Product Description

The theory of blindsight has been a source of great controversy in the philosophy of the mind, psychology, and neuroscineces. Desite the fact that blindsight is widely acknowledged to be a critical test-case for theories of the mind, this is the first extended treatment of the phenomenon from a philosophical perspective.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1002338 in Books
• Published on: 2003-02-26
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 153 pages

About the Author
Jason Holt is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at Concordia University (Montreal).

Customer Reviews

Very, very good.
Holt is young and smart enough to try and fight everyone he can on their own terms, and his arguments run from brilliant, to simple, to downright strange. He takes on up almost everybody from Dennett, to Chalmers, to the churchlands, BLock, Nagel, Tye, functionalsim, non-reductive materialism, theory of knowledge, you name it....all in 130 pages and revolving arround a single phenomenon-BLindsight. What emerges is one of the freshest approaches to the philosophy of mind that I have read in a while...probably since Owen Flanagans Consicousness Reconsidered. Now it is a very different matter if Holt succedds in all his objectives, I doubt he does, but it is true he is bound to, or at least should, spark ardent debate.

Holt aims to discuss what the phenomenon of blindsight has to offer to philsophy of mind, and the theory of knowledge, concentrating mainly on consicousness. Thus, he starts with an introduction to blindisight and to other cases of dissociations between performance and consicousness. IN blindisghts, patients with damage to V1 and therefore corrtically blind, can still however detect stimuli in their blind fields, but in a special way. Without consicousness. That is, they deny seeing anything, but if prompted to guess wether the stimuli is there or not, or is an X or an O, can perform almost flawlessly. Holt defends the interpretation of the phenomenon that says that blindsight is vision without consciousness. This has straightforward implications: vision does not depend on consicousness (but does not mean consicousness is epiphenomenal-and he shows it), and, more importantly, means that consicousness is a real phenomenon, and a physical one at that. Why? well because what is missing is V1, AND V1 only, and that is strictly physical. And so Holt argues against eliminitavism and discusses the super-blindsight argument. He also shows how consicousness can be casual, or rather is casual, although is not specific on exactly where. He speculates on consicousness as an inhibitor of automatic actions, and has some support for this. It also makes sense. But all of this is just the start of HOlts attack on the entrenched positions of functionalism, dualism and non-reductive materialism.

Holt argues against the zombie argument, claiming the obvious in that conceibability is not a good guide to logical possibility. His points there are good, but when he goes against colourblind mary, things get tricky. Holt mantains Mary already knows what red is like but only gains the red-recognitional ability. This is counterintuitive, but worse, unecessary. Holt forgets that maybe mary does gain knowledge, but that it is of a kind that could not have been gained before, and therefore the arguments assumptions are wrong. Or simply that mary gains indexical knowledge, or access too old physical knowledge in a different way. His position seems to fall to knowledge that/knowledge how distinction, and this line of arguemtn is not as strong as it could be.

Holt also argues against Kripkes, and many a dualist arguments, for dualism. Here Holt shows how good a philosopher he really is. It simply does not work to use the analogy of water as h2o as illustrating anything about consicousness as a physical state. Our concepts are simply different, and changing them could make the latter identity necessary, or at least seemingly necessary, which is what Kripke argues for. Then comes Holts attack on non-reductive materialism. He shows how a token-type identity from consicous states to brain states is no problem for materialism, and further, how a token-token identity can be made to work. Simply by fine graining the types into tokesn will do, but Holt goes further. He also shows there are in fact purely phyisical, and commonly accepted physical, things that nevertheless have token-type relationships between their micro and macro-prperties.

Holt also discusses Chalmers Hard problem, and shows that it is misconceived. As with Kripke, concpetual nuances could be to blame, as well as an insurmountably high bar of explanation set by CHalmers. Does it make sense to ask why consicousness arises out of its correlates anyway? He even attempts to close the Gap, but here he seems speculative (admittedly so) ans seems a little lost. He tries to use the concept of perspectives to do such a thing, and out goes another brave and interesting attempt. But I think HOlt does good simply by showing there is not necessarilt a hard gap, and that HE cannot close it is not to be taken against him. IM sure Chalmers would have a thing or two to say here, but I believe Holt does defend his views adequately. Finally, Holt discussess blindsights implications for the theory of knowledge by considering wether patients from beliefs about their unconsicous discriminations, and argues for an externalist, or maybe a dual internalist sometimes externalist view on perception. He also discusses direct or indirect views of perception and goes for a dual viw as well. Here I think his arguments for a direct form of perception could be countered.

THis book should be read, and its originality serve as exapmle. The use of a clinical phenomenon to make so much philosophy is a brilliant move. Holt makes brilliant point after point, and one only hopes he writes a book on neglect, one on amnesia, one on whatever phenomenon he likes, as long as he makes it as valuable as this one. Essential reading for those interested on consicousness.