Evan Thompson

In this thesis, I show how decisions about the ontology of colour depend upon the empirical and conceptual relations among levels of explanation for vision. In Chapter 1, I show how the "received" Lockean view of colour is linked to Newton's theory of light and colour. In Chapter 2, I review extensively recent biological, psychophysical, and computational models of colour vision, and I discuss their relations. I also show how the ontological status of colour is linked to these levels of explanation for the specific case of colour constancy. This empirical discussion provides the foundation for Chapters 3 and 4 where I argue that both objectivism and subjectivism are untenable on extensive empirical grounds. ;In Chapter 3, I argue that the computational level of explanation is not sufficient to ground an objectivist view of colour. Colour cannot be identified with surface spectral reflectance, nor can our present conception of colour be replaced by a new concept of physical colour as surface reflectance. An adequate account of colour must, then, be experientialist. I conclude this chapter by showing how arguments against objectivism are not sufficient to establish subjectivism. ;In Chapter 4, I present a novel philosophical argument based on the comparative study of colour vision in different species. This body of research has been largely neglected both by philosophers and by those who work on computational colour vision. My "comparative argument" purports to show that an adequate account of colour must be both experientialist and ecological. Whereas computational objectivism runs afoul of the experiential nature of colour, neurophysiological subjectivism runs afoul of the ecological nature of colour experience. In contrast to both objectivism and subjectivism, I defend a new view of colour, which I call ecological experientialism. According to this view, colour corresponds to a type of property that is interactional, i.e., to a type of property that results from the biological and ecological interactions of perceiving and cognizing animals. Therefore, to account for colour we must state generalizations over the ecologically embodied visual experiences of perceiving animals.

Colour fascinates all of us, and scientists and philosophers have sought to understand the true nature of colour vision for many years. In recent times, investigations into colour vision have been one of the main success stories of cognitive science, for each discipline within the field - neuroscience, psychology, linguistics, computer science and artificial intelligence, and philosophy - has contributed significantly to our understanding of colour. Evan Thompson's book is a major contribution to this interdisciplinary project. Colour Vision provides an accessible review of the current scientific and philosophical discussions of colour vision. Thompson steers a course between the subjective and objective positions on colour, arguing for a relational account. This account develops a novel `ecological' approach to colour vision in cognitive science and the philosophy of perception. It is vital reading for all cognitive scientists and philosophers whose interests touch upon this central area

The following points are discussed in response to the commentaries: (1) A taxonomy of perceptual completion phenomena should rely on both phenomenological and mechanistic criteria. (2) Certain forms of perceptual completion are caused by topographically organized neural processes the view that there must be a pictorial or spatial neural-perceptual isomorphism at the bridge locus – should be rejected. Although more abstract kinds of isomorphism are central to the neural-perceptual mapping, the perceptual cannot be exhaustively explained in terms of the neural, and therefore the explanation of perception cannot be reduced to uncovering neural-perceptual isomorphisms. (5) The task of vision is to guide action in the world, not to construct a detailed world-model in the head. (6) Neural filling-in facilitates the integration of information and thereby helps the animal find out about its environment. (7) Perceptual content needs to be understood at the level of the person or animal interacting in the world

Let me begin by thanking my commentators for taking the time to read my book and to write such constructive commentaries. I would also like to thank Christian Coseru for organizing and chairing the panel at the International Society for Buddhist Philosophy at the 2015 meeting of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association, at which three of the commentaries were originally presented together with my response. Finally, I am grateful to Philosophy East and West for publishing this exchange. Philosophy East and West published my first academic paper, so I am especially happy to have this exchange appear here.1In what follows, I have arranged my response according to the topics and issues raised by...

This article argues against the no-self or nonegological account of bodily self-awareness. It proposes an account of consciousness that challenges Miri Albahari's forceful defence of a nonegological view of consciousness, particularly its sharp distinction between subject and self. It contends that the subject of experience is a bodily subject and not merely an embodied one and argues that in order to be a subject of experience even in the minimal sense of witnessing-from-a-perspective, one must be prereflectively aware of oneself as a living body. It also argues in defence of the necessary presence of a minimal bodily sense of self as a constitutive feature of perspectival awareness of the world.

Experiments on scene perception and change blindness suggest that the visual system does not construct detailed internal models of a scene. These experiments therefore call into doubt the traditional view that vision is a process in which detailed representations of the environment must be constructed. The non-existence of such detailed representations, however, does not entail that we do not perceive the detailed environment. The “grand illusion hypothesis” that our visual world is an illusion rests on (1) a problematic “reconstructionist” conception of vision, and (2) a misconception about the character of perceptual experience.

The central idea of Waking, Dreaming, Being is that the self is a process, not a thing or an entity.1 The self isn’t something outside experience, hidden either in the brain or in some immaterial realm. It is an experiential process that is subject to constant change. We enact a self in the process of awareness, and this self comes and goes depending on how we are aware.When we’re awake and occupied with some manual task, we enact a bodily self geared to our immediate environment. Yet this bodily self recedes from our experience if our task becomes an absorbing mental one. If our mind wanders, the mentally imagined self of the past or future overtakes the self of the present moment.As we start to fall asleep, the...

It is now conventional wisdom that conscious experience — or in Nagel’s canonical characterization, “what it is like to be” for an organism — is what makes the mind-body problem so intractable. By the same token, our current conceptions of the mind-body relation are inadequate and some conceptual development is urgently needed. Our overall aim in this paper is to make some progress towards that conceptual development. We first examine a currently neglected, yet fundamental aspect of consciousness. This aspect is the spontaneity of consciousness, by which we mean its inner plasticity and inner purposiveness. We then sketch a “neurophenomenological” framework for thinking about the relationship between the spontaneity of consciousness and dynamic patterns of brain activity as studied in cognitive neuroscience. We conclude by proposing that the conscious mentality of sentient organisms or animals is active and dynamic, and that this “enactive” conception of consciousness can help us to move beyond the classical dichotomy between materialism and dualism

Binocular rivalry provides a useful situation for studying the relation between the temporal flow of conscious experience and the temporal dynamics of neural activity. After proposing a phenomenological framework for understanding temporal aspects of consciousness, we review experimental research on multistable perception and binocular rivalry, singling out various methodological, theoretical, and empirical aspects of this research relevant to studying the flow of experience. We then review an experimental study from our group explicitly concerned with relating the temporal dynamics of rivalrous experience to the temporal dynamics of cortical activity. Drawing attention to the importance of dealing with ongoing activity and its inherent changing nature at both phenomenological and neurodynamical levels, we argue that the notions of recurrence and variability are pertinent to understanding rivalry in particular and the flow of experience in general.