Abstract: Many people consider the dorsal visual stream to be a ‘zombie’: ‘merely computational’ in nature, something akin to a ‘robot’ system which the conscious mind or visual system assigns tasks (reaching, grasping) to solve, but which is utterly different in kind and content to the conscious, qualitative ventral steam – what we use to survey and describe a visual scene of colours, shapes and identifiable objects. Recently Wayne Wu has argued that, instead, and for all the empirical story tells us, the dorsal stream may instead be a case of what Ned Block has described as consciousness ‘overflowing’ cognitive access. On Wu’s hypothesis, the dorsal stream is conscious, and has phenomenal/qualitative character all of its own, only it is not introspectible, and its contents cannot be reported on – it is cognitively isolated. I suggest that a third hypothesis may well make better sense, since, among other things, it preserves the link between consciousness and introspectability: the dorsal stream is unconscious, but has qualitative character. Hence it has unconscious qualitative character. This would be an example of qualitative character overflowing consciousness, rather than consciousness overflowing cognitive access. I will suggest understanding some other alleged cases of Block-style overflow in the same way.
Activities > Extra talks > Another Kind of Overflow: The Two Visual Streams Hypothesis, Consciousness, and Qualitative Character
