How to get rich from inflation

Brown, Simon Alexander Burns (2024) How to get rich from inflation. Consciousness and Cognition, 117. ISSN 1053-8100

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Abstract

We seem to have rich experience across our visual field. Yet we are surprisingly poor at tasks involving the periphery and low spatial attention. Recently, Lau and collaborators have argued that a phenomenon known as “subjective inflation” allows us to reconcile these phenomena. I show inflation is consistent with multiple interpretations, with starkly different consequences for richness and for theories of consciousness more broadly. What’s more, we have only weak reasons favouring any of these interpretations over the others. I provisionally argue for an interpretation on which subjective experience is genuinely rich, but (in peripheral/unattended areas) unreliable as a guide to the external world. The main challenge for this view is that it appears to imply that experience in the periphery is not just unreliable but unstable. However, I argue that this consequence, while initially appearing unintuitive, is in fact plausible.

Item Type:	Article
Official URL:	https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/consciousnes...
Additional Information:	© 2023 The Author
Divisions:	Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method CPNSS
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > B Philosophy (General) B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology
Date Deposited:	03 Jan 2024 10:21
Last Modified:	10 Jan 2024 08:45
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/121134

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