cover image Perplexities of Consciousness

Perplexities of Consciousness

Eric Schwitzgebel. MIT, $23.99 (248p) ISBN 978-0-262-01490-8

As a self-proclaimed skeptic, Schwitzgebel challenges the reliability of conscious experience%E2%80%94visual imagery, inner speech, sensory and even emotional experience%E2%80%94in this provocative follow-up to Describing Inner Experience?: Proponent Meets Skeptic (co-authored with Russel T. Hurlburt). Schwitzgebel debunks claims that introspection or meditation offer roads to truth and makes the controversial suggestion that our judgments about objects in the world around us are more secure than our attempts at self knowledge. To substantiate this he provides numerous examples, such as a perceived change in the color of dreams: reports from the %E2%80%9850s, when most films were black-and-white, and the %E2%80%9860s are vastly different. And, though most people are unaware of subliminal perceptions that can influence behavior, such as reflected sound (the method used by bats and the blind to navigate their surroundings), experiments show that the ability exits in sighted people as well. Ultimately Schwitzgebel sees a paradoxical situation; on the one hand, "introspection of current conscious experience is both (i) possible, important, and central to the development of a full scientific understanding of the mind and (ii) highly untrustworthy, a least as commonly practiced." Though fascinating, his latest tome is likely to be of most interest to professional philosophers and psychologists. (Mar.)