Identity-Crowding and Object-Seeing: A Reply to Block

Contrary to Block's assertion, “identity‐crowding” does not provide an interesting instance of object‐seeing without object‐attention. The successful judgments and unusual phenomenology of identity‐crowding are better explained by unconscious perception and non‐perceptual phenomenology associated with cognitive states. In identity‐crowding, as in other cases of crowding, subjects see jumbled textures and cannot individuate the items contributing to those textures in the absence of attention. Block presents an attenuated sense in which identity‐crowded items are seen, but this is irrelevant to the debate about phenomenal experience of an object in the absence of object‐attention. Finally, even unconscious object perception in identity‐crowding likely involves an attention‐like selective process.