The Role of Noetic Feelings in Sensory Substitution

Abstract

A central issue in the study of sensory substitution devices is whether and to what extent the original source of knowledge about the world that they seem to enable substitutes for ordinary perception. I argue that this issue divides into two sub-issues, which concern respectively the sensory and the affective aspects of the phenomenology of perception. The sensory aspect determines the representational contents of experience, while the affective aspect is constituted by noetic feelings such as familiarity and presence. A pessimistic view may be formulated according to which neither familiarity nor presence can be reproduced in sensory substitution. There are important phenomenological differences between ordinary perception and sensory substitution due to the massively parallel architecture of the former. However, drawing on a discussion of Capgras syndrome and derealization disorder, I show that we also enjoy higher-level, post-perceptual feelings of familiarity and presence. In the last part of the essay, I draw on the psychological literature on metacognition and sketch a fluency-based account of both these feelings, which leads to a more optimistic view about whether they can be enjoyed by trained users of sensory substitution devices.