This is made in philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton.

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Philosophy bites is made in association with the Institute of Philosophy.

Is this a microphone I see before me? I have thee not yet I see thee still.

Are thou not fatal vision sensible to feeling as to sight, or art thou but a microphone

of the mind of false creation?

How do philosophers explain hallucinations?

If a person has an hallucination of, say, seeing a microphone, does he or she have the same mental experience as if looking at a real microphone?

For an answer, Philosophy Bites interviewed Theonimicson of Glasgow University.

At least we think we did.

Fianna McPherson, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Hello Naidale, it's very nice to be here.

The topic we're going to focus on is hallucination. Can we clarify

what a hallucination is in contrast with say an illusion? Yes. At first we

should think about the case of neither hallucination nor illusion, the case where we are seeing the world and seeing the world as it is.

So for example, I might be looking at a watch sitting on a table and I might be seeing the watch sitting on the table accurately in just the way that it is.

In cases of illusion we think that you are seeing perhaps the watch sitting on the table, but you're misperceiving certain of its properties.

So as a matter of fact, your watch has a black strap, but you might misperceive it and perceive the strap as being gray.

So you're seeing something but misperceiving certain of its qualities and that's a case of illusion.

So if I look at my watch now and it seems to say half past four and actually it's half past six on the face of the watch

I'm suffering from an illusion I'm looking at the watch I've just misread the hands

That's right. Okay, so how does that differ from

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