EDWARD'S LECTURE NOTES:
More notes at http://tanguay.info/learntracker
C O U R S E 
Phenomenology and the Conscious Mind
Dan Lloyd, Trinity College
https://www.edx.org/course/conscious-mind-philosophical-road-trip-trinityx-t004x
C O U R S E   L E C T U R E 
Phenomenological Superposition
Notes taken on March 27, 2016 by Edward Tanguay
semisensation
the concept that every object has parts that we can't see hidden behind parts that we can
but semi-sensation is not the only way that what we see goes beyond the senses
look at the duck-rabbit
make the reversal as many times as you can in five seconds
in what way is the object you are looking at changing?
since the image is not changing, the changes taking place are non-sensory, and yet it is a difference we perceive
the difference is super-sensory but not semi-sensory as we imagine the back side of a cube
we can never simply experience sensory perception pure and simple
if we look at a blue square, it could be:
the sky over your head
modern painting by Ad Reinhardt
a wall of someone's bedroom
the blue screen of death
an example in a MOOC
a stimulus in a pyschology experiment on color perception
to see the blue just as the color blue is an interpretation just as is all the rest
even if we try to limit our seeing to the color and nothing else, we are making an interpretation
whatever context we have, e.g. being in an art museum or a house or a psychology lab, remains in consciousness as a super-sensory element of what we see
we never experience a sensation of blue without interpretation, even the idea of pure blue is an interpretation
in all these cases, both the sensory and the non-sensory are in our conscious experience at the same time
we can think of experience as being made of layers of sensory and non-sensory elements
superposition
coexistence of features or properties bound to single entities, including sensory and non-sensory properties
e.g. of a moving cube, the visible sides of the cube travel together with their hidden sides
e.g. when the gray line drawing can be seen as two images
a general aspect of consciousness
look around you
all the objects you see have back sides
although there are borderline cases
everything around us has layers of interpretation
we never see the world as simple sensation