You’re right that if a portion of the brain or CNS had “awareness” or even reflective “consciousness” then the united apperceptive “subject of experience(/thought/action)” might be completely unaware of it. I think the connectionist philosophers Gerard O’Brien and Jon Opie have mentioned that possibility, though I don’t think they suggested there was any reason to believe that to be the case. They have written some interesting papers speculating on the evolutionary development of awareness and consciousness. (Btw, Kant acknowledged that animals without self-awareness might still be expected to have similar apperceptive unity, they just lacked the ability to abstractly reflect on their experience or develop logical proofs to show their access to external reality could not be a /complete/ illusion, as traditional idealism claims to be possible and empirical science alone would not be able to refute).
Caledonian, others,
There seems to be a misunderstanding of the purpose (and utility) of reflecting on the awareness as consciously perceived. The purpose was to characterize subjective perception and develop /abstract requirements/ completely independent of implementation (e.g. the eye, visual processing pathways) in order:
(1) to provide a compelling argument that our perceptions must come from an external source
and
(2) to establish rational warrant in making any claims about the reality of our interaction with the world external to our minds (including one’s own body) - though science can help us eliminate false interpretations and illusory aspects of our perceptual systems, as well as the brain areas and activities correlated with perception
Subjective self-report is commonly incorporated into scientific research because modern science recognizes it as an aspect of reality. Some basic elements of subjective experience are described identically by all people without brain damage causing apperceptive agnosia. Moreover, apperception and the unity of apperception can be falsified behaviorally by demonstrating capacities or the lack thereof.
People blind since birth who have regained sight through medical advances later in life have had difficulty making any sense of visual information, including shapes and objects. People with apperceptive agnosia cannot see more than one object at a time and function virtually as though they are blind.
Again, I didn’t claim world-access realist arguments prove we aren’t living in a simulation, or even that conditions might not radically change in the future (yes, the “eye does not see the eye” in the sense that we don’t directly access the future or past as well as in the physiological sense I suspect was intended), but presuming the perceptual and cognitive functions we seem to experience performing routinely do exist—and we don’t have compelling reasons to doubt that—then we do live in a universe with a reality external to our own minds (the effort to reach some absolute grounding for epistemological realism was a pipe dream). It is a pragmatic realist perspective from a world-access perspective and I think it is the deepest, most robust proof of realism we can hope for because it focuses on what conclusions we can draw merely from analyzing our form of conscious perceptual access to the world, prior to reliance on empirical tools accessed /through/ basic conscious functions.
I don’t expect most scientists or engineers who take epistemological realism as a premise to find the arguments interesting or relevant to their needs, which it typically is not. However, their epistemological models of reality technically remain vulnerable to Hume’s skeptical critiques and some popular broad-brush claims made like “perceptions are illusions” carry epistemological baggage that most scientists wouldn’t accept if confronted by it in detail with fleshed-out arguments.
Fly,
You’re right that if a portion of the brain or CNS had “awareness” or even reflective “consciousness” then the united apperceptive “subject of experience(/thought/action)” might be completely unaware of it. I think the connectionist philosophers Gerard O’Brien and Jon Opie have mentioned that possibility, though I don’t think they suggested there was any reason to believe that to be the case. They have written some interesting papers speculating on the evolutionary development of awareness and consciousness. (Btw, Kant acknowledged that animals without self-awareness might still be expected to have similar apperceptive unity, they just lacked the ability to abstractly reflect on their experience or develop logical proofs to show their access to external reality could not be a /complete/ illusion, as traditional idealism claims to be possible and empirical science alone would not be able to refute).
Caledonian, others,
There seems to be a misunderstanding of the purpose (and utility) of reflecting on the awareness as consciously perceived. The purpose was to characterize subjective perception and develop /abstract requirements/ completely independent of implementation (e.g. the eye, visual processing pathways) in order:
(1) to provide a compelling argument that our perceptions must come from an external source
and
(2) to establish rational warrant in making any claims about the reality of our interaction with the world external to our minds (including one’s own body) - though science can help us eliminate false interpretations and illusory aspects of our perceptual systems, as well as the brain areas and activities correlated with perception
Subjective self-report is commonly incorporated into scientific research because modern science recognizes it as an aspect of reality. Some basic elements of subjective experience are described identically by all people without brain damage causing apperceptive agnosia. Moreover, apperception and the unity of apperception can be falsified behaviorally by demonstrating capacities or the lack thereof.
People blind since birth who have regained sight through medical advances later in life have had difficulty making any sense of visual information, including shapes and objects. People with apperceptive agnosia cannot see more than one object at a time and function virtually as though they are blind.
Again, I didn’t claim world-access realist arguments prove we aren’t living in a simulation, or even that conditions might not radically change in the future (yes, the “eye does not see the eye” in the sense that we don’t directly access the future or past as well as in the physiological sense I suspect was intended), but presuming the perceptual and cognitive functions we seem to experience performing routinely do exist—and we don’t have compelling reasons to doubt that—then we do live in a universe with a reality external to our own minds (the effort to reach some absolute grounding for epistemological realism was a pipe dream). It is a pragmatic realist perspective from a world-access perspective and I think it is the deepest, most robust proof of realism we can hope for because it focuses on what conclusions we can draw merely from analyzing our form of conscious perceptual access to the world, prior to reliance on empirical tools accessed /through/ basic conscious functions.
I don’t expect most scientists or engineers who take epistemological realism as a premise to find the arguments interesting or relevant to their needs, which it typically is not. However, their epistemological models of reality technically remain vulnerable to Hume’s skeptical critiques and some popular broad-brush claims made like “perceptions are illusions” carry epistemological baggage that most scientists wouldn’t accept if confronted by it in detail with fleshed-out arguments.
I won’t bring up this topic again here. : )