[pessimizer]

The fact that blind people make decisions based on active echolocation without realizing that's what they're doing is IMO one of the great arguments against the idea that we're particularly knowledgeable about our own conscious thought processes.

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

http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/Echo.htm

been obsessed with this paper since it came out.

[azeirah]

The book "Phi" might interest you, it's written by an influential consciousness researcher, Giulio Tononi.

There is one example in the book, I believe, where a person is consciously blind, and is completely convinced they're blind, but when asked to walk through a hallway filled with junk and obstacles, the person passes through the hallway without a problem. When asked, "how did you avoid those obstacles?", they answered "luck", "small obstacles", etc...

It almost seems to me as if consciousness serves a social function. The mind's eye is blind, but the unconscious eye isn't. Yet, they communicate as if they were blind.

I wonder if there are more cases like this one, whether they lose their ability to communicate in all/most similar cases.

[jholman]

The blindness/sightedness phenomenon you're describing is called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight .

There's a controversial opposite, called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton%E2%80%93Babinski_syndrom...

(Semi-relatedly, plug for Peter Watt's book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel) )

Your sentence about "It almost seems to me as if..." seems to be hinting at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epiphenomenalism / https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epiphenomenalism/ . This is a theory/proposal that consciousness does not actually cause behaviour, but is simply a subject experience caused by the physical processes that do cause behaviour (how's THAT for a gross oversimplification, fite me bro). I suggest that this is both an interesting theory in its own right, but also an interesting mental exercise to limber up how one thinks about things like volition/free-will and responsibility.

[diminoten]

> the idea that we're particularly knowledgeable about our own conscious thought processes.

Is there anyone out there actually pushing this idea?