We seem to have rich experience across our visual field. Yet we are surprisingly poor at tasks involving the periphery and low spatial attention. Recently, Lau and collaborators have argued that a phenomenon known as “subjective inflation” allows us to reconcile these phenomena. I show inflation is consistent with multiple interpretations, with starkly different consequences for richness and for theories of consciousness more broadly. What’s more, we have only weak reasons favouring any of these interpretations over the others. I provisionally argue for an interpretation on which subjective experience is genuinely rich, but (in peripheral/unattended areas) unreliable as a guide to the external world. The main challenge for this view is that it appears to imply that experience in the periphery is not just unreliable but unstable. However, I argue that this consequence, while initially appearing unintuitive, is in fact plausible.

我们的视野似乎拥有丰富的经验。然而，我们在涉及外围和低空间注意力的任务上表现得令人惊讶。最近，刘和合作者认为，一种被称为“主观通货膨胀”的现象使我们能够调和这些现象。我表明通货膨胀与多种解释是一致的，对丰富性和更广泛的意识理论有着截然不同的后果。更重要的是，我们没有足够的理由支持这些解释中的任何一个。我暂时主张一种解释，即主观体验确实丰富，但（在外围/无人关注的区域）作为外部世界的指南并不可靠。这种观点的主要挑战在于，它似乎意味着外围地区的经验不仅不可靠而且不稳定。然而，我认为这个结果虽然最初看起来不直观，但实际上是合理的。