William Robinson

We can fixate on an object while attending to our visual periphery. It is difficult to describe how the world looks when we do this, and it is difficult to explain why such description is difficult. This paper focuses on these difficulties, with particular attention to the question whether they threaten realism about experiences. Several views are considered, including one that holds peripheral experiences to be episodes of phenomenal consciousness to which we have only partial access (in the sense of Block, 1995).

Over many years, I have defended qualitative event realism (QER) -- aka experiential event dualism. My Understanding Phenomenal Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) is my most extended explanation of this theory of consciousness, but I have written on a wide variety of topics in philosophy of mind, both those closely related to QER and those more distantly related. For further information, please visit my website, william-s-robinson-consciousness.com.