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Is the Visual World a Grand Illusion?
There is a traditional scepticism about whether the world "out there" really is as we perceive it. A new breed of hyper-sceptics now challenges whether we even have the perceptual experience we think we have. According to these writers, perceptual consciousness is a kind of false consciousness. This view grows out of the discovery of such phenomena as change blindness and inattentional blindness, which show that we can all be quite blind to changes taking place before our very eyes. Such radical scepticism has acute and widespread implications for the study of perception and consciousness. The writings collected in this volume explore these implications. The contributors are scientists and philosophers at the forefront of this research, and include well-known authors such as psychologists Susan Blackmore and Arien Mack, and philosophers Andy Clark and Daniel Dennett. They have an gift for bringing these paradoxical issues to life and sharing their excitement with the non-specialist.
- GenresPhilosophyPsychology
192 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 2002
About the author
Alva Noë
17 books107 followersAlva Noë (born 1964) is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. The focus of his work is the theory of perception and consciousness. In addition to these problems in cognitive science and the philosophy of mind, he is interested in phenomenology, the theory of art, Wittgenstein, and the origins of analytic philosophy.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
October 25, 2019
Essays blended together in such a way that they read as a coherent book with the central themes of Philosophy of Mind popping up throughout. Most of the time we are change blind (we don’t see changes unless we focus on it even to the degree of not seeing an ape on a basketball court while we were counting basketball dribbles) or we are intentionally forgetting or we never really were aware in the first place. When one ask are you conscious now, the answer is yes because we are aware of being aware when we think about our own being qua being while most of the rest of the time we aren’t thinking about thinking.
William James’ stream of consciousness is out of favor in these essays, Dennett’s last version recall is only favored by him (he writes one of the essays). Zombies get mentioned but thankfully Searle’s absurd ‘Chinese Room’ does not. The Rev. Berkeley gets mentioned and dismissed four or five times while the grand illusion this book speaks about is not Berkeley’s where we are all only in the mind of God, but the book’s grand illusion is more along the lines of since we don’t have a homunculus in our theater of the mind and we are change blind, forgetful and are lazy except when we are forced not to be how do we experience reality through our experiences which are shaped by our reality and reconcile our Bayesian priors (biases) which shades our world by our expectations. (One of the essays did talk about Bayes’ Theorem, and another shapes the problem in an experiential David Hume kind of way. BTW, Hume’s reality as experience would be similar to a Buddhist’s. They both have the same starting premise but Hume would say we should enjoy that card game while the Buddhist would ultimately say we should hope for the nothingness of Nirvana since all is suffering or disappointment anyways, and Schopenhauer who gives credit to Hume and Berkeley for his philosophical system would tend to agree with the Buddhist’s conclusion on that why bother point even to the point he’ll say we would have been better never to have been born at all!). Theory of mind was mentioned once in one essay and how autistics lack it explaining their inability to follow eye movement. I always translate ‘theory of mind’ to be ‘mind reading’ and think of it as mostly pseudo-science mumbo jumbo and I think implying autistics lack empathy of others since they lack ‘theory of mind’ is misleading at best and tends towards wild ass speculation based on nothing but misdirection.
In the end these essays get at the thinking about our own thinking or in other words what does it mean to be conscious when almost everything we do is not introspective implying that our own being is a grand illusion of sorts. Overall these are not a bad set of essays and deserve to be read today especially if you can find a cheap copy in a used book store for a couple of bucks or get a free pdf copy that is floating around the internet. Under no circumstances would I recommend paying full freight for this book ($29.90 too expensive!), but at the same time I would recommend it because it made for good cheap reading and is just as good as the other 10 or so Great Courses or books on Philosophy of Mind that I’ve read over the last year or two.
William James’ stream of consciousness is out of favor in these essays, Dennett’s last version recall is only favored by him (he writes one of the essays). Zombies get mentioned but thankfully Searle’s absurd ‘Chinese Room’ does not. The Rev. Berkeley gets mentioned and dismissed four or five times while the grand illusion this book speaks about is not Berkeley’s where we are all only in the mind of God, but the book’s grand illusion is more along the lines of since we don’t have a homunculus in our theater of the mind and we are change blind, forgetful and are lazy except when we are forced not to be how do we experience reality through our experiences which are shaped by our reality and reconcile our Bayesian priors (biases) which shades our world by our expectations. (One of the essays did talk about Bayes’ Theorem, and another shapes the problem in an experiential David Hume kind of way. BTW, Hume’s reality as experience would be similar to a Buddhist’s. They both have the same starting premise but Hume would say we should enjoy that card game while the Buddhist would ultimately say we should hope for the nothingness of Nirvana since all is suffering or disappointment anyways, and Schopenhauer who gives credit to Hume and Berkeley for his philosophical system would tend to agree with the Buddhist’s conclusion on that why bother point even to the point he’ll say we would have been better never to have been born at all!). Theory of mind was mentioned once in one essay and how autistics lack it explaining their inability to follow eye movement. I always translate ‘theory of mind’ to be ‘mind reading’ and think of it as mostly pseudo-science mumbo jumbo and I think implying autistics lack empathy of others since they lack ‘theory of mind’ is misleading at best and tends towards wild ass speculation based on nothing but misdirection.
In the end these essays get at the thinking about our own thinking or in other words what does it mean to be conscious when almost everything we do is not introspective implying that our own being is a grand illusion of sorts. Overall these are not a bad set of essays and deserve to be read today especially if you can find a cheap copy in a used book store for a couple of bucks or get a free pdf copy that is floating around the internet. Under no circumstances would I recommend paying full freight for this book ($29.90 too expensive!), but at the same time I would recommend it because it made for good cheap reading and is just as good as the other 10 or so Great Courses or books on Philosophy of Mind that I’ve read over the last year or two.
July 6, 2012
This is a fascinating and deeply thought provoking collections of arguments directed at responding to the question posed by the title. Some of the essays are more easily grasped than others, but even the thicker-going ones are worth "slogging" through. Many of the writers in this collection question whether perceptual consciousness is a kind of 'false consciousness.' This is interesting in light of what the buddha is said to have taught about perception: "all perception is wrong."
At a recent conference on consciousness, Deepak Chopra thought he'd set a real zinger when he criticized Susan Blackmore for saying that consciousness is an illusion. Arguing from the phenomenological sense of having or being conscious, Chopra seems to think it obvious that consciousness doesn't merely exist, but that it is 'being itself!' Blackmore, though I don't know if she knew it, was actually offering up the same view of the buddha (though you'd not know that if all you know about buddhism comes from zen or tibetan buddhism, which has reified consciousness/mind into a stand-in for atman/brahman!
Here's a whole collection that challenges our deepest and perhaps most intimate intimations about what we see. It's really worth the time to read!
At a recent conference on consciousness, Deepak Chopra thought he'd set a real zinger when he criticized Susan Blackmore for saying that consciousness is an illusion. Arguing from the phenomenological sense of having or being conscious, Chopra seems to think it obvious that consciousness doesn't merely exist, but that it is 'being itself!' Blackmore, though I don't know if she knew it, was actually offering up the same view of the buddha (though you'd not know that if all you know about buddhism comes from zen or tibetan buddhism, which has reified consciousness/mind into a stand-in for atman/brahman!
Here's a whole collection that challenges our deepest and perhaps most intimate intimations about what we see. It's really worth the time to read!
Want to read
April 6, 2010proponent of the idea that consciousness does not reside in the brain; recommended by John Kowalko
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews