In Real Hallucinations, Matthew Ratcliffe offers a philosophical examination of the structure of human experience, its vulnerability to disruption, and how it is shaped by relations with other people. He focuses on the seemingly simple question of how we manage to distinguish among our experiences of perceiving, remembering, imagining, and thinking. To answer this question, he first develops a detailed analysis of auditory verbal hallucinations (usually defined as hearing a voice in the absence of a speaker) and thought insertion (somehow (...) experiencing one's own thoughts as someone else's). He shows how thought insertion and many of those experiences labeled as "hallucinations" consist of disturbances in a person's senseof being in one type of intentional state rather than another. Ratcliffe goes on to argue that such experiences occur against a backdrop of less pronounced but wider-ranging alterations in the structure of intentionality. In so doing, he considers forms of experience associated with trauma, schizophrenia, and profound grief. The overall position arrived at is that experience has an essentially temporal structure, involving patterns of anticipation and fulfillment that are specific to types of intentional states and serve to distinguish them phenomenologically. Disturbances of this structure can lead to various kinds of anomalous experience. Importantly, anticipation-fulfillment patterns are sustained, regulated, and disrupted by interpersonal experience and interaction. It follows that the integrity of human experience, including the most basic sense of self, is inseparable from how we relate to other people and to the social world as a whole. (shrink)

When one visually hallucinates, the object of one’s hallucination is not before one’s eyes. On the standard view, that is because the object of hallucination does not exist, and so is not anywhere. Many different defenses of the standard view are on offer; each have problems. This paper defends the view that there is always an object of hallucination—a physical object, sometimes with spatiotemporally scattered parts.

Tradition has it that, although we experience darkness, we can neither hear nor hallucinate silence. At most, we hear that it is silent, in virtue of lacking auditory experience. This cognitive view is at odds with our ordinary thought and talk. Yet it is not easy to vouchsafe the perception of silence: Sorensen‘s recent account entails the implausible claim that the permanently and profoundly deaf are perpetually hallucinating silence. To better defend the view that we can genuinely hear and hallucinate (...) silence, we must reject the austere picture of conscious experience which underpins the cognitive theory. According to that picture, conscious experience is a simple relation between subjects and objects. In the absence of an object, there is no relation, and so no experience. By enriching this picture, room can be found for the experience of silence. I explore this idea in two phases. First, I defend the thought that we can hear and hallucinate certain forms of silence, such as pauses, in virtue of experiencing contrastive sounds. Second, I draw on Moore‘s analysis of sensation to suggest that simply experiencing silence is a special form of objectless consciousness. I offer two ways of fleshing out this idea. According to the first, auditory experience possesses a temporal field within which the absence of sounds can be perceived. According to the second, purely Moorean account, it is our capacity to listen in the absence of sounds that underlies the phenomenon of experiencing silence. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine the so-called disjunctive views on hallucinations. I argue that neither of the options open to the disjunctivist is capable of accommodating basic phenomenological facts about hallucinatory experiences and the explanatory demands behind the classical argument from hallucination. A positive characterization of the hallucinatory case is not attractive to a disjunctivist once she is disposed to accept certain commonalities with veridical experiences. Negative disjunctivism glosses the hallucinatory disjunct in terms of indiscriminability. I will argue that (...) this move either renounces to characterize phenomenally the hallucinatory experience or does not take seriously questions about why indiscriminability is possible in the phenomenal realm. (shrink)

Although it has been something of a fetish for philosophers to distinguish between hallucination and illusion, the enduring problems for philosophy of perception that both phenomena present are not essentially different. Hallucination, in its pure philosophical form, is just another example of the philosopher’s penchant for considering extreme and extremely idealized cases in order to understand the ordinary. The problem that has driven much philosophical thinking about perception is the problem of how to reconcile our evident direct perceptual (...) contact with objects and properties with the equally evident fact that there is no phenomenological signal separating error and truth. “The obscure object of hallucination” offers a subtle and plausible solution to this problem and one that solves the problem generally, not just in the special case of hallucination. Johnston’s objective is to offer a theory of perception that meets two constraints: (1) that it provide an explanation of the possibility of delusive and veridical sensings that are indistinguishable from the first-person perspective and (2) that it count as form of direct realism where this is taken to involve acquaintance with the objects of perception. Johnston uses the first constraint to rule out disjunctivism. The second constraint is used to rule out conjunctivism, which as Johnston uses the term, includes most of the widely adopted philosophical theories of perception. Johnston also develops his own sophisticated and interesting theory of perception. In what follows, I will discuss the relation of Johnston’s theory to conjunctivism, examine one of his anti-conjunctivist arguments and finally compare Johnston’s theory with some other versions of direct realism. These topics constitute a very incomplete selection of the important issues discussed in this rich and interesting paper. I will also not disagree, in any fundamental way, with any of the central theses of Johnston’s discussion.. (shrink)

How is it that many schizophrenics identify certain instances of verbal imagery as hallucinatory? Most investigators have assumed that alterations in sensory features of imagery explain this. This approach, however, has not yielded a definitive picture of the nature of verbal hallucinations. An alternative perspective suggests itself if one allows the possibility that the nonself quality of hallucinations is inferred on the basis of the experience of unintendedness that accompanies imagery production. Information-processing models of “intentional” cognitive processes call for abstract (...) planning representations that are linked to goals and beliefs. Unintended actions - and imagery - can reflect planning disruptions whereby cognitive products do not cohere with concurrent goals. A model of schizophrenic speech disorganization is presented that postulates a disturbance of discourse planning. Insofar as verbal imagery can be viewed as inwardly directed speech, a consequence of such planning disturbances could be the production of unintended imagery. This link between the outward disorganization of schizophrenic speech and unintended verbal imagery is statistically supported by comparing the speech behavior of hallucinating and nonhallucinating schizophrenics. Studies of “borderline” hallucinations during normal, “goal-less” relaxation and drowsiness suggest that experiential unintendedness leads to a nonpathological variant of hallucinatory otherness that is correctable upon emerging from such passive cognitive states. This contrasts with the schizophrenic case, where nonconcordance with cognitive goals reinforces the unintendedness of verbal images and sustains the conviction of an external source. This model compares favorably with earlier models of verbal hallucinations and provides further evidence for a language production disorder in many schizophrenics.Short Abstract: How is it that many schizophrenics identify certain instances of verbal imagery as hallucinatory? This paper proposes that the critical feature identifying hallucinations is the experience of unintendedness. This experience is nonpathological during passive conscious states but pathological if occurring during goal-directed cognitive processing. A model of schizophrenic speech disorganization is presented that postulates a disturbance of discourse planning that specifies communicative intentions. These alterations could generate unintended verbal imagery as well. Statistical data are offered to support the model, and relevant empirical studies are reviewed. (shrink)

Hallucination is a big deal in contemporary philosophy of perception. The main reason for this is that the way hallucination is treated marks an important stance in one of the most hotly contested debates in this subdiscipline: the debate between 'relationalists' and 'representationalists'. I argue that if we take hallucinations to be a form of mental imagery, then we have a very straightforward way of arguing against disjunctivism: if hallucination is a form of mental imagery and if (...) mental imagery and perception have some substantive common denominator, then a fortiori, perception and hallucination will also have a substantive common denominator. (shrink)

When you hallucinate an object, you are not in the normal sort of concurrent causal sensory interaction with that object. It's standardly further inferred that the hallucinated object does not actually exist. But the lack of normal concurrent causal sensory interaction does not imply that there does not exist an object that is hallucinated. It might be a past‐perceived object. In this paper, I argue that this claim holds for at least some interesting cases of hallucination. Hallucinations generated by (...) misleading cues (e.g. ‘seeing’ Kanizsa triangles), hallucinations of Charles Bonnet Syndrome patients, and dreams are experiences of past‐perceived objects. (shrink)

Hallucinations are among the most impressive of psychopathological symptoms and may appear in all the sensory modalities. They are the most common symptom in schizophrenia, where patients usually experience auditory hallucinations, often hearing voices which speak to them in direct communication or in the form of running commentary. One of the major research strategies in psychopathology during the last years has become the neuropsychological reconstruction of psychopathological symptoms in order to detect basic “core” deficits of the different symptoms. Given the (...) successful identification of such core deficits, they may then serve as heuristic tools to identify candidate brain regions of putative pathology. These brain sites in turn can be explored with respect to their impact for the pathogenesis of schizophrenia. Among these neuropsychological approaches, one of the most prominent concepts reconstructing schizophrenic symptomatology is the concept of a self-monitoring disturbance, based on the conceptual and empirical work of the group around Christopher Frith. Although this conceptualization is evidence-based and appears plausible, it does not fully explain the high degree of certainty or confidence with which schizophrenic patients usually judge the reality status of their hallucinations and the frequency with which the latter might occur. The concept of self-monitoring disturbance thus provides a necessary but not a sufficient theoretical account of how hallucinations are generated. (shrink)

Perceptual experiences have been construed either as representational mental states—Representationalism—or as direct mental relations to the external world—Disjunctivism. Both conceptions are critical reactions to the so-called ‘Argument from Hallucination’, according to which perceptions cannot be about the external world, since they are subjectively indiscriminable from other, hallucinatory experiences, which are about sense-data ormind-dependent entities. Representationalism agrees that perceptions and hallucinations share their most specific mental kind, but accounts for hallucinations as misrepresentations of the external world. According to Disjunctivism, the (...) phenomenal character of perceptions is exhausted by worldly objects and features, and thus must be different from the phenomenal character of hallucinations. Disjunctivism claims that subjective indiscriminability is not the result of a common experiential ground, but is because of our inability to discriminate, from the inside, hallucinations from perceptions. At first sight, Representationalism is more congenial to the way cognitive science deals with perception. However, empirically oriented revisions of Disjunctivism could be developed and tested by giving a metacognitive account of hallucinations. Two versions of this account can be formulated, depending on whether metacognition is understood as explicit metarepresentation or as implicit monitoring of first-order informational states. The first version faces serious objections, but the second is more promising, as it embodies a more realistic view of perceptual phenomenology as having both sensory and affective aspects. Affectbased phenomenology is constituted by various metacognitive feelings, such as the feeling of being perceptually confronted with the world itself, rather than with pictures or mere representations. (shrink)

A natural starting point for theories of perceptual states is ordinary perception, in which a subject is successfully related to her mind-independent surroundings. Correspondingly, the simplest theory of perceptual states models all such states on perception. Typically, this simple, common-factor relational view of perceptual states has received a perfunctory dismissal on the grounds that hallucinations are nonperceptual. But I argue that the nonperceptual view of hallucinations has been accepted too quickly. I consider three observations thought to support the view, and (...) argue that all three are dealt with equally well by an alternative view, illusionism, on which hallucinations do involve perception. Since this is so, adopting a common-factor relational view of all perceptual states remains a tenable option. (shrink)

What are hallucinations? A common view in the philosophical literature is that hallucinations are degenerate kinds of perceptual experience. I argue instead that hallucinations are degenerate kinds of sensory imagination. As well as providing a good account of many actual cases of hallucination, the view that hallucination is a kind of imagination represents a promising account of hallucination from the perspective of a disjunctivist theory of perception like naïve realism. This is because it provides a way of (...) giving a positive characterisation of hallucination—rather than characterising hallucinations in negative, relational, terms as mental events that are subjectively indistinguishable from veridical perceptual experiences. (shrink)

Case Reports Int J Psychoanal -/- . 1989:70 ( Pt 3):461-79. Negative hallucinations, other irretrievable experiences and two functions of consciousness L W Brakel -/- PMID: 2793325 -/- Abstract -/- After providing a psychodynamic exploration of negative hallucinations in four clinical cases, the focus of this paper was broadened in an attempt to understand the mechanism of negative hallucination. To this end, after defining the term 'irretrievable experiences', two other examples--preconscious perceptions and infantile amnesia, both analogues to negative (...) class='Hi'>hallucination--were examined. A discussion followed concerning two types of 'consciousness': 'consciousness' as a synonym for 'awareness' and 'consciousness' as a distinct psychological state. Next, the role of different functions of each sort of consciousness in the processes of conferring, fixing and retrieving mental contents within particular categories of experience was taken up. Finally, integrating developmental aspects of these same functions, explanations were offered regarding the mechanisms involved in preconscious perception, infantile amnesia and negative hallucinations. -/- PubMed. (shrink)

No particular dagger was the object of Macbeth’s hallucination of a dagger. In contrast, when he hallucinated his former comrade Banquo, Banquo himself was the object of the hallucination. Although philosophers have had much to say about the nature and philosophical import of hallucinations (e.g. Macpherson and Platchias, Hallucination, 2013) and object-involving attitudes (e.g. Jeshion, New essays on singular thought, 2010), their intersection has largely been neglected. Yet, object-involving hallucinations raise interesting questions about memory, perception, and the (...) ways in which we have knowledge of the world around us. In this paper, I offer an account of object-involving hallucinations. Specifically, I argue that they are an unusual species of perceptual remembering. (shrink)

According to the epistemic theory of hallucination, the fundamental psychological nature of a hallucinatory experience is constituted by its being 'introspectively indiscriminable', in some sense, from a veridical experience of a corresponding type. How is the notion of introspective indiscriminability to which the epistemic theory appeals best construed? Following M. G. F. Martin, the standard assumption is that the notion should be construed in terms of negative epistemics: in particular, it is assumed that the notion should be explained in (...) terms of the impossibility that a hallucinator might possess a certain type of knowledge on a certain basis. I argue that the standard assumption is mistaken. I argue that the relevant notion of introspective indiscriminability is better construed in terms of positive epistemics: in particular, I argue that the notion is better explained by reference to the fact that it would be rational for a hallucinator positively to make a certain type of judgement, were that judgement made on a certain basis. (shrink)

The paper proposes a minimal definition of dreaming in terms of immersive spatiotemporal hallucination (ISTH) occurring in sleep or during sleep–wake transitions and under the assumption of reportability. I take these conditions to be both necessary and sufficient for dreaming to arise. While empirical research results may, in the future, allow for an extension of the concept of dreaming beyond sleep and possibly even independently of reportability, ISTH is part of any possible extension of this definition and thus is (...) a constitutive condition of dreaming. I also argue that the proposed ISTH model of dreaming, in conjunction with considerations on the epistemic relationship between dreaming and dream reports, raises important questions about the extent to which dreams typically involve a detailed body representation—an assumption that plays an important role in philosophical work on dreaming. As a commonly accepted definition of dreaming is lacking in current dream research, the ISTH model, which integrates conceptual analysis and epistemological considerations with results from empirical research, is an important contribution to this field. By linking dreaming to felt presence, full-body illusions, and autoscopic phenomena such as out-of-body experiences in wakefulness and in the hypnagogic state, the ISTH model of dreaming also helps integrate dream research, both theoretically and experimentally, with the study of other altered states of consciousness involving hallucinations. It makes straightforward and investigable predictions by claiming that all of these experiences have amodal spatiotemporal hallucinations as their common denominator. Finally, it is theoretically relevant for the philosophical discussion on minimal phenomenal selfhood. (shrink)

This paper examines the standard conceptualizations of the notion of hallucination in light of various non-ordinary phenomenological patterns associated with altered states of consciousness induced by psychoactive agents. It is argued that in general, the conceptualizations encountered in the literature do not do justice to the richness and complexity that the psychological phenomenology actually exhibits. A close inspection of this phenomenology reveals some pertinent distinctions which are usually not made in the scientific literature. On the one hand, the discussion (...) is based on first-hand experiences and, on the other hand, it is grounded in empirical and theoretical cognitive investigations of the phenomenology of human consciousness. Theoretically, the discussion is grounded in an approach highlighting the centrality of experience, meaning and action in cognition. (shrink)

Scientific and philosophical perspectives on hallucination: essays that draw on empirical evidence from psychology, neuroscience, and cutting-edge philosophical theory.

What we perceive is the product of an intrinsic process and not part of external physical reality. This notion is consistent with the philosophical position of transcendental idealism but also agrees with physiological findings on the thalamocortical system. -Frequency rhythms of discharge activity from thalamic and cortical neurons are facilitated by cholinergic arousal and resonate in thalamocortical networks, thereby transiently forming assemblies of coherent oscillations under constraints of sensory input and prefrontal attentional mechanisms. Perception and conscious experience may be based (...) on such assemblies and sensory input to thalamic nuclei plays merely a constraining role in their formation. In schizophrenia, the ability of sensory input to modulate self-organisation of thalamocortical activity may be generally reduced. If during arousal thalamocortical self-organisation is underconstrained by sensory input, then attentional mechanisms alone may determine the content of perception and hallucinations may arise. (shrink)

What we perceive is the product of an intrinsic process and not part of external physical reality. This notion is consistent with the philosophical position of transcendental idealism but also agrees with physiological findings on the thalamocortical system. -Frequency rhythms of discharge activity from thalamic and cortical neurons are facilitated by cholinergic arousal and resonate in thalamocortical networks, thereby transiently forming assemblies of coherent oscillations under constraints of sensory input and prefrontal attentional mechanisms. Perception and conscious experience may be based (...) on such assemblies and sensory input to thalamic nuclei plays merely a constraining role in their formation. In schizophrenia, the ability of sensory input to modulate self-organisation of thalamocortical activity may be generally reduced. If during arousal thalamocortical self-organisation is underconstrained by sensory input, then attentional mechanisms alone may determine the content of perception and hallucinations may arise. (shrink)

Based on recent insight into the thalamocortical system and its role in perception and conscious experience, a unified pathophysiological framework for hallucinations in neurological and psychiatric conditions is proposed, which integrates previously unrelated neurobiological and psychological findings. Gamma-frequency rhythms of discharge activity from thalamic and cortical neurons are facilitated by cholinergic arousal and resonate in networks of thalamocortical circuits, thereby transiently forming assemblies of coherent gamma oscillations under constraints of afferent sensory input and prefrontal attentional mechanisms. If perception is based (...) on synchronisation of intrinsic gamma activity in the thalamocortical system, then sensory input to specific thalamic nuclei may merely play a constraining role. Hallucinations can be regarded as underconstrained perceptions that arise when the impact of sensory input on activation of thalamocortical circuits and synchronisation of thalamocortical gamma activity is reduced. In conditions that are accompanied by hallucinations, factors such as cortical hyperexcitability, cortical attentional mechanisms, hyperarousal, increased noise in specific thalamic nuclei, and random sensory input to specific thalamic nuclei may, to a varying degree, contribute to underconstrained activation of thalamocortical circuits. The reticular thalamic nucleus plays an important role in suppressing random activity of relay cells in specific thalamic nuclei, and its dysfunction may be implicated in the biological vulnerability to hallucinations in schizophrenia. Combined with general activation during cholinergic arousal, this leads to excessive disinhibition in specific thalamic nuclei, which may allow cortical attentional mechanisms to recruit thalamic relay cells into resonant assemblies of gamma oscillations, regardless of their actual sensory input, thereby producing an underconstrained perceptual experience. Key Words: Charles Bonnet syndrome; gamma oscillations; hallucinations; late paraphrenia; Lewy body dementia; perception; schizophrenia; thalamocortical system. (shrink)

Veridically perceiving puts us in a better epistemic position than, say, hallucinating does, at least in that veridical perception affords knowledge of our environment in a way that hallucination does not. But is there any _further_ epistemic advantage? Some authors have recently argued that veridical perception provides a superior epistemic benefit over hallucination not just concerning knowledge, but concerning justification as well. This contrasts with a traditional view according to which experience provides justification irrespective of whether it’s veridical (...) or hallucinatory. I think both views are mistaken. Although this traditional view should be rejected in favor of one on which _some_ hallucinations are epistemically worse than veridical perceptions (and some are not), I don’t believe there is good reason to think that the mere fact of hallucination—or factivity more generally—has any consequences for justification. Susanna Schellenberg has endorsed both the traditional and the factive views (for different elements or kinds of perceptual justification), and I critique her views in detail, though I also draw out more general epistemological lessons about factivity and evidence. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the indirect realists’ recourse to mental representations does not allow them to account for the possibility of hallucination, nor for the presentational character of visual experience. To account for the presentational character, I suggest a kind of intentionalism that is based on the interdependency between the perceived object and the embodied perceiver. This approach provides a positive account to the effect that genuine perception and hallucination are different kinds of states. Finally, I (...) offer a tentative suggestion as to how a hallucinatory experience may still be mistaken for a genuine perceptual experience. (shrink)

Chris Frith has argued that a loss of the sense of agency is central to schizophrenia. This suggests a connection between hallucinations and delusions on the one hand, and the misidentification of the subject’s imaginings as perceptions and beliefs on the other. In particular, understanding the mechanisms that underlie imagination may help us to explain the puzzling phenomena of thought insertion and withdrawal. Frith sometimes states his argument in terms of a loss of metarepresentational capacity in schizophrenia. I argue that (...) this formulation is unhelpful. (shrink)

Waking hallucinations suggest mechanisms of dream initiation and maintenance. Visual association cortex activation, yielding poorly attended-to, visually ambiguous dream environments, suggests conditions favoring hallucinosis. Attentional and visual systems, coactivated during sleep, may generate imagery that is inserted into virtual environments. Internally consistent dreaming may evolve from successive, contextually evoked images. Fluctuating arousal and context-evoked imagery may help explain dream features.

Synesthesia literally means a “union of the senses” whereby two or more of the five senses that are normally experienced separately are involuntarily and automatically joined together in experience. For example, some synesthetes experience a color when they hear a sound, although many instances of synesthesia also occur entirely within the visual sense. In this paper, I first mainly engage critically with Sollberger’s view that there is reason to think that at least some synesthetic experiences can be viewed as truly (...) veridical perceptions, and not as illusions or hallucinations. Among other things, I explore the possibility that many forms of synesthesia can be understood as experiencing what I will call “second-order secondary properties,” that is, experiences of properties of objects induced by the secondary qualities of those objects. In doing so, I shed some light on why synesthesia is typically one-directional and its relation to some psychopathologies such as autism. (shrink)

This chapter introduces and motivates the Null View about standard causally matching hallucinations. The Null View holds that these hallucinations fail to present any objects or sensible qualities, despite being dead ringers for perceptions of ordinary objects and their qualities. Motivation for the Null View comes from a neglected observation about perception-based thought, namely that perception can permit perception-based thought about a sensible quality even while misleading a subject about that quality. The chapter's other contribution is defensive. Most reject the (...) Null View on phenomenological or epistemic grounds. These objections to the Null View are sharpened and then undermined. (shrink)

REM sleep behaviour disorder is a REM sleep-related parasomnia which may be considered a “dissociated state of wakefulness and sleep”, given that conflicting elements of REM sleep and of wakefulness coexist during the episodes, leading to motor and behavioural manifestations reminiscent of an enacted dream. RBD has been reported in association with α-synucleinopathies: around a third of patients with Parkinson’s disease have full-blown RBD.Recent data indicate that PD patients with RBD are more prone to hallucinations than PD patients without this (...) parasomnia. However it is still not clear why RBD in PD is associated with an increased prevalence of VHs.Data exist which suggest that visual hallucinations in PD may be the result of untimely intrusions of REM visual imagery into wakefulness. RBD, which is characterised by a REM sleep dissociation pattern, might be a condition that particularly favours such intrusions. However, other hypotheses may be advanced. In fact, deficits in attentional, executive, visuoperceptual and visuospatial abilities have been documented in RBD and found to occur far more frequently in PD with RBD than in PD without RBD. Neuropsychological deficits involving visual perception and attentional processes are thought to play an important role in the pathophysiology of VHs. On this basis, RBD in PD could be viewed as a contributory risk factor for VHs. (shrink)

Tradition has it that, although we experience darkness, we can neither hear nor hallucinate silence. At most, we hear that it is silent, in virtue of lacking auditory experience. This cognitive view is at odds with our ordinary thought and talk. Yet it is not easy to vouchsafe the perception of silence: Sorensen‘s recent account entails the implausible claim that the permanently and profoundly deaf are perpetually hallucinating silence. To better defend the view that we can genuinely hear and hallucinate (...) silence, we must reject the austere picture of conscious experience which underpins the cognitive theory. According to that picture, conscious experience is a simple relation between subjects and objects. In the absence of an object, there is no relation, and so no experience. By enriching this picture, room can be found for the experience of silence. I explore this idea in two phases. First, I defend the thought that we can hear and hallucinate certain forms of silence, such as pauses, in virtue of experiencing contrastive sounds. Second, I draw on Moore‘s analysis of sensation to suggest that simply experiencing silence is a special form of objectless consciousness. I offer two ways of fleshing out this idea. According to the first, auditory experience possesses a temporal field within which the absence of sounds can be perceived. According to the second, purely Moorean account, it is our capacity to listen in the absence of sounds that underlies the phenomenon of experiencing silence. (shrink)

Hallucination: the perception of an impossible image. That which can never appear suddenly does so anyways - a private world that appears only to the eye of the one imagining it... until now. Ted Serios, psychic photographer, claimed he could project images directly from his mind onto photographic film. Under the sign of the psychic photograph, “Hallucinating Ted Serios” is a theorization of the dominant forms of uncertainty that persist in postmodern evaluations of representation, interpretation and identity. The central (...) thesis of this paper is that the imaginary and the real have collapsed into the spectral hallucination of one another, rendering impossible the rhetorical separation of hallucination from image. With the collapse of the boundary between the fictive and the real, the world of representation becomes intelligible only as an imaginary phenomenon; with the collapse between the object and the observer, interpretation is rendered deceptively magical; and, with the collapse between the self and its anonymous double, identity itself is relegated to a state of impossibility. Consequently, under the persisting signs of the imaginary, the magical and the impossible, “Hallucinating Ted Serios” asserts that in our contemporary world there no longer exists the possibility of failed performativity – psychic, imaginary or otherwise. (shrink)

This commentary takes a closer look at how “constructive models of subjective perception,” referred to by Collerton et al. (sect. 2), might contribute to the Perception and Attention Deficit (PAD) model. It focuses on the neuronal mechanisms that could mediate hallucinations, or false inference – in particular, the role of cholinergic systems in encoding uncertainty in the context of hierarchical Bayesian models of perceptual inference (Friston 2002b; Yu & Dayan 2002).

In a recent paper, Gow raised a new and interesting problem for externalist representationalism, the conclusion of which is that its proponents are unable to provide an acceptable account of the phenomenal character of colour hallucination. In contrast to Gow, we do not believe that the problem is particularly severe – indeed, that there is any problem at all. Thus our aim is to defend externalist representationalism against the problem raised by Gow. To this end, we will first reconstruct (...) her reasoning, and then show that it poses no real challenge to externalist representationalism. (shrink)

Derrida's treatment of Chinese script as essentially non-phonetic in Of Grammatology has been a recurrent leitmotif among several sinologists and scholars of Chinese origin, particularly in Rey Chow's famous 2001 essay ‘How Inscrutable Chinese Led to Globalized Theory’. Despite forceful refutations of this misconception, the accusation of a fantasizing ‘ethnocentrism thinking itself as anti-ethnocentrism’ has endured and could still be found in a recent 2015 article suggestively titled ‘A Sort of European Hallucination: On Derrida's “Chinese Prejudice”’. This essay will (...) probe into the recurrent accusation of a Derridean hallucination of the other as the other's own hallucination in order to analyse the sustained misreading of Derrida's phrase ‘outside of all logocentrism’ used about the Chinese ideogram. (shrink)

Auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs) are a highly complex and rich phenomena, and this has a number of important clinical, theoretical and methodological implications. However, until recently, this fact has not always been incorporated into the experimental designs and theoretical paradigms used by researchers within the cognitive sciences. In this paper, we will briefly outline two recent examples of phenomenologically informed approaches to the study of AVHs taken from a cognitive science perspective. In the first example, based on Larøi and Woodward (...) (Harv Rev Psychiatry 15:109–117, 2007 ), it is argued that reality monitoring studies examining the cognitive underpinnings of hallucinations have not reflected the phenomenological complexity of AVHs in their experimental designs and theoretical framework. The second example, based on Jones (Schizophr Bull, in press, 2010 ), involves a critical examination of the phenomenology of AVHs in the context of two other prominent cognitive models: inner speech and intrusions from memory. It will be shown that, for both examples, the integration of a phenomenological analysis provides important improvements both on a methodological, theoretical and clinical level. This will be followed by insights and critiques from philosophy and clinical psychiatry—both of which offer a phenomenological alternative to the empiricist–rationalist conceptualisation of AVHs inherent to the cognitive sciences approach. Finally, the paper will conclude with ideas as to how the cognitive sciences may integrate these latter perspectives into their methodological and theoretical programmes. (shrink)

Like dreaming, hallucination has been a formative trope for modern philosophy. The vivid, often tragic, breakdown in the mind’s apparent capacity to disclose reality has long served to support a paradoxical philosophical picture of sensory experience. This picture, which of late has shaped the paradigmatic empirical understanding the senses, displays sensory acts as already complete without the external world; complete in that the direct objects even of veridical sensory acts do not transcend what we could anyway hallucinate. Hallucination (...) is thus the mother of Representationalism, which insists that it is mental intermediaries that make other.. (shrink)

The problem of Nishida Kitaro's historical philosophy and an introduction to the psychedelic paradigm -- The Zen nexus between Nishida Kitaro and modern psychedelic experience -- Experience and the self: the early phase of Nishida's thought (1911-1931) -- Nishida Kitaro's historical world (1931-1945) -- A psychedelic paradigm of history -- Hallucinating the end of history: reflections on myth, the eschaton and the problem of overcoming modernity.

Collerton et al. propose that one and the same mechanism (PAD) underlies recurrent complex visual hallucinations (RCVH) in various disorders, including schizophrenia, dementia, and eye disease. The present commentary offers an alternative account of RCVH and other recurrent complex hallucinations specific to schizophrenia and related disorders only. The proposed account is consistent with the bias of schizophrenic RCVH contents toward animate, socially active entities.

Recently the attempt has been made to demonstrate Heidegger's relevance to the concerns of analytic philosophers. A focus for this effort has been the criticism in his early work of Cartesian ontology. While a number of important works have mapped out this area of Heidegger's thought, a crucial task has not been carried out, namely that of assessing how Heidegger can accommodate those phenomena which motivate the Cartesian to adopt his highly counter-intuitive ontology. As long as we fail to examine (...) how Heidegger's early ontology copes with the possibilities of error and of hallucination, the suspicion will remain that Heidegger is simply insensitive to those phenomena on which the Cartesian focuses. Neither Heidegger nor the Cartesian have been done any favours by commentators showing little inclination to bring the opponents into closer combat. This paper attempts to correct that omission. (shrink)

Relationalism maintains that mind-independent objects are essential constituents of veridical perceptual experiences. According to the argument from hallucination, relationalism is undermined by perfect hallucinations, experiences that are introspectively indistinguishable from veridical perceptual experiences but lack an object. Recently, a new wave of relationalists have responded by questioning whether perfect hallucinations are possible: what seem to be perfect hallucinations may really be something else, such as illusions, veridical experiences of non-obvious objects, or experiences that are not genuinely possible. This paper (...) argues that however well new wave relationalism may handle brains in vats, drug users “seeing” pink elephants, and other extraordinary hallucinations, it struggles to accommodate mundane hallucinations, such as “hearing” your child cry out from the room down the hall when she is actually sound asleep or “feeling” vibrations on your thigh even when your phone isn't in your pocket. Mundane hallucinations are best explained as byproducts of noise in the perceptual system, and noise-induced hallucinations are resistant to the strategies that new wave relationalists deploy to explain away other hallucinations. Mundane hallucinations can thus underpin an especially powerful version of the argument from hallucination. (shrink)

I consider a new, non-disjunctive strategy for ‘relational’ or ‘naïve realist’ theories to respond to arguments from ‘perfect’ (causally matching) hallucinations. The strategy, in a nutshell, is to treat such hypothetical cases as instances of perception rather than hallucination. After clarifying the form and dialectic of such arguments, I consider three objections to the strategy. I provide answers to the first two objections but concede that the third — based on the possibility of ‘chaotic’ (uncaused) perfect hallucinations — cannot (...) obviously be dealt with by the proposed strategy. However, such ‘chaotic’ scenarios are also problematic for standard representational accounts of experience. Thus I conclude that perfect hallucinations pose no more of a threat to the relational theory than to its main representational rival. (shrink)

Ordinary language and scientific language enable us to speak about, in a singular way, what we recognize not to exist: fictions, the contents of our hallucinations, abstract objects, and various idealized but nonexistent objects that our scientific theories are often couched in terms of. Indeed, references to such nonexistent items-especially in the case of the application of mathematics to the sciences-are indispensable. We cannot avoid talking about such things. Scientific and ordinary languages thus enable us to say things about Pegasus (...) or about hallucinated objects that are true, such as "Pegasus was believed by the ancient Greeks to be a flying horse," or "That elf I'm now hallucinating over there is wearing blue shoes." Standard contemporary metaphysical views and semantic analyses of singular idioms on offer in contemporary philosophy of language have not successfully accommodated these routine practices of saying true and false things about the nonexistent while simultaneously honoring the insight that such things do not exist in any way at all. That is, philosophers often feel driven to claim that such objects do exist, or they claim that all our talk isn't genuine truth-apt talk, but only pretence. This book reconfigures metaphysics in radical ways that allow the accommodation of our ordinary ways of speaking of what does not exist while retaining the absolutely crucial presupposition that such objects exist in no way at all, have no properties, and so are not the truth-makers for the truths and falsities that are about them. (shrink)

In this commentary, we present two examples where perception is not only influenced by, but also in fact driven by, top-down effects: hallucinations and mental imagery. Crucially, both examples avoid all six of the potential confounds that Firestone & Scholl (F&S) raised as arguments against previous studies claiming to demonstrate the influence of top-down effects on perception.

Do self‐monitoring accounts, a dominant account of the positive symptoms of schizophrenia, explain auditory verbal hallucination? In this essay, I argue that the account fails to answer crucial questions any explanation of auditory verbal hallucination must address. Where the account provides a plausible answer, I make the case for an alternative explanation: auditory verbal hallucination is not the result of a failed control mechanism, namely failed self‐monitoring, but, rather, of the persistent automaticity of auditory experience of a (...) voice. My argument emphasizes the importance of careful examination of phenomenology as providing substantive constraints on causal models of the positive symptoms in schizophrenia. (shrink)

Ordinary people tend to be realists regarding perceptual experience, that is, they take perceiving the environment as a direct, unmediated, straightforward access to a mindindependent reality. Not so for (ordinary) philosophers. The empiricist influence on the philosophy of perception, in analytic philosophy at least, made the problem of perception synonymous with the view that realism is untenable. Admitting the problem (and trying to offer a view on it) is tantamount to rejecting ordinary people’s implicit realist assumptions as naive. So what (...) exactly is the problem? We can approach it via one of the central arguments against realism – the argument from hallucination. The argument is intended as a proof that in ordinary, veridical cases of perception, perceivers do not have an unmediated perceptual access to the world. There are many versions of it; I propose the following1: 1. Hallucinations that are subjectively indistinguishable from veridical perceptions are possible. 2. If two subjective states are indistinguishable, then they have a common nature. 3. The contents of hallucinations are mental images, not concrete external objects. 4. Therefore, the contents of veridical perceptions are mental images rather than concrete external objects. The key move is, I believe, from the fact that hallucinations that are subjectively indistinguishable from cases of veridical perception are possible to an alleged common element, factor, or nature, in the form of a mental state, in the two cases – that is, premise 2. Disjunctivism, at its core, can be taken as simply denying this move, and arguing that all that follows from the premise stating the possibility of hallucinations that are subjectively indistinguishable from cases veridical perception is that there is a broader category, that of “experience as of...”, which encompasses both cases.. (shrink)