Jonathan Cohen's Synesthetic Perception Summary

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Jonathan Cohen, author of Synesthetic Perception as Continuous with Ordinary Perception, or: We're All Synesthetes Now, notes the near universal agreement between scientists and philosophers of perception on the view that synesthesia "involves the integration between normally unconnected psychological systems" and is a pathological outlier. (4) O'Callaghan appears to fall into this group of philosophers. When he compares crossmodal illusions to synesthesia to highlight what he believes drastically differentiates them, he claims that synesthetic processes always result in illusion, whereas those involved in crossmodal illusions do not (13). He posits that crossmodal interactions help us to perceive features that are actually present (rather than illusionary features) by recalibrating and biasing our perception in directed processes. This contrast appears to do more harm than good to O’Callaghan’s claim that multimodality is ubiquitous, for O’Callaghan’s prime examples are illusions, which he has just credited in one instance and discounted in another. This contradicts his …show more content…

This is not a legitimate appeal. Normal perceivers cannot be the the standard which determines the veridicality of other perceptions, for as O'Callaghan has pointed out, illusions and discrepancies abound in normal perceivers, which, I would like to point out, is something to be expected from non-directed evolutionary processes. Lastly, I would argue that synesthesia, as Cohen defines it, offers more conclusive evidence of the possibility of crossmodal interaction in normals (non-synesthetes) because as Cohen points out, there are significant similarities between the two groups suggesting that they also share physiological similarities.

Perception as a Distribution Now I wish to return to the issue of variation, which I briefly mentioned

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