Blindsight's implications in consciousness?
Blindsight is essentially when a person doesn't perceive anything in front of their eyes due to brain damage, yet better than chance they can "guess" what is there somehow. Surely all of our knowledge isn't gained strickly from perceptions from our senses? Perhaps we can gain knowledge from things we can't even perceive is there?
Comments (39)
the world is fabricated by the brain. and this includes the brain that you see
blind sight still has data coming in from the eyes into the brain its just not rendering up into consciousness
Unknowingly know? Like cryptomnesia?
[quote=Yoda]Truly wonderful, the mind of a child is. The padawan is right. Go to the center of gravity's pull and find your planet, you will.[/quote]
Lumen rationale: Logic/Reason is Shiva's [math]3^{rd}[/math] eye
One perceives through other organs besides the eyes. He perceives through his entire body.
Not quite. So in blindsight, your eyes work fine. This means the light is traveling to your eyes, and up to your brain. The problem is the brain's processing is damaged. Meaning that there is some level of processing inside, but not enough to get up to building a visual picture in your head. Likely there are still cells that can process something to an effect, and send that limited effect up the pipeline. There's probably not enough to get up to the "Display Monitor" of your mind, but you're probably still getting some types of signals that your mind interprets prior to it being placed on your inner display monitor.
No I cannot.
I never said you can perceive visually through your entire body.
Phenomena such as blindsightedness evince not unconscious but inarticulate experience. One would need, of course, to analyze the aspects of the experience in blindsightedness. One has before one a task involving an intention to see, which implies the involvement of a certain concept of vision that the perceiver expects to encounter. If the claim for blindsightedness were simply that this experience involves a different aspect of what is involved in seeing than one normally expects of a visual situation, (for instance, if one expects contrast, color, perspective, one gets instead a vague or incipient meaning that is not recognizable as seeing even though it in fact is normally part of all visual experiences), then I would be in agreement.
If, however, the claim is that whatever meaning or information is prompting the blindsighted behavior is independent of the conscious experience(conscious and unconscious events as independent, parallel meanings), then I disagree. My claim is that the experience mistakenly called blindsight is an incipient or intuitive feel that is consciously,
intentionally-metaphorically continuous with the ongoing flow of awareness. Blindsightedness is not an illustration of the partial independence of psychological subsystems, but of the fact that the most primordial 'unit' of awareness is something other than , and more subtle, than either contentful cognitive or empty affective identities. Just because something is not articulated does not mean that it is not fully experienced.
Blindsight involves a barely discernable shift of sense in an ongoing experience of regularity. There would be not only blindsight, but deaf-hearing, numb-tactility and non-conceptual conceptuality. The test consciousness of a thing:'Can one see that thing emerging from a field of perceived sameness?' is wrongheaded because it doesn't recognize that the field of supposed sameness is already a movement of changing meanings. The conscious-unconscious binary should be re-configured as a spectrum of meaningfulness.
Information from your visual receptors connects areas of visual processing in the brain with those of other sensory modalities(vestibular system, cerebellum, somatosensory cortex) in numerous ways. In addition, visual information is sent to the hypothalamus and pineal gland, regulating circadian rhythms though hormonal release to various areas of the body. So one could argue that, via feedback from the body , one is able to ‘perceive’ what originally enters the visual receptors.
Are you agreeing or disagreeing with them?
I’m disagreeing that we have to assume blindsight is unconscious.
To me, blindsight evidences that one’s awareness as a total self (i.e., a total mind/psyche—if not also a total mind-endowed body) is not always unitary, thought it at times can be. The blindsight endowed person, as a conscious self, is unaware of visual information while, the same person as a total psyche, is (at least to some extent) aware of said visual information. The conscious agent is visually unaware while the unconscious agency(ies) of the same (total) person are visually aware.
In parallel, an example I find both illustrative and relatively common to all people: a conscious self and its conscience will both be aware of the same basic facts but will hold different agencies each with its own perspectives (of awareness) regarding the facts concerned—with each of these two agencies momentarily intending different outcomes. One is consciously aware of one’s conscience’s occurrence but is not unitary with it—this at the times one is aware of one’s conscience—and, furthermore, is often consciously unaware of the nuances of reasoning for one’s conscience desiring you to act or behave as it does.
I say this in hopes of illustrating that there is such a thing as un/not-conscious awareness pertaining to unconscious agency(ies) which the conscious self is at times disassociated with, or is other in relation to, which operate in parallel to consciousness.
As another example of this, when one has forgotten where one’s keys are, asks of oneself “where on earth did I leave my keys”, and received an intuition that answers the enquiry placed by the conscious self to its total psyche as self, the mental agency which responds with the info is other in relation to the conscious agency: both are aspects of the same total person, but whereas the former knows (and is aware of) where the lost item is, the latter momentarily is unknowing (and unaware) of this same information.
None of this is to deny that conscious agency/awareness is constituted of unconscious agency/awareness and that, therefore, there is a “spectrum of meaningfulness” between the two. But it is to point out that there are times when this formation of the conscious self—formed from unconscious agencies—operates in parallel to some of said unconscious agencies.
As to blindsight, again, I’m arguing that here the conscious agent is visually unaware while the unconscious agency(ies) of the same (total) person are visually aware. In short, that blindsight is not conscious sight.
If you were to disagree with the aforementioned, by what do you distinguish the conscious mind from the unconscious mind? (If you do so distinguish.)
It's an 'illusion of consciousness' produced by unconscious (subpersonal) brain processes. Objectively, 'intentionality' is not what it subjectively seems. In light of the classic Libet experiment (demonstrating 'delayed awareness' of voluntary actions) as well as well-established cognitive biases such as e.g. anchoring bias), the practical example which comes to mind is daily commuting that, with repetition, people report experiencing going to and coming home from work as autopilot, almost trance-like, largely with little and even no conscious memory of actually driving, walking, riding ... from A to B and B to A. Maybe you've experienced it. Like blindsight in particular, intentionality in general is, mostly if not completely, an unconscious, subpersonal, reaction to environmental stimuli (including one's own behavioral effects). 'Consciousness is secondary – much more veto than volo – and confabulatory', perhaps selected for as a beneficial social-coordination adaptation which functions as the 'phenomenal complement' to natural language usage.
I don't think it can possibly be an illusion that our thoughts are about something. So are you using intentionality in some other way?
Quoting 180 Proof
If I am conscious of X then ipso facto I am conscious of X - i.e., my conscious intentionality regarding X is not illusory, nor a mere seeming, but brute reality - this even if my being conscious of X is itself a result of unconscious agencies/processes converging and thereby bringing about a unitary first person point of view. Where do you find a benefit for a near complete either-or approach to the reality of intentionality in respect to consciousness and the unconscious? I find that intentionality can readily be non-illusory for both.
They can't describe in detail what is there. They just know something is there. This is the difference between p-zombies and non-p-zombies. The assumption that p-zombies can behave the same way as humans is wrong. Blind-sight patients are unsure about what it is that they are aware of and won't behave in the same way as a human who perceives consciously.
I'm not sure what to make of this. If intentionality is part of the same system (the whole body) then why can't we say that we always behave with intent? All of our behaviors are goal-directed.
It seems like you keep trying to separate the various functions of the brain apart from our self. What is the self - the brain, the mind, the body? If we are our bodies does it make sense to say that we don't operate with intent? Intentionality is only an illusion if intent existed apart from our bodies. So if I perceive that my conscious intent as the source of action, and my perceptions are models of what is really happening, then my model shows that the intent came from my self (my body). If I assume that my body is the source of my intent and that my consciousness is only a model of the world and my body's relationship with it, then my conscious content informs me of what I (my body) intended to do and it makes no sense that we have an illusion of intent. It's only an illusion if you're a naive realist and believe that everything you consciously perceive is the way the world is, rather than a model of the way the world is.
Patently false assumption (e.g. reflexes, habits).
So you're saying that reflexive and habitual behaviors didn't evolve to achieve some goal - like survival?
Establishing the reality of first person conscious experience via tautological means, as in "if I am conscious of X then ipso facto I am conscious of X [...]". Thing is, there is no known inferential means of establishing the reality of first person conscious experience. See for example the problem of other minds, solipsism, and so forth. So @180 Proof is complaining about me not having made the currently impossible somehow possible, this by providing an inferential demonstration of me being consciously aware of things. So, that's that, me thinks. Besides, I'm guessing he has no answer to the question I asked him, hence the deliberate obfuscation. (So far no ad hominems, though.)
Quoting javra
:sweat: It's even worse than that, javra. I have no idea what you're (poorly) trying to ask. Does anyone?
We're using the term "illusory" (or illusion) differently. I do not mean 'not real' by "illusion"; rather I mean something seeming to be something else.
Quoting 180 Proof
To clarify, if you mean something other than "conscious intentionality seems to be true but it is not", please further specify the way in which you are using the word. I can only understand this interpretation of "something seeming to be something else" as "a seeming that is not true and, thereby, not real as that which it seems to be". For example, the mirage of an oasis in the desert is "something [desert] seeming to be something else [oasis]" as is "not real as the oasis which is seems to be". So, my being conscious of things is - in how I so far interpret your position - a seeming that is discordant with what is real, or else really happening.
I ask this because I still don't understand what you might mean by "my being consciously aware of things (which is fact) is 'something seeming to be something else'". Adding the adjective "objectively" doesn't help any.
Quoting 180 Proof
If so, then "survival" would be the telos (goal) which governs (directs) the process of adaptive mutations via natural selection.
For the record, this moronic (?) view that natural selection is teleological is shared with folks such as Darwin himself, Thomas Huxley (Darwin's "bulldog"), and more recently folks such as Francisco Ayala, whom I once upon a time had the pleasure to meet:
Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_causes#Biology
I said earlier tha behaviors are goal-directed, not natural selection. NS is the means by which goal-directed behaviors come to exist in organisms. So instincts and habits (behaviors) are goal-directed.
NS is simply the process by which other processes adopt attributes that allow them to persist through time.
Goal-directed behaviors are attributes that allow certain things to persist through time by integrating stored information with live (sensory) information.
Quoting Harry Hindu
One could add that the normative , goal-oriented nature of self-organizing systems is itself an aspect of evolution.
As Evan Thompson points out:
“Darwin's Newtonian framework, in which design arises from natural selection conceived of as an external force, does not address the endogenous self-organization of the organism. This aspect of development and evolution, rooted in the organism's autonomy, had to be rediscovered in modern biology, with tools the Darwinian tradition did not provide.”
Given that what natural selection has to work with is already constrained by the normatively determined ecological functioning of the organism-environment interaction, one could say that evolution is normatively constrained.