Topics Perception

Question When you see the Moon, which is about 250,000 miles away, does your consciousness extend out of your head, for a distance of 250,000 miles, to the Moon, or do you see an image of the Moon, brought to you by reflected sunlight? If you see an image of it then you do not see the real Moon, while if you see the real Moon then your consciousness somehow has to get out of your head to that distance. So do you see the real Moon, or not? The real Moon and the image cannot be one and the same, because the Moon is made of rock, and the image is not made of rock.

Accepted:
February 22, 2006

Comments

Some philosophers do think that our consciousness 'extends out ofour heads' when we perceive things in our environment. But even theywouldn't hold that your consciousness embraces the moon now (ieas it is when you are perceiving it). For everybody must agree that youwon't see things that happen on the moon until after adelay of more than a second.

You also ask whether we see an image of the moon, ratherthan the moon itself. However, scarcely any philosophers nowadays wantto say that we see images, rather than physical things--this idearaises more problems than it solves. (Even philosophers who reject theidea that consciousness depends on how things are 'outside our heads'will generally hold that our perceptions represent physical objectsrather than images.)

The general consensus then, both amongthose who think that consciousness 'extends out of our heads' and thosewho don't, is that we see the moon itself, not an image, but the moonas it was more than a second ago.

You might want to argue that, if at some time t we see something, we must be seeing it as it isat time t. But why assume this? After all, we are generally happy toaccept that when we see things, we see them as they are at a spatialdistance. So why can't we see them as they are at a temporal distance?