Blindsight and the Nature of Consciousness

by Jason Holt

Ever since its discovery nearly thirty years ago, the phenomenon of blindsight--vision without visual consciousness--has been the source of great controversy in the philosophy of mind, psychology, and the neurosciences. Despite the fact that blindsight is widely acknowledged to be a critical test-case for theories of mind, Blindsight and the Nature of Consciousnessis the first extended treatment of the phenomenon from a philosophical perspective...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1551113511
• ISBN13: 9781551113517
• Release Date: February 2003
• Publisher: Broadview Press Inc
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.4" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Very, very good.

Holt is young and smart enough to try and fight everyone he can on their own terms, and his arguments run from brilliant, to simple, to downright strange. He takes on up almost everybody from Dennett, to Chalmers, to the churchlands, BLock, Nagel, Tye, functionalsim, non-reductive materialism, theory of knowledge, you name it....all in 130 pages and revolving arround a single phenomenon-BLindsight. What emerges is one of the freshest approaches to the philosophy of mind that I have read in a while...probably since Owen Flanagans Consicousness Reconsidered. Now it is a very different matter if Holt succedds in all his objectives, I doubt he does, but it is true he is bound to, or at least should, spark ardent debate.Holt aims to discuss what the phenomenon of blindsight has to offer to philsophy of mind, and the theory of knowledge, concentrating mainly on consicousness. Thus, he starts with an introduction to blindisight and to other cases of dissociations between performance and consicousness. IN blindisghts, patients with damage to V1 and therefore corrtically blind, can still however detect stimuli in their blind fields, but in a special way. Without consicousness. That is, they deny seeing anything, but if prompted to guess wether the stimuli is there or not, or is an X or an O, can perform almost flawlessly. Holt defends the interpretation of the phenomenon that says that blindsight is vision without consciousness. This has straightforward implications: vision does not depend on consicousness (but does not mean consicousness is epiphenomenal-and he shows it), and, more importantly, means that consicousness is a real phenomenon, and a physical one at that. Why? well because what is missing is V1, AND V1 only, and that is strictly physical. And so Holt argues against eliminitavism and discusses the super-blindsight argument. He also shows how consicousness can be casual, or rather is casual, although is not specific on exactly where. He speculates on consicousness as an inhibitor of automatic actions, and has some support for this. It also makes sense. But all of this is just the start of HOlts attack on the entrenched positions of functionalism, dualism and non-reductive materialism.Holt argues against the zombie argument, claiming the obvious in that conceibability is not a good guide to logical possibility. His points there are good, but when he goes against colourblind mary, things get tricky. Holt mantains Mary already knows what red is like but only gains the red-recognitional ability. This is counterintuitive, but worse, unecessary. Holt forgets that maybe mary does gain knowledge, but that it is of a kind that could not have been gained before, and therefore the arguments assumptions are wrong. Or simply that mary gains indexical knowledge, or access too old physical knowledge in a different way. His position seems to fall to knowledge that/knowledge how distinction, and this line of arguemtn is not as strong as it could be.Holt also a