DOMINIC W. MASSARO, editor
University of California, Santa Cruz

Editor's Commentary on Seeing Red and "The Innocent Illusion"

By Dominic W. Massaro.

Humphrey is fortunate to have Rowe's insights and support for his view. I would like to play devil's advocate by not disagreeing with his major premises about the role of qualia for consciousness but by denying that two things (sensation and perception) are necessary for his overall thesis when one may be sufficient (embodied perception). In fact, Humphrey himself might buy into this alternative because he assigns many attributes to sensation that are normally considered perception. For example, Rowe quotes Humphrey: "What sensation does is to track the subject's personal interaction with the external world—creating the sense each person has of being present and engaged, lending a here-ness, a now-ness, a me-ness to the experience of the present moment" (p. 70). I think that this description captures perceptual experience as much as if not more than simply sensation. For Humphrey, I expect that sensation is multimodal or influenced by several senses in parallel, influenced by top-down variables such as "changes in mood or by mind-altering drugs" (Humphrey, 2006, p. 103), and although they are not specifically described by Humphrey, we can expect that sensation would be modulated by higher-order contextual constraints such as lexical, syntactic, and semantic context in speech perception (see Massaro, 1998, pp. 337–338). For example, we perceive the words in a sentence but also hear the "silences" between successive words, even though none are there.