The puzzle of the laws of appearance

The puzzle of cross‐modal shape experience

“…2222Pautz (2020) endorses similar claims. Pautz contends that it is a “law of appearance” that nothing can appear to have a particular intrinsic shape without appearing to have some perspectival “shape from here.” Two differences: First, Pautz's primary concern is perceptual experience, while mine is sensory imagery.…”

“…2727I am indebted to Chris Hill, Adam Pautz, Lilian Jin, David Bennett, Kevin Lande, Alex Byrne, Jake Quilty‐Dunn, Boyd Millar, David Chalmers, Bence Nanay, Chris Gauker, and Becko Copenhaver for valuable discussion and feedback. I also benefited from presenting portions of this material at Uriah Kriegel's Autumn of Consciousness talk series, Chris Hill and Adam Pautz's Fall 2020 Brown graduate seminar, the WUSTL Mind and Perception Group, the Antwerp/Salzburg Imagistic Cognition Group, and the MIT Work‐in‐Progress seminar. Finally, thanks to two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments.…”

The integration problem for naive realism

“…But for it to be the case, there would need to be a substantial constraint on the character of a perceptual appearance by the character of the item perceived. This is independently plausible (see Brewer 2011, 73; Pautz 2020) but requires a confinement of the range of experiences apt to present an item, ruling out the experiences in the relevant hypothetical abnormal circumstances from being fit to present anything in the subject's environment (and being rightly described as hallucinations). Otherwise, experiences with the same sort of qualitative character could present fundamentally different items (such as a persisting object with stable shape and a chaotic sequence of events), and supposing both would convey the same information about the nature of the perceived item, it follows that the perception of the one item (viz., the chaotic sequence) would completely misrepresent its nature.…”