Consciousness and Perceptual Experience

This book describes and proposes an unusual integrative approach to human perception that qualifies as both an ecological and a phenomenological approach at the same time. Thomas Natsoulas shows us how our consciousness - in three of six senses of the word that the book identifies - is involved in our activity of perceiving the one and only world that exists, which includes oneself as a proper part of it, and that all of us share together with the rest of life on earth. He makes the case that our stream of consciousness - in the original Jamesian sense minus his mental/physical dualism - provides us with firsthand contact with the world, as opposed to our having such contact instead with theorist-posited items such as inner mental representations, internal pictures, or sense-image models, pure figments and virtual objects, none of which can have effects on our sensory receptors.

• Studies the nature of conscious experience and its role in perception
• Proposes an integrative approach to perceiving that is, unusually, both an ecological and a phenomenological approach
• Shows how consciousness is involved in our activity of perceiving and argues that our stream of consciousness provides us with firsthand contact with the surrounding world itself