Précis: Perplexities of Consciousness for Philosophical Studies

We do not know our own stream of conscious experience very well, nor is it easy to remedy our ignorance. That is the thesis of Perplexities of Consciousness. The method is to look, in some detail, at a wide variety of cases: the coloration of dreams, the visual experience of perspective, double vision, visual imagery, the auditory experience of echolocation, combination tones, afterimages, visual illusions, the tactile experience of your feet in your shoes, emotional experience, peripheral vision, cognitive phenomenology, and visual experience with your eyes closed. About each type of case, I argue, we are prone to error or ignorance – in some cases, error or ignorance of a magnitude that would be shocking if we were trying to reach similarly large-grained judgments about nearby perceptible objects in the external world. For example, we seem to miss, or alternatively invent, entire modalities of experience – cognitive phenomenology (a.k.a. imageless thought or unsymbolized thinking), or echolocation, or distinctively emotional phenomenology. And we seem to miss, or alternatively invent, what one might have thought would be hugely obvious features of the experiences we do recognize, for example, that almost all of the objects that we see are visually doubled (or that they’re not), or that we have a wealth of sensory experience beyond the boundaries of attention (or that w