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December 2018/January 2019 Philosophy Now 53

sion: the surface is all that there is: “To believe that we have constructed a ‘picture’ of the visual world in our minds is to fall for the illusion of mental depth, hook, line, and sinker” (p.82). His idea of the mind is of  something entirely ‘in-the-moment’, and indeed, without breadth: the mind is a pin- point. If we disagree with this, it is because “almost everything we know about our minds is a hoax, played on us by our brains” (p.15). A hoax that Chater’s brain has myste- riously unmasked.

 The grounds for this extraordinary claim are worth examining. Take visual experience. Our visual focus is sharply concentrated in a minute area of each retina. You may feel that   you are currently looking at a page of print, but what you are seeing is one word at a time,  with everything else being ignored. Your sense that you have a visual  field – corre- sponding, for example, to a view of a room or a landscape – is an illusion. The feeling that   we are simultaneously grasping a ‘whole’ is

the result of being fooled by our brain into thinking “that we ‘see’ the stable, rich, colourful world before us in a single visual gulp, whereas the truth is that our visual connection with the world is no more than a series of localized ‘nibbles’.”(p.54) And what  applies to perception applies even more strongly to thought, feelings, to the exercise of our will, and to our sense of being unified or coherent selves. To imagine that our mind is more than fleeting fragments and to think  of ourselves as having inner depths is there- fore to fall victim to a Grand Illusion.

The Illusion of an Illusion

Illusion? Hardly. After all, the richness of  the world that we see is clearly not an illu- sion. The seething vista of events and objects that is the moment-to-moment  appearance of the world around us clearly  corresponds to reality; and so to see a rich  world is not to be the victim of any illusion. I see a room or a landscape, as opposed to pin-pricks of sense data, because there is a room or a landscape to see. If there is an illu- sion, it is a little one, about the processes underlying visual consciousness, not about  the objects of consciousness. But rather than even an illusion, since most of us are not up to speed with the latest research in the psychology and physiology of perception, it  is merely an unawareness of those processes. Indeed, if we were aware of those processes as we looked around us, we would be distracted to the point of being blind.  Anyway, all that psychology shows us is that 

at least one version of the representational theory of experience is bankrupt – and that 

our visual experiences are not realist  pictures in the head, mirror images of our surroundings. Psychology does not show us that our having an experience of a complex  world is an illusion. In fact, if the mind were a succession of moments, and the idea of  enduring mental phenomena, such as beliefs, were untrue, it is difficult to see how  Chater could have become sufficiently  together in order to write a book (which was presumably planned, researched, and writ- ten over many years) in support of those beliefs. In short, the existence of The Mind is   Flat is itself the most decisive refutation of 

the thesis contained between its covers. Ludwig Wittgenstein famously argued that his method was to “pass from a piece of  disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense” – thereby undermining daft  ideas that may have seemed like serious philo- sophical positions. We are indebted to Chater for doing something like this, albeit inadver- tently. More importantly, he illustrates the absurdity of taking empirical science as having the capacity to overturn our fundamental intuitions about our own nature.

The Mind is Flat also illustrates how reduc- ing persons or selves to their brains – what we may call ‘brainifying’ the person – invariably  involves personifying the brain and treating it as if it were, after all, a kind of self. The brain, Chater tells us, perpetrates “hoaxes”, “solves problems”, “is continuously scram- bling to link together scraps of sensory infor- mation”, trying to organize and interpret  them. All of this is, “in a very real sense mind- less” – although (with a characteristic  wobble) Chater asserts that we (italics mine) are “relentless improvisers, powered by a mental engine, perpetually creating meaning from sensory input.” How very like a self!

 At any rate, for Chater, the sense that we are extended in time is simply a report of  “the brain’s interpretation” (p.176). There- fore: “talk of being conscious of one’s self is incoherent nonsense – ‘selves’, after all, aren’t part of the sensory world. And all ‘higher’ forms of consciousness (being conscious of being self-conscious), though beloved of some philosophers, are nonsense on stilts” (p.183).

“There is the bit where you say it and the bit where you take it back” JL Austin once said caustically about philosophers who claimed to adhere to counterintuitive views.  And Chater takes it back in spades. For example: “what makes each of us unique is our individual and particular history – our own specific trail of precedents in thought  and action. We are each unique, in short, because of the endless variety of our layered

history of thoughts and actions” (p.202).  Layered ? In a mind without mental depth?

Time for the Self 

 We do not need psychologists to tell us that   we won’t find the self by examining the brain

and that brains are fundamentally different  from selves. For example, the state of the brain at given time is confined to what it is at that time. It cannot reach out to its own past, not even to those past events that have shaped it, or to its future, or to the timeless zone of general meanings and facts that we take account of to make sense of our lives.  The self, by contrast, is not temporally 

confined in this way. RT in 2018 is open to, aware of, RT in 1973 in the way that his body  or brain is not open to its past. It is clear then that the brain does not have the wherewithal to hoax us and to coin the ‘illusion’ of the self   with its various modes of self-consciousness.  The brain is as temporally flat, as temporally 

depthless, as the mind according to Chater. Brains could fool us into believing that we are or have selves only,  per impossibile, by  borrowing the capacities that actual minds (persons, selves) have.

 That I am a self is hardly something I can be mistaken about. As Dan Zahavi has pointed out, we cannot take the subjective dimension of our experiential lives seriously   without ascribing our experiences to a self as

a “built-in feature of experiential life” (‘Consciousness, Self-Consciousness, Self- hood: A Reply to some Critics’ 2018). This seems unassailable. But, he adds, we mustn’t  think of that self as something present in experience – either “as additional experien- tial object or as an extra experiential ingre- dient.” To do so would be to fall foul of  Hume’s critique. Selfhood, Zahavi concludes, is inseparable from the quality  that experience has of being first-personal, of being mine.

I couldn’t have put it better myself. © PROF. RAYMOND TALLIS 2018

 Raymond Tallis’ new book, Logos: The  Mystery of How We Make Sense of the  World has recently been published by Agenda.

Tallisin

54 Philosophy Now December 2018/January 2019

so on, are in the mind so physical objects are in the mind, as these objects just are their perceived properties. However, the exis- tence even of our senses refutes Berkeley’s argument. Our senses (and those of other living creatures) evolved because they enabled us to compete, survive and procreate in a challenging environ- ment that already existed. This process could not work in Berke- ley’s world. A belief in evolution entails necessarily a belief in the existence of a mind-independent physical world. So the physical  world exists, but we don’t see it as it really is, but according to

an illusion created by our senses.  MICHAELBRAKE, EPSOM, SURREY 

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n answering this question it is helpful to distinguish between ontology – what exists – and epistemology – how we know what   we know. The question has an ontological part, ‘Is there some-

thing called the world?’, and an epistemological part, ‘Is my expe- rience of this world false?’ The temptation is to conflate the two aspects of the question into either a naïve realist position – “The  world exists and I experience it accurately” – or a naïve idealist 

“Everything is an illusion” position. But it seems perfectly pos- sible to believe that an external world exists and at the same time believe that my experience of that world could be misinformative.  To briefly expand: I seem to have experiences of something. I can break this something down, first into the different senses – sight, sound, smell, touch and taste – through which I experience my body and other bodies that appear to be like mine. Further, I experience the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics and science in making coherent, consistent, correspondent and prag- matic predictions about my experiences. This leads me to guess that something outside of me – call it ‘the world’ – really does exist. However, I cannot help but also note that I only appreciate this as a subjective being! However, no matter what the nature of the world actually is, I only experience it through my senses and therefore can only know the world in these terms. I simply  have no idea whether this is a good representation of what the mind-independent world actually is. Furthermore, there will be other equally appropriate ways of experiencing the world using different senses of which I know nothing: to paraphrase Thomas Nagel, I can never know what the world is like from the perspec- tive of a bat. Finally, I don’t even have a sure way of knowing  whether others, who seem like me, experience the world in the same way. So, to summarise: No, that there is a world is probably  not an illusion, but my experience of it could well be one.

SIMONK OLSTOE, U NIVERSITY OFPORTSMOUTH

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s the world an illusion? I will first examine what is meant by  ‘world’, and subsequently what is meant by ‘illusion’. People typically do not differentiate between ‘the world’ and its percep-

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f course the world is an illusion! We see only a tiny part of  the electromagnetic spectrum, which is divided into colours that exist only in our brains. We hear only a limited range of vibra- tions, onto which we impose meanings the vibrations do not  themselves contain. We have no idea what dogs and bees find so interesting, and vice versa. We feel as soft or solid what is nearly  all empty space, apart from a few fundamental particles in differ- ent arrangements. We can grasp directly only scales from around one millimetre to one kilometre. We think that the present is now, when we’re actually experiencing what happened half a sec- ond ago. Our personal, political, and ideological hang-ups and squabbles are blind to natural ecology and history – including the cells and DNA of our own bodies. Our heads are full of phantoms  we impose on a world that is fundamentally indifferent to them.  And yet that very indifference proves that the world is real!

On the basis that once the impossible is eliminated what  remains must be the truth, the most convincing current hypoth- esis is that the world is made of information. This is abstract, spaceless, timeless, but can be consciously expressed only and nec- essarily in viewpoints of a physical world. This world emerges in a rational sequence of steps, its properties at each level depending on those of the level below. In a sense every emergent geometry  and substance is illusory, yet it is also deeply real.

DR NICHOLASB. T AYLOR , LITTLES ANDHURST

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n illusion is a false sense-impression of something. This defi- nition is a good starting point, since I will argue that the world exists, but that the sense-impressions we have of it are an illusion.  John Locke (1632-1704) held that objects have what he called  primary and secondary qualities . Primary qualities are those he con- sidered to be intrinsic to the object: its size, solidity, shape, num- ber and position. Secondary qualities are not intrinsic but the result of “a power in the object” to create a sense-impression: to create colours, sounds, tastes, smells, feels in our minds.

 We can update Locke. What do exist independently of our minds are objects consisting of molecules, particles, waves, forces.  These are devoid of colour, sound or any of the other secondary 

qualities: the external world is dark, silent and colourless. Our sen- sory apparatus – our sense organs, sensory nervous system and sen- sory cortices – creates the illusion that the world is bright and colourful by transforming the raw data provided by our senses into colours, sounds, tastes, smells, sensations of hot and cold (and pain). These secondary qualities didn’t exist until they were invented by evolution. They evolved over time because those organisms that had the most informative senses had an evolution- ary advantage.

Some idealists may disagree with these ideas and maintain, as George Berkeley (1685-1753) did, that just as colours, sounds and

In document REGLAMENTO DE LA LIGA DE HUNTING FIELD TARGET DE EUSKADI (página 34-56)