Tuesday, 9 June 2020

Lecture 4: Simulative, Projective, and Locality Assumptions (Turvey, 2019, Lectures on Perception)

This lecture is a brief history of the common assumptions made in theories of perception about how things 'over there' can cause us to have a given perceptual experience. The simulative and projective elements can be quickly dealt with; the big claim in this lecture is that the right notion of causation for perception is non-local, as it is in quantum mechanics. (Note: Turvey is not saying perception is a quantum process. He's just going to use it as a framing to explain what non-local causation is, and he will rely on the rigorous empirical testing it has passed in physics to say it is a viable notion of causation for a physical system.)