How to get rich from inflation

Conscious Cogn. 2023 Dec 26;117:103624. doi: 10.1016/j.concog.2023.103624. Online ahead of print.ABSTRACTWe seem to have rich experience across our visual field. Yet we are surprisingly poor at tasks involving the periphery and low spatial attention. Recently, Lau and collaborators have argued that a phenomenon known as "subjective inflation" allows us to reconcile these phenomena. I show inflation is consistent with multiple interpretations, with starkly different consequences for richness and for theories of consciousness more broadly. What's more, we have only weak reasons favouring any of these interpretations over the others. I provisionally argue for an interpretation on which subjective experience is genuinely rich, but (in peripheral/unattended areas) unreliable as a guide to the external world. The main challenge for this view is that it appears to imply that experience in the periphery is not just unreliable but unstable. However, I argue that this consequence, while initially appearing unintuitive, is in fact plausible.PMID:38150781 | DOI:10.1016/j.concog.2023.103624

Source: Consciousness and Cognition - December 27, 2023 Category: Neurology Authors: Simon Alexander Burns Brown Source Type: research