The Scripture Is False And The Biblical God Is Dead.

[GrandizerII]

You know I'm comfortable positing that it doesn't.  

Nevertheless, there's a strong correlation between visual experience and performance in human beings.  People with blindsight are still profoundly disabled.  You wont find many blindsighted outfielders.

It's been a while since I last read about blindsight, but the impression I always got was that the main debilitating factor about it was the lack of trust or confidence in the perception (if you can call it that). Ie normally we have these multiple channels, as it were, of consciousness integrating with and reinforcing each other, giving confidence in what we're perceiving, such as the position of an object. But in the case of blindsight where that sense, again, if you can call it that, doesn't integrate with any of the others, it's understandable there would be a feeling of lack of justification or confidence. Basically I guess what I'm saying is, the ability itself may (or may not) be solid, but without confidence in the perceptions, that seems to be where the real disability lies.

Hey emjay, interesting take. When you say "channels of consciousness", you don't mean consciousness itself in various modes (or whatever), but the underlying neurons/neural processes?

That can work for epiphenomenalism, actually.

Going back to the various recent posts (I've missed a lot since my last response), I see there's some conflation going on between perception and [phenomenal] experience, and therefore people from different sides are talking past one other. In the case of vision, visual perception is the interpretative output made by the relevant regions of the brain (and the CNS in general) as a result of processing the electrochemical "data" sent in through the optic nerve, and it is entirely reducible to the activities happening in the CNS (and the rest of the body). Visual experience is the extra layer that goes beyond perception and is observed intimately, privately, subjectively from a first-person perspective (by someone/something that feels like "you") and in which details of perception are vividly expressed in the form of colors, shapes, and such. This is the part that we are unable, as of yet, conceive of how to reduce to activities in the CNS. And more relevant to the current discussion, why we need such a thing at all, if the underlying neural correlates seem to suffice.