Circumstances that color our perception
Dozens of Harvard faculty and students gathered at Emerson Hall on Feb. 23 to ponder the nature of perception with Ned Block, the Silver Professor of Philosophy, Psychology and Neural Science at New York University (NYU) and one of the country’s leading thinkers on consciousness. Block’s lecture, “How Empirical Facts About Attention Transform Traditional Philosophical Debates About the Nature of Perception,” explored prevailing notions of perception by looking at how we see and pay attention to objects we encounter. As the title indicated, the lecture was peppered with evidence from experiments, some of which he asked members of the audience to try themselves. The address also marked the resurrection of the William James Lectures, a long-running series of talks in the 20th century that featured such well-known intellectuals as Bertrand Russell and John Dewey. Discontinued in the 1980s, the series has now been revived by Harvard’s Department of Philosophy. Block appropriately began his...