Consciousness and Psychopathologyin their visual field but only one at a time. They cannot make out the full scene they belong
to or make out a whole image out of the details. Outside of a narrow area in the visual field,
these patients say they see nothing but an undifferentiated mess. Hemispatial neglect (also called
hemiagnosia and hemi-neglect) is a neuropsychological condition in which there is a deficit in
attention to and awareness of one side of space. There is typically damage to the right posterior
parietal lobe. It is defined by the inability for a person to process and perceive stimuli on one
side of the body or environment that is not due to a lack of sensation. In hemi-neglect, one loses
all sense of one side of one’s body or sometimes half (divided vertically) of everything spatial in
one’s experience. When asked to draw a clock, patients typically try to jam all of the numbers
into the right side of the image.
It is worth mentioning one important launching point for some related work in abnor-
mal psychology and psychopathology, namely, the discovery of “blindsight” (Weiskrantz 1986),
which is very frequently discussed in the philosophical literature regarding its implications for
consciousness and unconscious visual processing. Blindsight patients are blind in a well-defined
part of the visual field (due to specific cortical damage), but yet, when forced, can guess the loca-
tion or orientation of an object in the blind field with a much higher than expected degree of
accuracy (even up to 90% of the time). For example, patients can correctly guess the orientation
of lines in circles filled with vertical or horizontal shapes in their blind field. The same goes for
some shapes, such as an ‘X’ or ‘O.’ The patient is surprised by her success since she tends to think
that she is purely guessing without gaining any conscious visual information at all.
3 AutismThere has been increased interest in autism among philosophers and psychologists in recent
decades. Autism is a disorder characterized by impaired social interaction and communication,
as well as by restricted and repetitive behavior. It is a developmental disorder that affects a child’s
ability to acquire social skills and engage in social activities. Autism is sometimes thought of as
a more serious version of a spectrum of cases called Asperger’s syndrome. Researchers also tend
to agree that autistic humans have impaired empathizing skills and deception detection. Autistics
also exhibit a lack of imagination and an inability to pretend. There is typically a lack of normal
eye contact and gaze monitoring, along with a lack of normal social awareness and respon-
siveness, such as would normally occur when one is embarrassed or sympathetic to another’s
embarrassment (Hillier and Allinson 2002). So, for example, Baron-Cohen (1995) argues that
various mechanisms are deficient in the mind of autistic humans, such as major impairment of
what he calls the “Shared Attention Mechanism.” Thus, it seems clear that autistic humans have
particular difficulty with mind-reading (Baron-Cohen 1995; Frith and Hill 2003; Nichols and
Stich 2003). “Mind-reading” is a technical term used in the literature to refer to a set of abilities
to discern other people’s mental states from their behaviors and from contextual factors. It does
not refer to supernatural abilities or telepathy.
Some, however, have claimed that individuals with autism are “mind-blind” in more signifi-
cant ways and are virtually incapable of mind-reading and perhaps even meta-cognition entirely
(Carruthers 1996; Frith and Happé 1999). Given his parallel arguments regarding animals and
infants, Carruthers seems committed to the rather startling view that autistic children lack con-
scious states. He reasons that if autistic subjects lack self-awareness, then autistic individuals should
be “as blind to their own mental states as they are to the mental states of others” (Carruthers 1996:
262), and “they lack phenomenally conscious mental states” (Carruthers 2000: 202).
On the other hand, there seem to be numerous cases where autistic subjects engage in deep
meditation and prolonged focusing of attention on inner-feelings or images (Gennaro 2012: