tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post4628442956707108013..comments2024-03-28T19:14:33.619-07:00Comments on The Splintered Mind: Doubts about (One Kind of) "Purkinje Afterimage"Eric Schwitzgebelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11541402189204286449noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-33378793612016911802007-01-13T10:45:00.000-08:002007-01-13T10:45:00.000-08:00Thanks for the interesting and thoughtful comment,...Thanks for the interesting and thoughtful comment, Chris!<br /><br />I think the two possibilities in the quoted passage are consistent: The blink might be disruptive, causing a gap in our experience (or blackness? or some other interruption?) and yet we may fail to notice that disruption.<br /><br />I'm not wedded to such a view, though. I do think it's quite possible, as you suggest, that though blinks affect our experience under some particularly self-conscious conditions, they don't generally have any such impact on our visual experience.<br /><br />I'm wary of easy answers to questions of this sort, which I think are often trickier than people take them to be. Simple introspection is prone to lead us astray, as you suggest; but neither can we discover the facts about consciousness <i>without</i> introspection.Eric Schwitzgebelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11541402189204286449noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-24491404465899032072007-01-13T07:42:00.000-08:002007-01-13T07:42:00.000-08:00Hi - I'm curious about one thing you wrote:
"I'm...Hi - I'm curious about one thing you wrote: <br /><br />"I'm suspicious -- partly because I think it possible that a blink does momentarily disturb visual experience, and partly because Dennett has convinced me [...] that often we don't notice even fairly large gaps and lacunae in our visual experience"<br /><br />I'm having trouble reconciling these things; how can you simultaneously admit that our conscious visual experience is much more impoverished than it seems, and yet suggest that we can detect something as minor as a spontaneous eye blink?<br /><br />This is to me an example of where introspection leads one badly astray... sure, blinks do seem disruptive *when you're actually monitoring them*, just as the abrupt disappearance of an object (as in change blindness) seems disruptive *when you're actually monitoring that object*. But we are not often doing that, so neither blinks nor object disappearance are particularly disruptive to our visual experience.<br /><br />Or am I missing the point???<br /><br />Very interesting blog!Chris Chathamhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03275787429920482219noreply@blogger.com