Spatial Perceptions and Reality

Synthese, 1998

I wish to consider a seemingly attractive strategy for grappling with the mind-body problem. It is often thought that materialists are committed to spatially locating mental events, whereas dualists are barred from so doing. The thought naturally arises, then, that reasons for or against ...

Philosophy of Mind (Phil 4210), 2010

Consciousness and Cognition, 2008

Visual, somatosensory, and perspectival cues normally provide congruent information about where the self is experienced. Separating those cues by virtual reality techniques, recent studies found that self-location was systematically biased to where a visual–tactile event was seen. Here we developed a novel, repeatable and implicit measure of self-location to compare and extend previous protocols. We investigated illusory self-location and associated phenomenological aspects in a lying body position that facilitates clinically observed abnormal self-location (as on out-of-body experiences). The results confirm that the self is located to where touch is seen. This leads to either predictable lowering or elevation of self-localization, and the latter was accompanied by sensations of floating, as during out-of-body experiences. Using a novel measurement we show that the unitary and localized character of the self can be experimentally separated from both the origin of the visual perspective and the location of the seen body, which is compatible with clinical data.

Brain and Mind, 2000

The problem of how physical systems, such as brains, come to represent themselves as subjects in an objective world is addressed. I develop an account of the requirements for this ability that draws on and refines work in a philosophical tradition that runs from Kant through Peter Strawson to Gareth Evans. The basic idea is that the ability to represent oneself as a subject in a world whose existence is independent of oneself involves the ability to represent space, and in particular, to represent oneself as one object among others in an objective spatial realm. In parallel, I provide an account of how this ability, and the mechanisms that support it, are realized neurobiologically. This aspect of the article draws on, and refines, work done in the neurobiology and psychology of egocentric and allocentric spatial representation.

Current Biology, 2015

Working paper for the Institute for Psychoanalytic Studies in Architecture, 2024

Anca Carrington, in The Unconscious as Space: From Freud to Lacan, and Beyond, makes the argument that the unknowable unconscious must involve a fourth dimension, an element beyond the three dimensions of conscious perception. She argues that Jacques Lacan’s explorations of mathematics and topological geometry as structures of the unconscious that reveal the presence of the Real, what is beyond knowledge, lead to the necessity of a fourth dimension. As Freud said, the unknown part of the mind is the same as the unknown part of the universe. It stands to reason that the reality beyond what we perceive in the universe corresponds to the reality of the human mind beyond understanding in rational and conscious thought. It is generally accepted by physicists that there is such a reality; for example, Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose, in The Nature of Space and Time, said that what we experience as physical reality may be some kind of boundary of a higher-dimensional structure.

Dialogue, 2007

Da vid Morris's The Sense of Space is a subtle, careful, and ambitious examination of spatial experience: that is, of how we perceive the spatial environment around us-its various depths, our orientation within it, the voluminousness of the objects that fill it, and so on. The argument of the book has several strands, but its key thesis is as follows. "The tradition" has it, in one way or another, that our experience of space is generated by using sensory information to construct and constantly update an inner mental model of our environment and our body's position within it. By contrast, Morris argues that we perceive space by moving our bodies in the world, and that the content of spatial perception consists in the constraints and limits on movement imposed jointly by our bodies and the environment in which they are located.

2011

Abstract. In this paper we present an argument for a psychoanalytic understanding of space. While Freud struggled to move away from his own early prepsychoanalytic attempts at mapping the psyche through cerebral localization, he nevertheless found himself compelled to use spatial language and topographical models throughout his career. In his ambivalence, Freud emphasized that the space of the psyche should be read as no more than metaphorical.

Neuron, 2011

Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2003

Lehar provides useful insights into spatially extended phenomenology that may have major consequences for neuroscience. However, Lehar’s biological naturalism leads to counterintuitive conclusions and he does not give an accurate account of preceding and competing work. This commentary compares Lehar’s analysis with that of Velmans, which address similar issues but draws opposite conclusions. Lehar argues that the phenomenal world is in the brain, and concludes that the physical skull is beyond the phenomenal world. Velmans argues that the brain is in the phenomenal world and concludes that the physical skull is where it seems to be.