Dr Heather Logue has been awarded a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship for her project 'World in Mind'
Dr Heather Logue, Associate Professor in Philosophy and Interim Head of School, has been awarded a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship for her project 'World in Mind'.
The British Academy’s Mid-Career Fellowships are designed both to support outstanding individual researchers with excellent research proposals, and to promote public understanding and engagement with humanities and social sciences.
Heather describes the project and her plans during the course of the fellowship in the abstract below.
“It is common to suppose that our perceptual experiences of the world around us are entirely contained within our heads, and that one could have a hallucination that seems exactly the same as an ordinary perception just by stimulating the brain in the right way (as in the movie “The Matrix”). However, contrary to prevailing orthodoxy, I hold that perceptual experience extends to encompass the mind-independent world (i.e., that things like bananas and desks can literally be part of the mind), and that a hallucination that doesn’t involve perceiving the world around one could be easily told apart from an ordinary perceptual experience. These claims are typically dismissed as implausible because of certain theoretical prejudices, but I argue that giving up these prejudices enables us to dissolve longstanding problems concerning perceptual consciousness—such as the problem of how it arises out of physical entities like neurons.
“Over the course of the fellowship, I will complete a book manuscript, and produce two videos and two popular articles conveying the key ideas of the manuscript in a manner accessible to members of the general public.”
