- seCtIon one: tHe PRoBLem
up, as it were, the space of the real pitcher, the real wash basin filled
with water(Hugo von Hoffmansthal, ‘Letters of the returning one’ [Briefe eines
Zurückgekehrten] IV, 26 May 1901, our translation)First, let us go back to the beginning. What is it like to see? In particular, what is
it like to have a conscious visual experience, such as consciously seeing a yellow
daffodil on a green lawn? You see it; you can reach out to it; you delight in the rich
visual experience of the petals’ bright translucent yellow against the blades of
green. Choose something in your field of view, and really look at it: be consciously
aware of the curve of the tea cup or the pattern of the carpet. What does it mean
for you to be seeing this, right now? What is it really like?
Seeing comes so naturally that these questions may seem silly, but they are not.
Indeed, the difficulty of answering them has led some to conclude that visual
experience is all a grand illusion. The term ‘grand illusion’ (Noë et al., 2000; Noë,
2002) emerged from research on change blindness and inattentional blindness
(discussed later in this chapter) to convey the idea that our visual experience may
not be quite how it first seems. What sort of illusion do they mean?Simple visual illusions, such as the effects of illusory contours, brightness and
colour constancy, or the Müller-Lyer and café-wall illusions, are tricks that mislead
you about what is out there in the world; they create confusion between appear-
ance and reality. The interesting possibility for students of consciousness is not
that we are sometimes wrong about what we are seeing, which we clearly can be,
but that we may be wrong about the nature of seeing itself.The starting point, then, is how vision seems. How does it seem to you? It
is important, before we go any further, to answer this question for yourself.
This is partly because sometimes people propose novel solutions to difficult
problems only to find that others say, ‘Oh, I knew that all along’, and partly
because some of the debates over the grand illusion concern the difficulty
of knowing how people’s experience really seems to them. And we cannot
decide whether we need to talk about illusions unless we first know how it
seems. So – how does it seem to you?Close your eyes, reopen them, and look around. It probably seems as though you
see the world like a richly detailed and ever-changing picture; perhaps as you
turn your head to see what’s on either side of you it seems more like a moving
picture, a continuous ‘stream of vision’.
Now, before going any further, it may also be useful to describe to yourself how
you think vision actually works; try to come up with a basic theory about what is
going on. Perhaps you arrived at something like this:When we look around the world, unconscious processes in the brain build
up a more and more detailed representation of what is out there. Each
glance provides a bit more information to add to the picture. This rich
mental representation is what we consciously see at any time. As long as
we are looking around there is a continuous stream of such pictures. This is
our conscious visual experience.‘We [. . .] are the victims
of an illusion – not
a perceptual illusion
about the world but
rather an illusion about
the nature of our visual
experience’
(Noë et al., 2000, p. 100)