When reality is confusing: Distinguishing confused perceptions from imagination
Ophelia Deroy (LMU)
29 October 2021, 16:00 (Lisbon Time – GMT+1) | Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia)
Abstract: We ordinarily track whether something is real or imagined. To explain this, philosophers and cognitive scientists posit a subjective sense of reality which ‘tags’ certain representations as real or not. In this talk, I argue that this sense of reality is insufficient to account for what I call ‘extraordinary perceptions’, that is experiences occurring in virtual reality, derealisation, or under various forms of stimulants which can be confusing yet continue to tell us that we perceive something which is real and independent of us.
To account for it, we need to accept that the subjective signature of reality is a composite. On the negative side, this raises issues for current accounts, notably bayesian, which see the sense of reality as varying only on one dimension. On the positive side, our new account makes new predictions regarding the non- linear development and possible breakdowns of the subjective sense of reality in perception.