Perplexities of Consciousness (Life and Mind: Philosophical Issues in Biology and Psychology)

Do you dream in color? If you answer Yes, how can you be sure? Before you recountyour vivid memory of a dream featuring all the colors of the rainbow, consider that in the 1950sresearchers found that most people reported dreaming in black and white. In the 1960s, when mostmovies were in color and more people had color television sets, the vast majority of reported dreamscontained color. The most likely explanation for this, according to the philosopher EricSchwitzgebel, is not that exposure to black-and-white media made people misremember their dreams. Itis that we simply don't know whether or not we dream in color. In Perplexities ofConsciousness, Schwitzgebel examines various aspects of inner life (dreams, mentalimagery, emotions, and other subjective phenomena) and argues that we know very little about ourstream of conscious experience.

Drawing broadly from historical and recentphilosophy and psychology to examine such topics as visual perspective, and the unreliability ofintrospection, Schwitzgebel finds us singularly inept in our judgments about consciousexperience.

Eric Schwitzgebel, Professor of Philosophy at the Universityof California, Riverside, is the coauthor (with Russell T. Hurlburt) of DescribingInner Experience? Proponent Meets Skeptic (MIT Press, 2007).