Debate on Unconscious Perception

Abstract

Cases of two types ground much contemporary belief in unconscious perception. First, clinical cases in which perception appears preserved despite loss of consciousness. Second, paradigms in which a stimulus continues to influence responding despite apparently being suppressed from conscious awareness. Seeing is a single fundamental natural kind, of which conscious and unconscious seeing are sub-kinds. This fact provides difficulties for some of the major theories of perception. Unconscious perception be both unconscious and perception, but there is a potential conflict between these desiderata. Ned Block's opening statement describes his favourite case of unconscious seeing: continuous flash suppression. Ned Block suggests a wider significance: unconscious perception threatens naive realism. Block's view rests on two contentions: that conscious and unconscious seeing are of the same fundamental kind, and that unconscious seeing must be a matter of perceptual representation. A. Phillips says unconscious perception of low-level features associated with gender might explain the result.