Responses to critics

Responses to replies can be boring if they are about who said what but I'll try to keep my responses interesting by focusing on the most significant issues, putting any textual issues in separate sections that can be skipped. (References to page numbers are to my book (Block 2023) unless specified otherwise.) Jake Beck and Jake Quilty-Dunn make opposite (though compatible) criticisms of my way of drawing the border between perception and cognition. Beck thinks I am wrong about a species of cognition while Quilty-Dunn thinks I am wrong about a species of perception. Beck thinks that cognition can have the properties I regard as constitutive of perception; he thinks my characterization of perception as iconic, non-conceptual and non-propositional also applies to an important species of cognition and that I neglect this species of cognition. Quilty-Dunn thinks that the properties I ascribe to paradigmatic cognition (discursive, conceptual, propositional) apply to an important species of perception—object perception. From my perspective, Beck inflates the category of the non-conceptual, non-propositional and iconic whereas Quilty-Dunn inflates the category of the conceptual, propositional and discursive. Both critiques centrally involve my claim that when perceptual representations are used in cognition, they are enclosed in what I call a cognitive envelope that adds a discursive, conceptual and propositional shell to perceptual representations that do not in themselves have these properties. This challenges Beck because the cognitive aspect of the representations that he emphasizes should be thought of in terms of cognitive envelopes and it challenges Quilty-Dunn because object perception itself is not enclosed in a cognitive envelope unless encoded in working memory. I explain the notion of a cognitive envelope and its relation to working memory in the Précis in the section on what a cognitive envelope is. Please read that before continuing. Encoding in working memory is fast (too fast for me to explain). Perceptual categorization (especially high level perceptual categorization) is fast (too fast for me to explain). I'll start with 1. As I explain in the Précis, I see encoding in working memory in terms of the global workspace model. (I am ignoring “activity-silent” working memory—see the Précis.) Broadcasting in the global workspace takes about 270 ms. at a minimum, so the speed of encoding in working memory is a potential vulnerability for me. Before we get to an explicit discussion of that issue, there are two preliminary issues. The first is whether perception and working memory speak different languages (requiring a time-consuming translation) and the second is what working memory is for. I will proceed to discuss those two issues before getting to an explicit discussion of how fast encoding in working memory really is and why that matters. Does the way perception and cognition interact seem to suggest that they speak different languages and rely on some intermediating translation? Or do they use a common interlingua that allows for free transfer of information? … Our key question: does perception seem to hand information off in a way that suggests a common interlingua, in a way that suggests a … is the information transfer fast the representations at the for cognitive and perceptual the is that a that that perception and cognition speak the a speed when it to the fast speed of encoding perception in working memory. 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