ABSTRACT
Cases of two types ground much contemporary belief in unconscious perception. First, clinical cases in which perception appears preserved despite loss of consciousness. Second, paradigms in which a stimulus continues to influence responding despite apparently being suppressed from conscious awareness. Seeing is a single fundamental natural kind, of which conscious and unconscious seeing are sub-kinds. This fact provides difficulties for some of the major theories of perception. Unconscious perception must be both unconscious and perception, but there is a potential conflict between these desiderata. Ned Block's opening statement describes his "favourite case of unconscious seeing": continuous flash suppression. Ned Block suggests a wider significance: unconscious perception threatens naïve realism. Block's view rests on two contentions: that conscious and unconscious seeing are of the same fundamental kind, and that unconscious seeing "must be a matter of perceptual representation". A. Phillips says unconscious perception of low-level features associated with gender might explain the result.
