How Well Do We Know Our Own Conscious Experience? The Case of Human Echolocation

Schwitzgebel, Eric and Gordon, Michael S (2000) How Well Do We Know Our Own Conscious Experience? The Case of Human Echolocation.

Abstract

Researchers from the 1940's through the present have found that normal, sighted people can echolocate - that is, detect properties of silent objects by attending to sound reflected from them. We argue that echolocation is a normal part of our perceptual experience and that there is something 'it is like' to echolocate. Furthermore, we argue that people are often grossly mistaken about their experience of echolocation. If so, echolocation provides a counterexample to the view that we cannot be mistaken about our own current phenomenology.