"What in the World are Hallucinations?" by Rami El Ali (Lebanese American University)

We have an upcoming talk by Rami El Ali (Lebanese American University), details of which you may find below:

 

Title: What in the World are Hallucinations?

Time: Monday, December 20, 2021, 7pm-

Place: https://boun-edu-tr.zoom.us/j/94869291837

Abstract: It is widely thought that when we hallucinate, we are not directly presented with ordinary objects. As a result, one cannot extend naive realism to hallucinations, since naive realism maintains that we are directly presented with ordinary objects. Hallucinatory perception theories (HPTs) offer naive realists a new way out of this conflict. They maintain that all hallucinations are hallucinatory perceptions, hallucinations that are a type of perception. But HPTs do not clearly account for hallucinatory phenomenal character. On the one hand a subject can veridically perceive and hallucinate in the same surroundings while undergoing distinct phenomenal characters. On the other hand hallucinatory objects do not seem like the ordinary objects we perceive, they possess features ordinary objects lack. To answer these challenges, I offer a new metaphor for the naive realist view of perceptual processing, then apply this metaphor to account for hallucinatory phenomenology. More specifically, I argue that hallucinatory perception  can be modeled on picture perception. On this view, hallucinations are cases of seeing the patterned surfaces of ordinary objects in a particular way, and so directly present us with ordinary objects.