Table Of Content

The Border Between Seeing and Thinking PHILOSOPHY OF MIND SERIES series editor: David J. Chalmers, New York University The Conscious Brain Consciousness and Fundamental Reality Jesse Prinz Philip Goff Simulating Minds The Phenomenal Basis of Intentionality The Philosophy, Psychology, and Angela Mendelovici Neuroscience of Mindreading Alvin I. Goldman Seeing and Saying The Language of Perception and the Supersizing The Mind Representational View of Experience Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Berit Brogaard Extension Andy Clark Perceptual Learning The Flexibility of the Senses Perception, Hallucination, and Illusion Kevin Connolly William Fish Combining Minds Phenomenal Concepts and Phenomenal How to Think about Composite Knowledge Subjectivity New Essays on Consciousness and Luke Roelofs Physicalism Torin Alter and Sven Walter The Epistemic Role of Consciousness Declan Smithies The Character of Consciousness David J. Chalmers The Epistemology of Non- Visual Perception Berit Brogaard and Dimitria Electra The Senses Gatzia Classic and Contemporary Philosophical Perspectives What Are Mental Representations? Fiona Macpherson Edited by Joulia Smortchkova, Krzysztof Dołęga, and Tobias Schlicht Attention Is Cognitive Unison An Essay in Philosophical Psychology Phenomenal Intentionality Christopher Mole George Graham, John Tienson, and Terry Horgan The Contents of Visual Experience Feminist Philosophy of Mind, Keya Maitra Susanna Siegel and Jennifer McWeeny Consciousness and the Prospects of The Border Between Seeing and Thinking Physicalism Ned Block Derk Pereboom The Border Between Seeing and Thinking NED BLOCK New York University Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2023 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. This is an open access publication, available online and distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution – Non Commercial – No Derivatives 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), a copy of which is available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress Names: Block, Ned, 1942- author. Title: The border between seeing and thinking / Ned Block. Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2022] | Series: Philosophy of mind series | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022006336 (print) | LCCN 2022006337 (ebook) | ISBN 9780197622223 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197622247 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Cognition. | Perception. | Thought and thinking. | Senses and sensation. Classification: LCC BF311 .B554 2022 (print) | LCC BF311 (ebook) | DDC 153– dc23/eng/20220504 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022006336 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022006337 ISBN 978– 0– 19– 762222– 3 DOI: 10.1093/ oso/ 9780197622223.001.0001 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America The publisher gratefully acknowledges support from New York University for providing funding for this Open Access publication. For my grandchildren, Ada, Mae, and Felix. Contents Preface xi 1. Introduction 1 Consciousness 16 Pure perception 17 What is a joint? 20 Constitutivity vs. explanatory depth 23 The contents of perception 27 Realism about perceptual and cognitive representation 30 Three- layer methodology 33 Higher “capacity” in perception (whether conscious or not) than cognition 34 Armchair approaches to the perception/c ognition border 41 Conceptual engineering 44 If there is a fundamental difference between perception and cognition, why don’t we see the border in the brain? 51 Interface of perception with cognition 53 Why should philosophers be interested in this book? 56 Roadmap 58 2. Markers of the perceptual and the cognitive 61 Adaptation 61 Perception vs. cognition in language 64 Different kinds of adaptation 69 Visual hierarchy 83 The use of adaptation in distinguishing low-l evel from high-l evel perception 85 The use of adaptation in distinguishing perception from cognition 97 Semantic satiation 101 Rivalry 104 Pop- out 109 Interpolation of illusory contours 111 Neural markers of perception and cognition 113 Other markers of perception 115 Phenomenology 118 Summary 119 viii Contents 3. Two kinds of seeing-a s and singular content 121 Burge and Schellenberg on singular content 123 Attribution and discrimination 142 Ordinary vs. technical language 152 Bias: Perception vs. perceptual judgment 152 Evaluative perception 157 4. Perception is constitutively nonpropositional and nonconceptual 166 Concepts and propositions 166 Format/ content/ state/ function 172 The nonpropositional nature of perception 176 Conjunction 180 Negation 182 Disjunction 187 Atomic propositional representations 188 Rivalry and propositional perception 191 How do iconicity, nonconceptuality, and nonpropositionality fit together? 195 Laws of appearance 198 Bayesian “inference” 200 Bayesian realism 204 5. Perception is iconic; cognition is discursive 215 Iconicity, format, and function 215 Iconicity and determinacy 219 Structure 221 Analog tracking and mirroring 221 Analog magnitude representations 224 Mental imagery 226 Holism 232 Integral vs. separable 234 Iconic object-r epresentations in perception 237 Object files in working memory 246 Memory involving perceptual representations 248 6. Nonconceptual color perception 265 Perceptual category representations 266 Infant color categories 274 Infants’ failure to normally deploy color concepts 278 Color constancy 281 Working memory again 284 Experiments on babies’ working memory representations 286 Adult nonconceptual color perception 293 Is high- level perception conceptual? 298 Systematicity again 302 Modality 302 Contents ix 7. Neural evidence that perception is nonconceptual 306 “No- report” paradigm vs. “no- cognition” paradigm 308 Another “no- report” paradigm 319 8. Evidence that is wrongly taken to show that perception is conceptual 325 Fast perception 325 Cognitive access to mid- level vision 333 9. Cognitive penetration is common but does not challenge the joint 338 Cognitive impenetrability: Recent history 338 Perceptual set 347 Ambiguous stimuli 347 Spatial attention 354 Feature- based attention 358 Dimension restriction 370 Mental imagery 374 10. Top- down effects that are probably not cases of cognitive penetration 380 Figure/ ground 380 Memory color 385 11. Modularity 394 12. Core cognition and perceptual analogs of concepts 404 Perception of causation 404 Core cognition 410 13. Consciousness 417 Phenomenal consciousness vs. access consciousness 419 Global workspace 423 Higher order thought 424 Alleged evidence for higher order thought theories of consciousness 427 Prefrontalism and electrical stimulation of the brain 442 Overflow 444 Biological reductionism 445 Direct awareness 446 Teleological approaches 449 Fading qualia 451 Consciousness and free will 459 14. Conclusions 468 References 475 Author Index 531 Subject Index 535