Books on the topic 'PERCEPTUAL LOOS'

In this chapter, I argue that perceptual media like air or water are imperceptible. I show that, despite their lack of phenomenological features, perceptual media crucially affect what we see by selecting what is perceptually available to the perceiver. In the second part of the chapter, I argue that mirrors are visual media like air, water, and glass. According to this account, mirrors are transparent and invisible and cannot therefore have a distinctive look or appearance. In the last part of the chapter, I extend the general account of perceptual media to the sense organs themselves by showing that perceptual media not only include external entities causally involved in the perceptual process but also comprise the perceptual system itself.

Properties like shape, size, and colour exhibit perceptual constancy: they appear to remain constant throughout variations in the conditions under which they are perceived. A number of writers have suggested that “apparent properties”, mind-independent relational properties that vary with the perceptual conditions, play an essential role in explaining perceptual constancy. On this view, when we see, e.g. a penny from an oblique angle, we see the circularity of the penny by or in virtue of seeing a mind-independent relational apparent property (its elliptical look). This chapter argues that views which explain the perception of constant properties of objects by appealing to perception of mind-independent apparent properties are structurally similar to sense-datum theories of perception; as such, they face many of the same challenges. It concludes that apparent properties play at best a modest explanatory role, functioning as the objects of awareness when we direct our attention in the appropriate ways.

This chapter discusses the visual perception of hills. Hills look much steeper than they are. This chapter reviews current knowledge of the phenomenology of slant perception in relation to both functionalist and mechanistic accounts of this perceptual bias. Recent discoveries suggest that this misperception of the geometry of our environment may be related to useful biological information coding strategies with respect to not only slant but also other angular variables relevant to the biological measurement of surface layout. Even in the absence of hills, people misperceive the angular declination of their gaze systematically in ways that seem to contribute to the vertical expansion of the perceived environment.

In this initial chapter, the author establishes her framework for discussion of perceptual verbs like ‘look’, ‘see’, ‘seem’. Perceptual reports are particular speech acts made by utterances of sentences that contain a perceptual verb. More specifically, they are assertions made by utterances of these sentences. Perceptual reports assert how objects in the world and their perceptible property instances are perceived by subjects. A subset of these reports purport to assert how objects in the world and their visually perceptible property instances are visually perceived by subjects. This chapter is primarily concerned with the semantics of ‘seem’ and ‘look’, which—it is argued—subject-raising verbs. Subject-raising verbs function as intensional operators at the level of logical form, just like ‘it is possible’, ‘it was the case’, and ‘it might be the case’. The author’s main argument for the representational view rests on this fact about ‘seem’ and ‘look’.

Absolute identification is a deceptively simple task that has been the focus of empirical investigation and theoretical speculation for more than half a century. Since Miller’s (1956) seminal paper the puzzle of why people are severely limited in their capacity to accurately perform absolute identification has endured. Despite the apparent simplicity of absolute identification, many complicated and robust effects are observed in both response latency and accuracy, including capacity limitations, strong sequential effects and effects of the position of a stimulus within the set. Constructing a comprehensive theoretical account of these benchmark effects has proven difficult, and existing accounts all have shortcomings. We review classical empirical findings, as well as some newer findings that challenge existing theories. We then discuss a variety of theories, with a focus on the most recent proposals, make some broad conclusions about general classes of models, and discuss the challenges ahead for each class.

This chapter shows how visual illusions arise from neural processes that play an adaptive role in achieving the remarkable perceptual capabilities of advanced brains. It clarifies that many visual percepts are visual illusions, in the sense that they arise from active processes that reorganize and complete perceptual representations from the noisy data received by retinas. Some of these representations look illusory, whereas others look real. The chapter heuristically summarizes explanations of illusions that arise due to completion of perceptual groupings, filling-in of surface lightnesses and colors, transformation of ambiguous motion signals into coherent percepts of object motion direction and speed, and interactions between the form and motion cortical processing streams. A central theme is that the brain is organized into parallel processing streams with computationally complementary properties, that interstream interactions overcome these complementary deficiencies to compute effective representations of the world, and how these representations generate visual illusions.

Visual illusions in nonhuman animals are not only an intriguing topic in themselves but also an important question to understand regarding how humans’ perceptual systems have developed through evolution, why they work as they do, and what mechanisms such illusory processes are based on. Furthermore, the effects of early experience on illusory perception can be understood by controlling raising environments of nonhumans. This chapter presents a brief review of the literature then looks at more recent systematic analyses mainly focused on pigeons. Although pigeons are susceptible to various illusions, they perceive some of the illusory figures distorted in the direction opposite to humans. Perceptual systems in pigeons are likely to be adaptive to the way they live in their environment. The chapter presents a view of human perceptual functions situated in the animal kingdom.

There are a number of reasons to think that one of Kant’s concerns in the Critique of Pure Reason is with the active role the mind must play in organizing the sensory input to enable us to experience objects, and therefore that he thinks that something like what is now called perceptual binding is necessary for us to be presented with perceptual particulars. Given the centrality of the notion of synthesis in the Critique, as well as Kant’s claim that synthesis governed by the categories is needed for us to have what he calls ‘relation to an object’, it might be thought that Kant’s notion of synthesis is where we should look for Kant’s account of something like perceptual binding. The aim of this chapter is to argue that this is not the case, and that synthesis plays a much higher-level role in Kant’s account.

Many philosophers and scientists take perceptual experience, whatever else it involves, to be representational. In ‘The Silence of the Senses’, Charles Travis argues that this view involves a kind of category mistake, and consequently, that perceptual experience is not a representational or intentional phenomenon. The details of Travis’s argument, however, have been widely misinterpreted by his representationalist opponents, many of whom dismiss it out of hand. This chapter offers an interpretation of Travis’s argument from looks that it is argued presents a genuine and important challenge to orthodox representational views of experience. Whilst this challenge may not (pace Travis) be insurmountable, it places a substantial burden upon the representationalist to explain not only how experiences come to have the contents that they do (the individuation question), but how those contents come to feature in our conscious mental lives (the availability question).

Entering beneath the water surface produces a radical change in perceptual challenges. The eye is no longer able to focus adequately and, with increasing depth, light levels decrease and the spectral properties of ambient light narrows with the result that visual resolution decreases rapidly and colour cues are lost. Diving to depth is rapid which means that perceptual challenges change constantly. This results in a paucity of visual information and olfaction and hearing cannot be used to complement this loss. Amphibious foragers must rely upon minimal cues and very specialized foraging behaviours; some ducks may forage for sessile prey using touch sensitivity in the bill, cormorants use a technique in which they trigger an escape response from a fish which they catch at very short range, while penguins and auks may rely upon minimal cues from photophores on fish and random encounters with prey.

Why should we believe that perceptions justify beliefs? One argument starts with the premise that sentences of the form “a looks F” may be used to justify conclusions of the form “a is F”. That argument will show that perceptions justify beliefs only if we can find a reading of “a looks F” on which utterances of that form report the contents of perceptions and not the contents of non-perceptual beliefs. There might be a reading of “a looks F” on which utterances of that form report the contents of perceptions, but, when read in that way, such utterances do not justify a conclusion of the form “a is F”.

It is common to argue that doing things ourselves, using our skills, is more “authentic” than allowing automation to do things for us. Yet what this means or why it is desirable is rarely explained. Here I discuss the value of skill in terms of the effect that the widespread automation of skills—from driving to cooking—would have on our perceptual lives. The phenomenological tradition has long held that to have a skill is not just to have a productive capability; more than that, skill enables me to perceive elements and aspects of the world that are inaccessible to the unskilled. Automating my skills thus amounts to losing the ability to see and know certain “niches” of reality. By showing that skill, and the determinacy of perception that it brings us, is linked to some clearly recognizable human goods, I show that the potential loss of perceptual skill through automation is worthy of moral consideration.

Familiar versions of empiricism overemphasize and misconstrue the importance of perceptual experience as a source of scientific knowledge. This chapter discusses their main descriptive and normative shortcomings and sketches an alternative framework for thinking about the contributions of human sensory systems and experimental equipment to scientific knowledge. Rather than assuming that all scientific claims are developed, tested, and modified or rejected in the same way, this chapter suggests that philosophers would do better to look case by case at the epistemic pathways that link the credibility of different scientific claims to different epistemically significant factors.

The present chapter explores evidence for the role of embodied simulation and facial mimicry in the decoding of facial expression of emotion. We begin the chapter by reviewing evidence in favor of the hypothesis that mimicking a perceived facial expression helps the perceiver achieve greater decoding accuracy. We report experimental and correlational evidence in favor of the general effect, and we also examine the assertion that facial mimicry influences perceptual processing of facial expression. Finally, after examining the behavioral evidence, we look into the brain to explore the neural circuitry and chemistry involved in embodied simulation of facial expressions of emotion.

Clothing and cosmetic makeup take advantage of visual illusions so as to make the human body and face look more attractive. This chapter lists such real-life geometric illusions and reviews studies that psychophysically measured them. These illusions include the Müller-Lyer illusion, the Helmholtz illusion, the Delboeuf illusion, the “bicolor” illusion, the “shape echo” illusion, and perceptual completion. Puzzling characteristics of these bodily illusions, which can be called “biological illusions,” are discussed. The ways in which geometric illusions in the human face and body differ from classical geometric illusions consisting of simple lines are also discussed, and the concept of “biological motion” as a separate field is proposed.

The arts sometimes precede the sciences in the discovery of fundamental visual principles. Victor Vasarely’s “Nested Squares” show an illusory effect in which corners look brighter and more salient than straight edges, despite having equivalent luminance. This chapter summarizes recent research, originally based on Victor Vasarely’s Nested Squares illusion, to discover the related perceptual and underlying physiological principles. The results offer significant insights into how corners, angles, curves, and line endings affect the appearance of brightness, shape, salience, depth, and color in our brains. Concepts covered include the alternating brightness star illusion, center-surround simulations, brain activation, corner perception, and the redundancy-reducing hypothesis.

Sight-reading is defined as the execution – vocal or instrumental – of longer stretches of non- or under-rehearsed music at an acceptable pace and with adequate expression. Some people also label this ‘playing by sight’ or ‘prima vista’. Similar to improvisation, sight-reading requires the instant adaptation to new constraints, which places it among those that motor scientists refer to as open skills. This article briefly looks at how music notation is perceived and then moves on to the structure of sight-reading, taking into account the real-time conditions under which it takes place. This includes a discussion of perceptual and problem-solving issues. Finally, the article outlines the course of skill acquisition with its characteristic differences between novices and experts, and presents a model of sight-reading performance.

Musical-peak experiences are a significant component of the lives of many people. They are powerful, valued, have lasting effects, and – for some – are a reason for continued engagement with music. This article highlights research on the peak experience, emphasizing literature focusing on music-specific peaks. After outlining four studies fundamental to the study of peaks in music, a section discusses precursors to peaks and proposed differences between those who have achieved peaks and those who have not. A section on the cognitive, perceptual, emotional, and physical phenomena associated with peak experiences is thenfollowed by an investigation on the after-effects of peaks. Next, a section discussing methodologies for the investigation of musical-peak experiences highlights the possibilities and difficulties of this work. Finally, a brief section summarizes the contents of the article and looks towards the future of research in this field.

In chapter 3, the author presents two arguments for the view that visual experience is representational. The first shows that phenomenal ‘look’ and ‘seem’ reflect phenomenal, representational properties of visual perception. It follows that experience is representational. This conclusion is consistent with some versions of naive realism, but considerably stronger than the minimal content view that takes content to be a description of what it is like for the subject to have the experience. The second argument establishes that the perceptual relation that obtains between experience and its object in core cases cannot fully explain the phenomenology of experience. In order to explain its phenomenology, we will need to appeal to the experience’s representational nature. The second argument thus shows that visual experience is fundamentally representational and not fundamentally relational, which is the central claim of the representational view.

Sensuous imaginative content presents a problem for unitary accounts of phenomenal character (or content) such as relationism, representationalism, or qualia theory. Four features of imaginative content are at the heart of the issue: its perspectival nature, the similarity with corresponding perceptual experiences, the multiple use thesis, and its non-presentational character. This chapter rejects appeals to the dependency thesis to account for these features and explains how a representationalist approach can be developed to accommodate them. The author defends the multiple use thesis against Kathleen Stock’s objections but separates the putative non-presentational character of imaginative content into two elements. Loss of presentation is accounted for by the reduced representations involved in imagination and lack of potential response-dependent representational properties. Absence of commitment to reality is accounted for by representational properties characterized in terms of the absence of a certain kind of aetiology.

One of the main disputes in the current perception literature concerns the question of whether visual experience is fundamentally a matter of being perceptually related to the external world or is a matter of representing the external world in a particular way. In this book, the author has argued that on the relatively innocuous assumption that the language of perception is not systematically false, the semantics of ‘look’, ‘seem’, and ‘see’ can be used to settle the dispute in favor of the representational view. In this concluding section, she provides a summary of the book’s main arguments in favor of this position.

When the vertex of an occluded angle geometrically belongs to the side of the occluding surface, the occluded angle looks distorted. This characteristic effect of coincidental occlusion—called the Gerbino illusion—is consistent with the phenomenal rounding of angles observed under conditions of symmetrical occlusion. Both effects are robust and appear in static and dynamic displays. The Gerbino illusion differs from distortions observed in Poggendorff-like displays, runs against the tendency to global Prägnanz, and reveals important aspects of amodal completion processes. Alternative explanations based on visual interpolation and visual approximation are discussed. According to the approximation-based explanation, the possible discrepancy between internal models and the sensory input is perceptually represented as a phenomenal distortion.

Abstract The Rationality of Love addresses the question whether love belongs, paradoxically enough, to the realm of reason, whether love belongs to the class of responses, such as belief and action, that admit of norms of justification and rationality. Are there normative reasons to love someone? Can love be an appropriate or fitting response to an individual? Or is love, like perceptual experiences, sensations, and urges, the sort of thing we just have and for which we cannot be normatively criticizable? Ordinary thinking about love seems to pull us in different directions. On the one hand, love—involving as it does lots of non-rational elements—seems to be a good example of a response we shouldn’t assess in terms of rationality. On the other hand, we find it appropriate or fitting to love certain things and not others, and we are not reluctant to ask ourselves why we love certain people. This book defends the view that love is subject to normative standards by carefully assessing the various answers to the normative question about love and by providing its own solution. An extensive critical discussion of the so-called ‘no-reasons’ view of love is given, which helps uncover important issues to be tackled by any advocate of the rationality of love. In addition, the discussion is informed by the philosophy of normativity, an area often neglected in the debate. All in all, this book provides a systematic and up-to-date discussion of a central issue in the philosophy of love.

Finalizando la segunda década del siglo XXI no cabe duda alguna de que nos ha correspondido ser testigos de primera mano de una revolución tecnológica sin antecedentes en la historia de la humanidad. Los acelerados desarrollos que tienen lugar cada día en campos como la inteligencia artificial, la robótica, la bioingeniería, entre otros más, así lo demuestran. Sin embargo, junto con el entusiasmo que naturalmente provoca ver aparecer nuevas e insospechadas posibilidades de bienestar —en áreas tan importantes como la salud, la economía y las comunicaciones—, conviven también el desconcierto y el temor ante las transformaciones tan rápidas que dichos adelantos traen consigo, especialmente en las maneras habituales de relacionarnos con los demás y con nosotros mismos. Ciertamente, muchas de las preocupaciones centrales en nuestros días tienen que ver con la incertidumbre que despierta vivir en sociedades en las que, por cuenta de las nuevas tecnologías, nuestra identidad y valor como seres humanos se hacen cada vez menos seguros. Así, por ejemplo, con frecuencia creciente se habla de la inevitable sustitución de mano de obra por robots híper eficientes e infalibles, lo cual provocará, a la vuelta de unas décadas, una crisis de desempleo sin precedentes. Así mismo hay quienes advierten sobre el posible advenimiento de una inteligencia artificial capaz, en un mañana no muy lejano, de reemplazar y hasta superar la inteligencia humana gracias a sus algoritmos altamente complejos. Algunos incluso proclaman y financian a torrentes la “salvífica” llegada de seres post-humanos dotados de poderes físicos y mentales resultantes de mejoras tecnológicas llevadas a cabo sobre cuerpos humanos que, en contraste, quedarán obsoletos y condenados a desaparecer. De modo que la balanza oscila sin cesar entre las promesas altisonantes y las graves advertencias frente a las soluciones que las nuevas tecnologías ofrecen para la alteración de las condiciones de habitabilidad del planeta. Con todo, lo cierto es que estos escenarios, más o menos catastrofistas—algunos de los cuales, es verdad, no pasan de ser especulaciones cercanas a la ciencia ficción—, confirman cuán profunda es la incertidumbre que experimentamos acerca del lugar que como seres humanos debamos y, acaso podamos, ocupar todavía en la denominada “era de la técnica”. Nos movemos, pues, sin cesar, entre un narcisismo de especie y un sentimiento de irremediable catástrofe. Ciertamente, como ocurre en toda revolución, lo que antes resultaba familiar ahora está cambiando de forma muy rápida, y con tanto movimiento alrededor es imposible no experimentar vértigo y desorientación. Es lo que vuelve necesaria más que nunca la filosofía. Su papel ha sido siempre el de orientar en el pensamiento y permitirnos encontrar puntos de referencia a partir de los cuales trazar reflexivamente un camino para movernos a través de la huidiza realidad. Así pues, en medio del vértigo que causa la revolución tecnológica en curso, la filosofía, con su ritmo lento y pausado, permite desacelerar el paso trepidante que acompaña estos cambios, ayudando a avizorar mejor el rumbo que siguen y, todavía más, anticipar el que pueden seguir. En pocas palabras, ofrece un espacio de reflexión para hallar algo de sentido en medio del vórtice. A esta tarea responde, pues, el presente libro. Las contribuciones reunidas aquí responden, en efecto, al deseo de elaborar reflexivamente, al compás de la filosofía, algunas de las inquietudes existenciales, antropológicas, éticas, ambientales, etc., que han surgido en estos tiempos, debido a la conciencia que se ha ganado acerca de que la técnica es el horizonte en el que insoslayablemente se define la condición humana. En otras palabras, se interrogan por ¿qué significa vivir en un mundo técnico como el nuestro y, sobre todo, qué peligros entraña para el ser humano vivir en un mundo así? ¿Puede acaso el mundo técnico ser inhumano? ¿Cómo? ¿Por qué? Así pues, los trabajos que conforman este volumen se mueven, principalmente, en torno a tres ejes: (i) repensar la naturaleza del fenómeno técnico, (ii) examinar el cuerpo humano expuesto a la mirada técnica y, finalmente, (iii) exhibir problemas éticos propios de la era técnica. Es así como, de la mano del filósofo político Leo Strauss, el capítulo de Oscar M. Donato se esmera en desentrañar cuál es la concepción de la técnica de dicho autor y cómo tal concepción está enmarcada en lo que Strauss denomina “la primera ola de la modernidad”, mostrando así la íntima relación entre el surgimiento de la técnica y el marco cultural y político que le dio dio lugar. Por su parte, William F. Guerrero Salazar vuelve en su capítulo sobre el pensamiento de Martin Heidegger para despejar una posible propuesta ética en el filósofo alemán, basada en la comprensión de la ética no como conjunto de preceptos o principios morales, sino como una forma de habitar el mundo, de donde se plantea la pregunta de hasta dónde es en verdad habitable, es decir ético, el mundo técnico descrito por Heidegger. El capítulo de Diana M. Muñoz González también quiere poner a prueba la actualidad y el alcance explicativo de la reflexión heideggeriana sobre la técnica, en su caso frente al transhumanismo, y deja ver que pese a su distancia temporal respecto a este proyecto reciente que preconiza una modificación tecnológica radical del ser humano, la filosofía de Heidegger está en condición de ofrecer herramientas analíticas útiles para apuntalar una mirada crítica sobre la ideología transhumanista, la cual, en tanto sintomática de un modo de pensar técnico-metafísico, se revela deshumanizante. De otro lado, e interesado a su vez en indagar acerca de la imagen que el transhumanismo se hace del ser humano, el capítulo de Ángel Rivera Novoa moviliza la teoría de la mente extendida de Clark y Chalmers para contrastarla con la figura del ciborg (un ser que está a medio camino entre lo orgánico y lo cibernético), lo que le permite arrojar una sombra de escepticismo sobre la exaltada pretensión transhumanista de mejorar las capacidades mentales humanas mediante prótesis cibernéticas que producirían mentes super humanas. Del mismo modo, el capítulo de José Luis Luna Bravo apela a la reflexión fenomenológica de estirpe husserliana para preguntarse si, como sostienen los transhumanistas, el cuerpo híbrido de los ciborgs experimenta y tiene un acceso perceptual al mundo completamente diferente respecto al de los cuerpos humanos no modificados. José Pedro Cornejo Santibañez nos ofrece, por su parte, una aproximación adicional al problema de la técnica y su relación con el cuerpo a partir del pensamiento de Martin Heidegger. Dada la relación humanotécnica, Cornejo se enfoca en el polo humano de esta relación para mostrar las condiciones que hacen posible a la técnica misma e identifica a lo que él denomina “apertura bidimensional de la existencia” como la clave que descifra la relación que tenemos con los objetos técnicos. Tal apertura, no osbtante, no podría pensarse al margen de la corporalidad, ya que es sólo a través del cuerpo que podemos relacionarnos con los objetos técnicos. Todavía en la misma línea de cuestionar la manera cómo en la era técnica se piensa la condición corpórea del ser humano, el capítulo de César A. Delgado Lombana llama la atención sobre una aproximación médica, hoy en día hegemónica, que bajo el pretexto de tratar la enfermedad, la entiende cada vez más como un problema técnico soluble, y al hacerlo desconoce el sufrimiento y el dolor como siendo experiencias esenciales constitutivas