a philosophical question. Much of the philosophical debate surrounding sensory substitution devices concerns (...) what happens after perceptual learning occurs. In particular, should the resultant perceptual experience be classified in the substituted modality (as vision), in the substituting modality (as auditory or tactile), or in a new sense modality? I propose a novel empirical test to help resolve this philosophical debate. (shrink)

[This is the penultimate version, please send me an email for the final version]. Some sensations are pleasant, some unpleasant, and some are neither. Furthermore, those that are pleasant or unpleasant are so to different degrees. In this essay, I want to explore what kind of a difference is the difference between these three kinds of sensations. I will develop a comprehensive three-level account of sensory pleasure that is simultaneously adverbialist, functionalist and is also a version of a satisfied experiential-desire (...) account. (shrink)

Joint attention has been extensively studied in the developmental literature because of overwhelming evidence that the ability to socially coordinate visual attention to an object is essential to healthy developmental outcomes, including language learning. The goal of this study was to understand the complex system of sensory-motor behaviors that may underlie the establishment of joint attention between parents and toddlers. In an experimental task, parents and toddlers played together with multiple toys. We objectively measured joint attention—and the sensory-motor behaviors that (...) underlie it—using a dual head-mounted eye-tracking system and frame-by-frame coding of manual actions. By tracking the momentary visual fixations and hand actions of each participant, we precisely determined just how often they fixated on the same object at the same time, the visual behaviors that preceded joint attention and manual behaviors that preceded and co-occurred with joint attention. We found that multiple sequential sensory-motor patterns lead to joint attention. In addition, there are developmental changes in this multi-pathway system evidenced as variations in strength among multiple routes. We propose that coordinated visual attention between parents and toddlers is primarily a sensory-motor behavior. Skill in achieving coordinated visual attention in social settings—like skills in other sensory-motor domains—emerges from multiple pathways to the same functional end. (shrink)

What are the sensory individuals of audition? What are the entities our auditory system attributes properties to? We examine various proposals about the nature of the sensory individuals of audition, and show that while each can account for some aspects of auditory perception, each also faces certain difficulties. We then put forward a new conception of sensory individuals according to which auditory sensory individuals are composite individuals. A feature shared by all existing accounts of sounds and sources is that they (...) postulate sensory individuals that are non-composite. They identify the sensory individual of sound hearing or source hearing with one type of entity in the environment, be they sound waves, vibrations, or interactions. We question this assumption and argue that our perceptual systems represent two or more aspects of the environment as a single sensory individual. Finally, we show that taking auditory individuals to be composite sensory individuals allows for an account of audition that is less problematic than its existing alternatives. (shrink)

Sensory awareness -- the direct focus on some specific sensory aspect of the body or outer or inner environment -- is a frequently occurring yet rarely recognized phenomenon of inner experience. It is a distinct, complete phenomenon; it is not merely, for example, an aspect of a perception. Sensory awareness is one of the five most common forms of inner experience, according to our results . Despite its high frequency, many people do not notice its appearance nor recognize its theoretical (...) import. We describe sensory awareness and distinguish it from other aspects of experience. We give examples and discuss how it appears when moments of inner experience are examined carefully. We note that there are large individual differences in the observed frequency of sensory awareness and consider its relationship to mental health and other aspects of psychological functioning. (shrink)

One of the central limitations of sensory substitution devices (SSDs) is their inability to reproduce the non-sensory feelings that are normally associated with visual experiences, especially hedonic and aesthetic responses. This limitation is sometimes reported to cause SSD users frustration. To make matters worse, it is unclear that improvements in acuity, bandwidth, or training will resolve the issue. Yet, if SSDs are to actually reproduce visual experience in its fullness, it seems that the reproduction of non-sensory feelings will be of (...) some importance. We offer a novel solution. Researchers can produce hedonic and aesthetic responses by eliciting these feelings artificially, pairing distal objects that should be pleasurable to pleasurable stimulus outputs from the SSD. We outline two strategies for accomplishing this: first, by means of a prefixed, hardwired, association of pleasant distal objects to pleasant stimulus outputs from the SSD; second, by means of a flexible, feedback-based association which creates associations based on a subject-directed matching of distal objects to patterns of stimuli from the SSD which the subject takes to have the corresponding hedonic properties. We evaluate some problems with both strategies, and we argue that the feedback-based strategy is more promising. Researchers can use this strategy to help the blind, allowing them to take pleasure in the objects they perceive using SSDs. (shrink)

This collection of new essays on sensory individuals in unimodal and multimodal perception features contributions by outstanding researchers in the fields of philosophy of perception, experimental psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. The topics investigated include conceptual, developmental, and methodological aspects of object perception, and especially how various sense modalities construct their objects from sensory features and feature bearers. The interdisciplinary approach offered has enabled new directions in research on this subject. As ordered in this volume, the topics of the contributions progress (...) from treating neural sensory processes as primarily unisensory towards approaches that take perceptual processing to be modality-independent, meta-modal, and multimodal. Even within these latter approaches, sensory stimuli, sensory properties, brain activations, and corresponding perceptual phenomenology have often been characterized in a modality-specific way. Thus, it is timely to explore the relation between those processes that are unisensory and those that are multisensory. One of the primary themes of this collection is examining whether the basic building blocks of human perception are best understood as modality-dependent units of different forms or in terms of multimodal perceptual objects. Another theme is the relation between low-level object processing (segmentation and perceptual grouping processes) and high-level object knowledge embracing object concept and object-related expectations. A final theme is the role that perceptual objects play as loci of unification in unimodal and multimodal perception, namely that they enable binding and integration of sensory properties to individual entities or events. (shrink)

Some 20 years ago Todd and colleagues proposed that rhythm perception is mediated by the conjunction of a sensory representation of the auditory input and a motor representation of the body (Todd, 1994a, 1995 ), and that a sense of motion from sound is mediated by the vestibular system (Todd, 1992a, 1993b ). These ideas were developed into a sensory-motor theory of rhythm and beat induction (Todd et al., 1999 ). A neurological substrate was proposed which might form the biological (...) basis of the theory (Todd et al., 2002 ). The theory was implemented as a computational model and a number of experiments conducted to test it. In the following time there have been several key developments. One is the demonstration that the vestibular system is primal to rhythm perception, and in related work several experiments have provided further evidence that rhythm perception is body dependent. Another is independent advances in imaging, which have revealed the brain areas associated with both vestibular processing and rhythm perception. A third is the finding that vestibular receptors contribute to auditory evoked potentials (Todd et al., 2014a, b ). These behavioral and neurobiological developments demand a theoretical overview which could provide a new synthesis over the domain of rhythm perception. In this paper we suggest four propositions as the basis for such a synthesis. (1) Rhythm perception is a form of vestibular perception; (2) Rhythm perception evokes both external and internal guidance of somatotopic representations; (3) A link from the limbic system to the internal guidance pathway mediates the “dance habit”; (4) The vestibular reward mechanism is innate. The new synthesis provides an explanation for a number of phenomena not often considered by rhythm researchers. We discuss these along with possible computational implementations and alternative models and propose a number of new directions for future research. (shrink)

In this article, we address an existing lacuna in the sociology of the senses, by employing sociological phenomenology to illuminate the under-researched sense of temperature, as lived by a social group for whom water temperature is particularly salient: competitive pool swimmers. The research contributes to a developing ‘sensory sociology’ that highlights the importance of the socio-cultural framing of the senses and ‘sensory work’, but where there remains a dearth of sociological exploration into senses extending beyond the ‘classic five’ sensorium. Drawing (...) on data from a three-year ethnographic study of competitive swimmers in the UK, our analysis explores the rich sensuousities of swimming, and highlights the role of temperature as fundamentally affecting the affordances offered by the aquatic environment. The article contributes original theoretical perspectives to the sociology of the senses and of sport in addressing the ways in which social actors in the aquatic environment interact, both intersubjectively and intercorporeally, as thermal beings. (shrink)

Sensory substitution and augmentation devices are used to replace or enhance one sense by using another. Fiona Macpherson brings together neuroscientists, psychologists and philosophers to focus on the nature of the perceptual experiences, the sensory interactions, and the changes that occur in the mind and brain while using these technologies.

It is typically assumed that while we know other people’s mental states by observing and interpreting their behavior, we know our own mental states by introspection, i.e., without interpreting ourselves. In his latest book, The opacity of mind: An integrative theory of self-knowledge, Peter Carruthers (2011) argues against this assumption. He holds that findings from across the cognitive sciences strongly suggest that self-knowledge of conscious propositional attitudes such as intentions, judgments, and decisions involves a swift and unconscious process of self-interpretation (...) that utilizes the same sensory channels that we employ when working out other people’s mental states. I provide an overview of Carruthers’ book before discussing a pathological case that challenges his account of self-knowledge and mentioning empirical evidence that undermines his use of a particular kind of data in his case against introspection of conscious attitudes. (shrink)

This paper highlights the significance of sensory studies and psychophysical investigations of the relations between psychic and physical phenomena for our understanding of the development of the physics discipline, by examining aspects of research on sense perception, physiology, esthetics, and psychology in the work of Gustav Theodor Fechner, Hermann von Helmholtz, Wilhelm Wundt, and Ernst Mach between 1860 and 1871. It complements previous approaches oriented around research on vision, Fechner’s psychophysics, or the founding of experimental psychology, by charting Mach’s engagement (...) with psychophysical experiments in particular. Examining Mach’s study of the senses and esthetics, his changing attitudes toward the mechanical worldview and atomism, and his articulation of comparative understandings of sensual, geometrical, and physical spaces helps set Mach’s emerging epistemological views in the context of his teaching and research. Mach complemented an analytic strategy focused on parallel psychic and physical dimensions of sensation, with a synthetic comparative approach – building analogies between the retina, the individual, and social life, and moving between abstract and sensual spaces. An examination of the broadly based critique that Mach articulated in his 1871 lecture on the conservation of work shows how his historical approach helped Mach cast what he now saw as a narrowly limiting emphasis on mechanics as a phase yet to be overcome. (shrink)

Philosophers and cognitive scientists address the relationships among the senses and the connections between conscious experiences that form unified wholes. In this volume, cognitive scientists and philosophers examine two closely related aspects of mind and mental functioning: the relationships among the various senses and the links that connect different conscious experiences to form unified wholes. The contributors address a range of questions concerning how information from one sense influences the processing of information from the other senses and how unified states (...) of consciousness emerge from the bonds that tie conscious experiences together. Sensory Integration and the Unity of Consciousness is the first book to address both of these topics, integrating scientific and philosophical concerns. A flood of recent work in both philosophy and perception science has challenged traditional conceptions of the sensory systems as operating in isolation. Contributors to the volume consider the ways in which perceptual contact with the world is or may be “multisensory,” discussing such subjects as the modeling of multisensory integration and philosophical aspects of sensory modalities. Recent years have seen a similar surge of interest in unity of consciousness. Contributors explore a range of questions on this topic, including the nature of that unity, the degree to which conscious experiences are unified, and the relationship between unified consciousness and the self. Contributors Tim Bayne, David J. Bennett, Berit Brogaard, Barry Dainton, Ophelia Deroy, Frederique de Vignemont, Marc Ernst, Richard Held, Christopher S. Hill, Geoffrey Lee, Kristan Marlow, Farid Masrour, Jennifer Matey, Casey O'Callaghan, Cesare V. Parise, Kevin Rice, Elizabeth Schechter, Pawan Sinha, Julia Trommershaeuser, Loes C. J. van Dam, Jonathan Vogel, James Van Cleve, Robert Van Gulick, Jonas Wulff. (shrink)

Can a basic sensory property like a bare colour or tone be beautiful? Some, like Kant, say no. But Heidegger suggests, plausibly, that colours ‘glow’ and tones ‘sing’ in artworks. These claims can be productively synthesized: ‘glowing’ colours are not beautiful; but they are sensory forces—not mere ‘matter’, contra Kant—with real aesthetic impact. To the extent that it inheres in sensible properties, beauty is plausibly restricted to structures of sensory force. Kant correspondingly misrepresents the relation of beautiful wholes to their (...) parts. Beautiful form is not extrinsic to sensory force. Sensible beauty is just the holistic impact of agonistically-interacting sensory forces. When sensory forces interact hierarchically, their collective impact is closer to the sublime, in quality if not degree. The simplest sensory experience of sublimity is just the impact of radically intensified sensory forces, similar in kind if not degree to the individual ‘singing’ tones in a beautiful melody. (shrink)

Synesthesia is a phenomenon in which an additional nonstandard perceptual experience occurs consistently in response to ordinary stimulation applied to the same or another modality. Recent studies suggest an important role of semantic representations in the induction of synesthesia. In the present proposal we try to link the empirically grounded theory of sensory-motor contingency and mirror system based embodied simulation to newly discovered cases of swimming-style color synesthesia. In the latter color experiences are evoked only by showing the synesthetes a (...) picture of a swimming person or asking them to think about a given swimming style. Neural mechanisms of mirror systems seem to be involved here. It has been shown that for mirror-sensory synesthesia, such as mirror-touch or mirror-pain synesthesia, concurrent experiences are caused by the overactivity in the mirror neuron system responding to the specific observation. The comparison of different forms of synesthesia has the potential of challenging conventional thinking on this phenomenon and providing a more general, sensory-motor account of synesthesia encompassing cases driven by semantic or emulational rather than pure sensory or motor representations. (shrink)