Illusion, delusion, and neural sense data: comments on Adam Pautz’s Perception

ABSTRACT

This commentary on Adam Pautz's excellent book, Perception, explores the consequences of “spatial illusionism,” the view that the spatial properties presented in experience aren't instantiated in the extra-mental world. First, I consider whether spatial illusionism entails that our ordinary beliefs about the physical world are mostly false. I then argue that spatial illusionism threatens to undermine two arguments Pautz's defends in Perception: his argument that sense data theory is incompatible with physicalism, and his central argument against the internal physical state view of perception.

KEYWORDS:

• Color
• spatial realism
• sense data
• physicalism
• consciousness

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Arguments along these lines can be found in Russell (1912), Albert (1996), Chalmers (2019, 2021a, 2021b), and Cutter (2021).

2 A paradigm case of a paradigm-case argument is Flew’s (1955) argument for compatibilism, which is widely thought to have been refuted by van Inwagen (1983).

3 This roughly parallels Chalmers’ (2022, ch. 24) and Carroll’s (2016, 92) argument that it is epistemically unstable to believe that you are a Boltzmann brain, at least if you hold this belief on the basis of scientific theories that imply that most observers are Boltzmann brains.