Wednesday, May 23, 2012

"The phenomenology of vision seems to present a world that is carved into objects at its joints. One does not simply perceive a distribution of mass and color. One perceives objects on top of other objects, each of which may be articulated into objectual parts. Depending on one’s metaphysical views, one may think that the world does not respect this articulation into objects. One might think that macroscopic objects do not exist in the world’s basic ontology, or one might give their existence some highly deflationary treatment on which their individuation is a matter of convention or conceptual scheme, or on which there is no deep fact of the matter about when there is an object or when there is not. But even if one’s metaphysics is deflationary about objects, one’s phenomenology is not. So perhaps, for our visual experiences to be perfectly veridical, there would have to be real, first-class, nonrelative objects in the world. One might say that in Eden, there are perfect objects." – The Character of Consciousness by David Chalmers

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