Many current neurophysiological, psychophysical, and psychological approaches to vision rest on the idea that when we see, the brain produces an internal representation of the world. The activation of this internal representation is assumed to give rise to the experience of seeing. The problem with this kind of approach is that it leaves unexplained how the existence of such a detailed internal representation might produce visual consciousness. An alternative proposal is made here. We propose that seeing is a way of acting. It is a particular way of exploring the environment. Activity in internal representations does not generate the experience of seeing. The outside world serves as its own, external, representation. The experience of seeing occurs when the organism masters what we call the governing laws of sensorimotor contingency. The advantage of this approach is that it provides a natural and principled way of accounting for visual consciousness, and for the differences in the perceived quality of sensory experience in the different sensory modalities. Several lines of empirical evidence are brought forward in support of the theory, in particular: evidence from experiments in sensorimotor adaptation, visual \"filling in,\" visual stability despite eye movements, change blindness, sensory substitution, and color perception.

A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness-Authors' Response-Acting out our sensory experience

What determines what we see? In contrast to the traditional "modular" understanding of perception, according to which visual processing is encapsulated from higher-level cognition, a tidal wave of recent research alleges that states such as beliefs, desires, emotions, motivations, intentions, and linguistic representations exert direct top-down influences on what we see. There is a growing consensus that such effects are ubiquitous, and that the distinction between perception and cognition may itself be unsustainable. We argue otherwise: none of these hundreds of studies - either individually or collectively - provide compelling evidence for true top-down effects on perception, or "cognitive penetrability". In particular, and despite their variety, we suggest that these studies all fall prey to only a handful of pitfalls. And whereas abstract theoretical challenges have failed to resolve this debate in the past, our presentation of these pitfalls is empirically anchored: in each case, we show not only how certain studies could be susceptible to the pitfall (in principle), but how several alleged top-down effects actually are explained by the pitfall (in practice). Moreover, these pitfalls are perfectly general, with each applying to dozens of other top-down effects. We conclude by extracting the lessons provided by these pitfalls into a checklist that future work could use to convincingly demonstrate top-down effects on visual perception. The discovery of substantive top-down effects of cognition on perception would revolutionize our understanding of how the mind is organized; but without addressing these pitfalls, no such empirical report will license such exciting conclusions. Language: en

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Cognition does not affect perception: Evaluating the evidence for "top-down" effects.

A blind spot? the birth of an ideology clearing away the rubbish print culture nationalising religion the culture of science anatomising human nature the science of politics secularising modernising happiness from good sense to sensibility nature did the mind have a sex? education - a panacea the vulgar the pursuit of wealth reform progress the revolutionary era - "modern philosophy" lasting light?

Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World

Volume I: General Introduction Acknowledgments Notes on the text 1. Introduction: seeing things their way 2. The practice of history and the cult of the fact 3. Interpretation, rationality and truth 4. Meaning and understanding in the history of ideas 5. Motives, intentions and interpretation 6. Interpretation and the understanding of speech acts 7. 'Social meaning' and the explanation of social action 8. Moral principles and social change 9. The idea of a cultural lexicon 10. Retrospect: Studying rhetoric and conceptual change. Volume II. 1. Introduction 2. The rediscovery of republican values 3. Ambrogio Lorenzetti and the portrayal of virtuous government 4. Ambrogio Lorenzetti on the power and glory of republics 5. Republican virtues in an age of princes 6. Machiavelli on virtu and the maintenance of liberty 7. The idea of negative liberty: Machiavelli and modern perspectives 8. Thomas More's Utopia and the virtue of true nobility 9. Was there a Calvinist theory of revolution? 10. Moral ambiguity and the renaissance art of eloquence 11. John Milton and the politics of slavery 12. Classical liberty, Renaissance translation and the English civil war 13. From the state of princes to the modern state 14. Augustan party politics and Renaissance constitutional thought. Volume III: 1. Introduction: Hobbes's career in philosophy 2. Hobbes and the studia humanitatis 3. Hobbes's changing conception of a civil science 4. Hobbes on rhetoric and the construction of morality 5. Hobbes and the purely artificial person of the state 6. Hobbes on the proper signification of liberty 7. Hobbes and the classical theory of laughter 8. History and ideology in the English revolution 9. The context of Hobbes's theory of political obligation 10. Conquest and consent: Hobbes and the engagement controversy 11. Hobbes and his disciples in France and England 12. Hobbes and the politics of the early Royal Society 13. Hobbes's last word on politics.

https://assets.cambridge.org/97805218/13686/frontmatter/9780521813686_frontmatter.pdf

Visions of Politics

This paper considers whether a passive isometric input device, such as a Spaceball/sup TM/, used together with visual feedback, could provide the operator with a pseudo-haptic feedback. For this aim, two psychophysical experiments have been conducted. The first experiment consisted of a compliance discrimination, between two virtual springs hand-operated by means of the Spaceball/sup TM/. In this experiment, the stiffness (or compliance) JND turned out to be 6%. The second experiment assessed stiffness discrimination between a virtual spring and the equivalent spring in reality. In this case, the stiffness (or compliance) JND was found to be 13.4%. These results are consistent with previous outcomes on manual discrimination of compliance. Consequently, this consistency reveals that the passive apparatus that was used can, to some extent, simulate haptic information. In addition, a final test indicated that the proprioceptive sense of the subjects was blurred by visual feedback. This gave them the illusion of using a nonisometric device.

/pdf/pseudo-haptic-feedback-can-isometric-input-devices-simulate-58ppv00sgm.pdf

Pseudo-haptic feedback: can isometric input devices simulate force feedback?

Hobbes's psychology of thought: Endeavours, purpose and curiosity

The Morality of the Sublime: Kant and Schiller

What did it mean to be reasonable in the Age of Reason? Classical probabilists from Jakob Bernouli through Pierre Simon Laplace intended their theory as an answer to this question--as "nothing more at bottom than good sense reduced to a calculus," in Laplace's words. In terms that can be easily grasped by nonmathematicians, Lorraine Daston demonstrates how this view profoundly shaped the internal development of probability theory and defined its applications.

Classical Probability in the Enlightenment.

HE SUBLIME was first delineated as an aesthetic experience in England at the beginning of the eighteenth century, above all in the writings of the :third earl of Shaftesbury and of John Dennis. An analogous experience had long been known in religious and poetic as well as political and oratorical contexts, and the moral significance that had accrued to it persisted as an aspect of the newly recognized aesthetic character of the sublime. Dennis understood the experience-taken principally as a response to literary texts-in the light of a psychology of feeling and passion which gave its ethical implications a new, revolutionary turn. Drawing on achievements in psychology and poetry from the preceding century, in the writings of Hobbes and Milton, Dennis essentially renewed a conception which he found in the classical locus of the sublime, the HEpt' kqov; of "Longinus." Thus, while he emphasized the religious associations of sublime experience, Dennis in effect reversed the main direction which had been given to its conception, and so to the experience itself, in Christian tradition starting with Saint Augustine. Elsewhere I have discussed the morality of the sublime in Kant and Schiller, two competing versions of its eighteenth-century culmination, showing how the aesthetic experience retained its relevance to ethical (as well as to cognitive) concerns.' For Kant and Schiller the term "aesthetic" depended for its meaning on renewed connection with its

The Morality of the Sublime: To John Dennis

A curious feature of the Cartesian theory of the passions is their characterization as "confused" thoughts or perceptions. The contrast to the "clear and distinct ideas" which Descartes took as the basis of rational thinking is obvious; yet there is much more to the intrinsic "confusion" of sense perception and passion. The present essay considers three works which develop this notion, Descartes's Les Passions de l'Ame (1649), Malebranche's De la Recherche de la Verite (1674-75/1712), and Hutcheson's Essay on the Nature of the Passions and Affections (1728/1742). One implication of this use of "confused" is that it is the very relation of passion to sensation, or alternatively the very involvement of the body (in an agitation of animal spirits), that makes passion an obstacle to human knowledge and autonomy. In his insistence on confusion Descartes is reviving a theme of classical philosophy, giving it a new definition and application. The theme takes on further new senses and uses in Malebranche and Hutcheson. I They all acknowledge the necessity of passion, however, implicitly recognizing the virtues of "confusion."

Jeffrey Barnouw

Papers

Hobbes's psychology of thought: Endeavours, purpose and curiosity

The Morality of the Sublime: Kant and Schiller

Classical Probability in the Enlightenment.

The Morality of the Sublime: To John Dennis

Passion as "confused" perception or thought in Descartes, Malebranche, and Hutcheson.