Is the Visual World a Grand Illusion?

Alva Noë, Editor

There is a traditional skepticism about whether the world "out there" really is as we perceive it. A new breed of hyper-skeptics 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 skepticism 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 a gift for bringing these paradoxical issues to life and sharing their excitement with the non-specialist. This collection was originally published as a special double issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies (Vol.9, No.5-6, 2002).

"This is a most impressive selection of essays on a central topic in cognitive science. Every essay has valuable points to make . . . This book is essential reading for any theorist interested in perception." Paul Coates, Human Nature Review

"Many contributions to consciousness debates have been ill informed or over subjective. This volume does not suffer from these deficiencies. The common thread of change blindness ensures that all contributions are grounded in at least one empirically robust effect. The is no doubt that this grounding advances the quality of debate about the nature of visual experience." Richard Cooper, Times Higher Education Supplement

Table of Contents

• Editor’s Preface
• Alva Noë, "Is the Visual World a Grand Illusion?"
• Daniel C. Dennett, "How Could I Be Wrong? How Wrong Could I Be?"
• Susan Blackmore, "There Is No Stream of Consciousness"
• Bruce Bridgeman, "The Grand Illusion and Petit Illusions: Interactions of Perception and Sensory Coding"
• Eric Schwitzgebel, "How Well Do We Know Our Own Conscious Experience? The Case of Visual Imagery"
• Dana H. Ballard, "Our Perception of the World Has To Be an Illusion"
• Temre N. Davies, Donald D. Hoffman & Antonio M. Rodriguez, "Visual Worlds: Construction Or Reconstruction?"
• Frank H. Durgin, "The Tinkerbell Effect: Motion Perception and Illusion"
• Arien Mack, "Is the Visual World a Grand Illusion? A Response"
• Daniel T. Levin, "Change Blindness Blindness As Visual Metacognition"
• Charles Siewert, "Is Visual Experience Rich Or Poor?"
• Jonathan Cohen, "The Grand Grand Illusion Illusion"
• Mark Rowlands, "Two Dogmas of Consciousness"
• Andy Clark, "Is Seeing All It Seems? Action, Reason and the Grand Illusion"

· ISBN 0-907845-23-1 · Published in June 2002 by Imprint Academic · Paperback · 202 pages · $29.90 ·

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