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Week 03 Questions:
Mind & Reality
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\section{Recording of Whole-Class Live Question Session}
\emph{Reading:} §Kosslyn, Stephen M., William L. Thompson, Maria F. Costantini-Ferrando, Nathaniel M. Alpert, and David Spiegel. ‘Hypnotic Visual Illusion Alters Color Processing in the Brain’. American Journal of Psychiatry 157, no. 8 (1 August 2000): 1279–84. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.157.8.1279., §Koivisto, Mika, Svetlana Kirjanen, Antti Revonsuo, and Sakari Kallio. ‘A Preconscious Neural Mechanism of Hypnotically Altered Colors: A Double Case Study’. PLOS ONE 8, no. 8 (5 August 2013): e70900. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0070900., §Kadosh, Roi Cohen, Avishai Henik, Andres Catena, Vincent Walsh, and Luis J. Fuentes. ‘Induced Cross-Modal Synaesthetic Experience Without Abnormal Neuronal Connections’: Psychological Science, 1 February 2009., §Fodor, J. (1983). The Modularity of Mind: an Essay on Faculty Psychology. Bradford book. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass ; London.
Philosophy is done by asking questions.
Josh D (q1)
take Witzel's experiment regarding colour [...].
Our beliefs and
knowledge about what a banana looks like are altering our perception of the
banana,
making it extra yellow
and by extension we could argue how we
perceive it is wrong.
Although the principle of acquaintance and cognitive penetration are separate, could it be argued that we are not truly acquainted with [the banana’s colour] because of how our thoughts and knowledge have adjusted our perception of the banana’s colour?
Misperceiving colour won’t obviously influence whether we are acquaintance with the banana
But ...
Proponents of cognitive penetration generally think that adding in the beliefs
enhances the accuracy of perceptions. This is probably feasible with bananas.
Josh D [reconstruction]
1. Cognition penetrates perception,
2. causing us to misperceive things.
3. But acquaintance requires veridical perception.
4. Therefore there is no acquaintance.
http://brainden.com/images/yellow-blue-dogs-big.jpg
more illusions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob8uPzHVrY8
Proponents of cognitive penetration generally think that adding in the beliefs
enhances the accuracy of perceptions. This is probably feasible with bananas.
This illusion illustrates why: knowing what colour an object is supposed to be can help you.
Josh D [reconstruction]
1. Cognition penetrates perception,
2. causing us to misperceive things.
3. But acquaintance requires veridical perception.
4. Therefore there is no acquaintance.
Proponents of cognitive penetration
usually hold, plausibly, that the influence of beliefs
will normally make our peceptions more, not less, accurate.
Josh D (q2)
Could it also be argued that if we now know that
we are seeing the yellow differently to the true yellow of the banana that
our perception of the colour will continue to alter, for example, the
yellow will continue to get brighter every time?
synchronic vs diachronic cognitive penetration
Last point: synchronic vs diachronic.
What banana shows is at most diachronic
Solyman
If [...] experiencing hallucinations [...] due to the defects and internal stimulation related to
associated objects for which these are wholly triggered within the mind
[...],
do we not associate this with perception being penetrated
by cognition,especially when one has had past experience with fear
[...] acting upon the precepts?
Thus we may infer from this that cognition does [...] penetrate our perceptions.
Hypnosis: Kosslyn et al (2000); Kadosh et al (2009); Koivisto et al (2013)
Also related to colour perception, a recent study reporting the
successful creation of grapheme-colour synaesthesia in non-synaesthetes
by hypnotic suggestion [22] used the outcome to support the view that
the unusual cross-modal interactions found in synaesthesia could be the
product of disinhibition between brain areas rather than
hyperconnectivity.
A lot hangs on how we characterise cognitive penetration ...
suggestion: ‘all triangles are red’
Of ‘two very highly hypnotizable participants’, one ’reported altered colors in the
targeted shapes’ there were markers of associated brain atcivity 70--120ms after
stimulus onset.
These effects were absent when the subject was asked to simulate the effects of suggestion.
Koivisto et al, 2013
But is this evidence of cognitive penetration?
It depends on your definition ...
Canonical Definition
to say that vision is cognitively penetrated is to say that
‘our beliefs, desires, emotions, actions, and even the languages we speak can directly influence what we see.’
Firestone & Scholl, 2016 p. 5
\citep[p.~5]{firestone:2016_cognition}
Steve’s Alternative Definition
Sensory inputs provide incomplete information about objects.
Perceptual processes fill in (some of) the missing information
in accordance with principles specifying how objects behave.
Our question of cognitive penetration is:
Can anything you know or believe be used to fill in that missing information?
theoretical significance
In Witzel et al’s banana, beliefs are supposed to be filling in.
In hypnosis (and hallucination?), beliefs are creating interference.
This is essentially a simplified version of Pylyshlyn’s definition:
‘A technical discussion ... is beyond the scope of this paper
... For present purposes it is enough to say that if a
system is cognitively penetrable, then the function it computes is
sensitive, in a semantically coherent way, to the organism’s goals and
beliefs, that is, it can be altered in a way that bears some logical
relation to what the person knows’
Note 3: ‘[...] This is the essence of what we mean by
cognitive penetration: it is an influence that is coherent or quasi-rational
when the meaning of the representation is taken into account.’
Pylyshyn, 1999 p. 343
note 3. ‘We sometimes use the term “rational” in speaking of cog- nitive
processes or cognitive influences. This term is meant to in- dicate that
in characterizing such processes we need to refer to what the beliefs are
about – to their semantics. The paradigm case of such a process is
inference, where the semantic property truth is preserved. But we also
count various heuristic reasoning and decision-making strategies (e.g.
satisficing, approximating, or even guessing) as rational because,
however suboptimal they may be by some normative criterion, they do not
transform representations in a semantically arbitrary way: they are in
some sense at least quasi-logical. This is the essence of what we mean by
cognitive penetration: it is an influence that is coherent or quasi-rational
when the meaning of the representation is taken into account.’
Adam W
If someone talks to you under water, you usually can't understand what they're saying,
but if you know what they're going to say beforehand, then you can understand them perfectly.
Does a phenomenon such as that not prove the existence of cognitive penetration?
phoneme restoration (discussed in Fodor, 1983 pp. 65ff)
