Alan Weir "Hallucination as Collage"

I have argued (‘An Ultra-Realist Theory of Perception’ International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 2004, 12 (2): 105-128) for a fairly strong naïve realism in perception. When one perceives a state of affairs, on this view, one’s perception simply is the state of affairs not, any sort of representation of something distinct from the representation itself. Idealism is avoided by denying that states of affairs are part of the ontology of the world; the latter comprises only of objects, properties and relations. States of affairs or situations are mind-dependent bindings of independently existing objects and properties into temporary wholes whose existence depends on that of a suitably co-varying physical state, such as a brain state.

Among the obvious questions which arise here are: how do perceptions, thus construed, connect together to form a unitary stream of conscious experience? And how can misperception and hallucination be accounted for if all experiences are to be construed as on this model, as states of affairs composed of real, mind-independent objects, properties and relations? In this paper I present a much simpler account of the interconnectedness of perceptions than in the original paper and defend an account of hallucination as a form of collage: hallucinatory experiences are experiences in which real, mind-independent objects, properties and relations are bound together into states of affairs, but in ways which need not have occurred in reality.