One way to find out what something is good for is to examine what it is like not to have it. […] there is a broad spectrum of syndromes in which there is a loss of acknowledged awareness of capacities or their contents, ranging from detection, through selective attention, semantic and associative meaning, episodic memory, to language. […] The message that emerges from the clinic is unmistakable: all of the syndromes can possess implicit processing, but none of the patients can live by implicit processing alone. It cannot be used by the patient in thinking or in imagery, and this is a severe penalty. […] The amnesic patient is severely impaired, and requires continuous custodial care. Priming is intact, but of no evident use to the amnesic victim. He cannot relate what is primed today to what was primed yesterday, or to any other item in memory, including time and place and other (but not only) contextual information; he is functionally fixed in the semantic or procedural present. […] Similarly, the blindsight patient continues to fail to identify objects and to bump into them in his blind field. If he can detect a stimulus in the blind field, he does not know what it is. There may be some occasional benefit to him if he can duck as a rapidly zooming object approaches (although typically this is not a common response in blindsight subjects).

Authors

• Person: Not available Organization: Cambridge University Press
  The Problem of Hard and Easy Problems

Sources

• The Problem of Hard and Easy Problems www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press via serper

Referenced by nodes (6)

• language concept
• awareness concept
• episodic memory concept
• blindsight concept
• selective attention concept
• priming concept