Abstract: This talk is not about ghosts or the occult. It is also not about hallucinations or illusions. Rather, I discuss a series of otherwise normal visual experiences that are, strictly speaking, about objects and features not presented to our senses. A traditional and intuitive answer when asking what the targets of perception are, is to say that perception is about the world out there ? the external environment and the objects that populate it. However, this picture of perception leaves out an essential aspect of experience and its targets: our own subjectivity. We experience not only what there is objectively out there, but also the point-of-view from which we encounter it; we perceive not only what there is, but also what's missing; we perceive not only what is present, but also what will be there in the near future; we can even imagine a visual world without seeing it. These forms of subjectivity play a central role in a long and rich philosophical tradition, but they have been at times notoriously challenging to study scientifically. In this talk, I explore new ways of studying subjectivity in the lab. By exploiting experimental designs from vision science, Ill show how our subjective point of view leaves psychophysical traces in rapid, automatic visual processing. Patterns of visual attention reveal that our visual system processes absences in similar ways to how it processes more ordinary, present objects. Novel representational momentum phenomena show that the near, yet non-existent future gets integrated into our actual experiences. Mental imagery is subject to similar algorithmic constrains as visual perception even though there are no objects to be perceived. Visual experiences are definitely about the world, but they also are about what is not there.
Bio: Jorge Morales