\title {A Talk \\ Commentary on Wolfgang}
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\def \ititle {Commentary on Wolfgang}
\def \isubtitle { Prinz and Michael Graziano}
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\textbf{\ititle}: \isubtitle
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I have a series of questions which I want to put to Wolfgang Prinz and
Michael Graziano.
The broad thrust of my questions might be put like
this.
Both theories involve taking as primary a third-person perspective of
subjectivity or awareness, a perspective of it as seen by an onlooker with a
side on view.
More than this, they aim to show that other perspectives, and in particualar
a first person perspective, are dispensable in the sense that we can
construct these from a third-person perspective.
Thus Wolfgang talks about importing from a third-person perspective on
another’s experiences and actions, and Michael explains awareness in terms
of a model of attention which describes attention as a relation
between a subject and a thing.
My aim in what follows is to explore reasons for thinking that
other perspectives,
the first-person perspective and the perspective we adopt
when we do things together,
are indispensable.
It is not that I think another perspective has primacy.
My guess is that none are primary and that all are indispensable in the
sense that you cannot construct any one from the others.
OK, now for some questions.
- one- and two-year-olds’ representations of awareness differ systematically from most adults’
- one- and two-year-olds’ attention schema differs systematically from most adults’
- Conditions under which 1- and 2-year-olds’ are aware of a thing differ systematically from conditions under which most adults are aware of a thing.
There isn't an objection in view yet.
After all, lots of scientific theories have surprising consequences.
But I do think there is an objection.
This is because awareness typically affects behaviour, as deficits like
neglect show.
If (3) were true, one- and two-year-olds should fail to search for, or talk
about objects in cases where they are unaware of them. In fact, they should
show signs of being quite significantly impaired. But as far as I know
they don’t.
We can bring this out by contrasting two types of change:
you rotate or an object rotates.
Although the two rotations may result in your seeing the same aspect of the
object, they involve a different alteration in your expeirence.
So it seems that some experiences implicitly specify their subjects
in virtue of being organised around a point of view.
I think this leads to a dilemma.
- EITHER The implicitly specified perceiver is merely ‘an artefact made by humans’, a consequence of Like You or the attention schema.
- OR Appeal to Like You and an Attention Schema can explain how things become explicit; but they cannot explain the ways in which a subject of awareness is implicitly specified.
I couldn't find an apple so I'll have to make do with a green square
Suppose you attend to the shape and let’s say you’ve seen lots of these
so you’re really focussed on the shape.
You might say, sincerely, ‘I was aware of the shape but not the colour.’
Even so, you are computing its categorical colour properties, as is
shown by the fact that you can get odd-ball effects for changes in
categorical colour properties.
So X includes inforamation about shape plus information about categorical
colour.
But on the additive model, A gets added to X or not.
Given the additive nature of the model,
how can we distinguish this case, in which there is awareness shape
from a case in which you are aware of categorical colour and shape?
Is the idea, for example, that the awareness feature gets bound to
something other than an object, perhaps a partial object?
So this was my question about whether we have a full explanation of how
people make decisions about awareness.
I also want to note a question about how the model of attention
changes across development.