Some Hallucinations Are Experiences of the Past

Abstract

Abstract When you hallucinate an object, you are not in the normal sort of concurrent causal sensory interaction with that object. It's standardly further inferred that the hallucinated object does not actually exist. But the lack of normal concurrent causal sensory interaction does not imply that there does not exist an object that is hallucinated. It might be a past‐perceived object. In this paper, I argue that this claim holds for at least some interesting cases of hallucination. Hallucinations generated by misleading cues (e.g. ‘seeing’ Kanizsa triangles), hallucinations of Charles Bonnet Syndrome patients, and dreams are experiences of past‐perceived objects.

Topics & Concepts