Eric Schwitzgebel

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445 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2011 last heard Jun 2011

Eric Schwitzgebel’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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New Books in Philosophy · Eric Schwitzgebel, “Perplexities of Consciousness” (MIT Press, 2011) · 15 Jun 2011 podcast

So...

In fact, I think our knowledge of our perceptual experience is often grounded in, to a large extent, although I don't think completely, but to a large extent grounded in our knowledge of the outside world.

So if I look at a white wall and I judge, oh, I'm having a visual experience of whiteness, I think it's to a large extent because I know of the outside thing that it's a white thing.

that I'm inclined to judge that I'm having the visual experience of whiteness.

If I look at a box of tissue paper, I know a lot about that box.

I know its shape.

I know its colors.

I know how it's oriented in space.

I know its texture.

All that stuff that I know through vision then informs my judgments about what experience I'm having when I'm looking at that box rather than the other way around.

So how does perception work?

Well, let me say this.

I don't think it works as follows.

Something comes in the eye.

I have a certain experience.

I know that I have that experience and therefore I reach a conclusion about what the outside world is.

It's something more like something comes through the eye.

And I have knowledge about the outside world on the basis of that.

Somehow an experience is created that exactly where the experience is in the causal path is I think there are actually a couple options.

But it's not that I have an experience and the knowledge of the experience and those are precursors of my perceptual knowledge.

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