| The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refused to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, skepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin. —Thomas Henry Huxley |
Seeing Red – Understanding Consciousness February 25, 2007
Posted by Rastaban in : Naturalism , add a commentAn article by John Searle (“Minding the Brain”) in the Nov 2, 2006 edition of The New York Review of Books shows how confused most of us (including philosophers & scientists) are about something as everyday as vision. Searle reviewed Nicholas Humphrey’s book Seeing Red: a Study in Consciousness, with which he largely disagrees. In that book (based on lectures he gave at Harvard in 2004) Humphreys asks the reader to imaging they are looking at a large red screen upon which the color red is projected, and proceeds to argue that the normal interpretation of what happens when we view such a field of red is mistaken.
But what is the normal interpretation of seeing red? Searle explains it this way,
According to contemporary scientific common sense, when we look at the red screen the reflection of light waves sets up in us a series of neuronal events beginning at the retina and ending with a conscious visual experience of red. If we assume that there are no hallucinations or pathological conditions involved, the perceiver sees, and in that way perceives, the red object by having a visual experience. The perceiver sees the object, but he does not see the visual experience of the object. He consciously sees real things in the real world and not his experiences of those things. There are not two red things in the scene but just one, the red screen.
If Searle is correct that this is the standard viewpoint, then I’m with Humphrey right off the bat, for I almost don’t know where to begin with my objections. (more…)
