© Φ Philosophical Writings Proceedings of the Fifteenth Annual British Postgraduate Philosophy Conference TYPE-2 BLINDSIGHT, SELF- ATTRIBUTION AND QUALIA: A PROBLEM FOR QUALIA-BASED ACCOUNTS OF BLINDSIGHT Robert Foley – University College Dublin Abstract Type-2 blindsight is a phenomenon in which a patient with blindsight reports some awareness corresponding to the presentation of stimuli in their scotoma, without this awareness being a normal experience of those stimuli. Recent research into type-2 blindsight has raised many interesting questions for philosophical debates about consciousness. In this paper I argue that blindsight, as it is traditionally understood (e.g., Weiskrantz, 2008), cannot properly incorporate type-2 blindsight. This has resulted in type-2 blindsight often being treated as a peripheral phenomenon. I discuss a recent study in which a blindsight subject (GY) reported on his visual experiences in his scotoma under type-2 conditions. I argue that traditional accounts of blindsight cannot explain GY’s reports, and that his reports also raise serious issues for those who wish to defend a standard notion of qualia. In particular, the case puts pressure on two major tenets underlying the notion of qualia (the ‘constitutive claim’ and the ‘revelation thesis’). It is argued that those who wish to defend qualia must reject one or other of these tenets in the face of evidence from GY’s first-person reports. Introduction The canonical definition of ‘blindsight’, as given by Lawrence Weiskrantz, is “visual capacity in a field defect in the absence of acknowledged awareness.” 1 Weiskrantz and others noted, in early studies, that the blindsight subject ‘DB’ often had some form of awareness of high-contrast or moving stimuli in his blind field. This became known as type-2 blindsight: when a patient with blindsight (as defined above) reports some awareness corresponding to the presentation of stimuli in their scotoma, but without this awareness being a normal experience of 1 Weiskrantz (1986), p. 225.