From another part of the forest, research such as the following, reported in this new entry (a book chapter) at academia.edu, is significant for our attempt to understand the interrelation of biological, neurological, and psychological factors affecting 'consciousness' and 'perception'. Since this paper addresses questions raised previously by
@Burnt State relative to perceptions of 'ufos', I hope he might return to this thread and comment on the paper:
"Beyond ‘Salience’ and ‘Affordance’: Understanding Anomalous Experiences of Significant Possibilities"
Matthew Ratcliffe and Matthew R. Broome
Extract: ". . . As all of this illustrates, salience is not just a matter of experiencing what is
actually present. Things appear salient in the light of
(a) what was anticipated prior to their arrival and/or
(b) what is now anticipated from them. Experience is thus permeated with the anticipation, fulfilment, and negation of significant, variably determinate possibilities. 7
Consequently, things appear salient in a range of different ways. In cases of aberrant
salience, there is a further distinction to be drawn between experiencing something as salient in a way that is aberrant and experiencing it as aberrant. For example, there is a difference between experiencing the sofa in one’s lounge as menacing and experiencing it as strangely menacing (given a mismatch between that entity’s physical properties and the kinds of significant possibilities it points to). A further question thus arises concerning the source and type of normativity at stake when we refer to salience as ‘aberrant’. Is it a biological, epistemic, and/or phenomenological ‘ought’?
[7 It is arguable that a phenomenological account of the manner in which experience incorporates anticipation is complemented in various ways by recent work on ‘predictive coding’ and ‘predictive processing’, work that has also been related to the topic of aberrant salience and dopamine dysregulation in psychosis. See Ratcliffe (2017, Chapter 6) for a discussion.]
One might answer ‘all three’, but they do not always go together. For instance, a non-localized experience of everything being somehow not right may well be biologically ‘normal’ or even ‘functional’ under certain conditions. Regardless of the source of normativity, there are further distinctions to be drawn between different kinds of deviation from a norm. Something’s appearing salient when it should not differs from its appearing salient when it should, but not in the way that it should and from its not appearing salient when it should do (according to one or another criterion). In the latter case, an absence of salience may itself be salient.
Another important variable to consider is whether an experience is modality-specific and which modality or modalities it involves. As noted earlier, we might think of salience as principally perceptual in nature – it is a matter of how our surroundings appear to us and how various things relate to our concerns and potential activities. But it is arguably much broader than that. The weak point in an argument might equally be described as ‘salient’, as might some feature of an imagined situation or remembered event. Furthermore, it is not simply the case that we experience something as ‘perceived’, ‘imagined’, ‘thought’, or ‘remembered’ and, in conjunction with this, experience it as salient in one or another way. The kinds of salience attached to an experience also contribute to our sense of its being one and not another type of experience – an experience of perceiving, anticipating, remembering, imagining, or thinking. To explain further, it seems reasonable to maintain that the hallmark of perceptual experience is a sense of ‘presence’ (e.g. Noë, 2004). Thus, when we have a perceptual experience of a tree, that experience is not exhausted by its sensory-perceptual content. In addition, we experience the tree as
here, now . It is this ‘here, now’ that constitutes our sense of the experience as unambiguously perceptual in nature. However, objects of perception sometimes look strangely unfamiliar, not quite there, somehow unreal, to the point where it no longer feels like an unambiguously perceptual experience. Erosion of the sense that one is having a perceptual experience is attributable -- at least in part -- to aberrant salience. A perceived entity that does not offer the usual range of specifically perceptual possibilities can appear ‘salient’ in lacking them. It ‘stands out’ insofar as it looks somehow more like an imagined or remembered entity – not fully ‘there’. Conversely, salient possibilities more usually associated with perception could adhere to the contents of memory or imagination. The sense that one is imagining or remembering, rather than perceiving, can thus be eroded (Ratcliffe, 2017). For instance, suppose that you cannot help imagining having done p and feel intense guilt every time you do imagine having done p . The kind of significance attaching to p is likely to diminish, to some degree, your sense of merely imagining rather than remembering p.
Hence salience is integral to the phenomenological constitution of intentionality, to our grasp of the distinctions between what is currently the case, what was the case, what is not and never was the case, and what might be the case. For that reason, it is not sufficient to refer to
‘aberrant salience’ within one or another modality. Associated disturbances of intentionality should also be acknowledged. Kapur (2003) takes delusions to be beliefs that are
‘highly improbable’. However, given that wide-ranging salience disruption can erode one’s grasp of the distinction between what is and what is not the case and -- with this -- the
way in which one believes, it should be added that these ‘beliefs’ are different in kind from more typical forms of believing.
[8 An appreciation of how salience dysregulation can impact on the structure of belief may also help to clarify the relationship between aberrant salience and delusion – how exactly the former disposes one towards the latter.]
. . . ."
Beyond 'Salience' and 'Affordance': Understanding Anomalous Experiences of Significant Possibilities 
