Seeing Dark Things

Abstract

If a spinning disk casts a round shadow does the shadow also spin? When the cave guide turns out the light so that you can experience the total blackness, are you seeing in the dark? Or are you merely failing to see anything (just like your blind companion)? Seeing Dark Things uses visual riddles to explore our ability to see shadows, silhouettes, black ants, plus some things that are only metaphorically “dark” such as holes. These dark things are anomalies for the causal theory of perception: anything we see must be a cause of what we see. Roy Sorensen defends the causal theory of perception by treating absences as causes. With the help of fifty-nine figures, Sorensen proceeds bottom up from observation rather than top down from theory. Shadows are metaphysical amphibians with one foot on terra firma of common sense and the other in the murky waters of nonbeing. Seeing Dark Things portrays the causal theory of perception's confrontation with the shadows as a triumph against alien attack. Lessons from the parried threat deepen a theory that resonates strongly with common sense and science. Thus the book is an unorthodox defense of an orthodox theory.

Perception and imagination: amodal perception as mental imagery

“…6 There are some exceptions. Roy Sorensen, for example, would question this necessary condition (Sorensen 1999(Sorensen , 2007, but would accept something similar that suffices for our purposes. He writes: ''To see an object, the object must be causally responsible for the visual information'' (Sorensen 1999, p. 45).…”

Special issue: “Darkness matters”

“…Shadows "are offspring of luminosity, kindred alter egos to sensuous things, stalking silhouettes but loyal companions of material objects" (Macauley, 2009, p. 54). Alternatively, Sorensen (2008) views shadows as holes in light.…”

What Do We See When We See Total Darkness?

“… Abstract Seeing total darkness is a peculiar perceptual state: in it, the subject is visually aware of something while seeming to fail to be aware of anything. Recent treatments of the topic (Sorensen , Soteriou ) leave this particular puzzle unsolved. Here, I attempt a solution.…”

“…Consider the ganzfeld effect, in which the subject's perceptual experience is of a structureless visual field. As Sorensen (: 244) explains, pilots experience this when flying in a homogenously blue sky, but the effect may be replicated in a laboratory by sticking the two halves of a ping‐pong ball in each of a subject's eyes and having her sit under the constant illumination of a light bulb. While the pilot might report that ‘she sees the blue sky’ because she knows what it is that she sees, the experimental subject will plausibly report, if the light is blue, that ‘she sees blueness’, because all she sees is a homogeneous blue visual field (Figure ).…”