Posted: Jan 14, 2017 5:09 pm
DavidMcC wrote:archibald wrote:...Iow, it seems all sorts of funny things can go on in the short time intervals involved in brain activity, and we shouldn't necessarily trust consciousness to provide an accurate picture. Not only is it probably 'the last to be informed', given that there appear to be time lags between activity and conscious awareness of it, but it can seemingly confabulate and rejig events post-dictum, and we end up feeling that something happened before something else and/or that we meant to do something.
This issue exists because we did not evolve with TV/monitor screen! I suspect that it is largely about vision (ie, optical ilusions), rather than conscious experience generally, because it is mainly with vision that this kind of experiment can be performed.
Ahem. I cited four experiments and one phenomena; only that one was primarily about vision.
And that one, being consciously experienced vision, seems very pertinent to consciousness, especially if (as is suggested, and interpreted by some, including Daniel Dennett) the filling-in happens afterwards, but seems (consciously) to us to be before*. In other words, it appears not to be merely an optical illusion in the way that the others you mentioned are (eg blind spot). Our conscious experience seems to be a revisionist account of what just happened. This ability to confabulate is then explored in the 4 experiments, in situations where subjects feel they made choices but didn't (were duped).
*I am not claiming that we can be certain that the filling-in happens retrospectively, but that is what is suggested.