“How Well Do We Know Our Own Conscious Experience? The Case of Human Echolocation”, 2000-09 ():
[cf. Daniel Kish’s et al 2017] Researchers from the 1940s through the present have found that normal, sighted people can echolocate—that is, detect properties of silent objects by attending to sound reflected from them. [eg. stopping before walking into an object in the dark or distinguishing triangle vs square or fabric vs wood objects, as well as acoustically-modifiable rooms meant to simulate offices vs symphony halls and noticing when the setting inconsistent with its appearance]
We argue that echolocation is a normal part of our perceptual experience and that there is something ‘it is like’ to echolocate. Furthermore, we argue that people are often grossly mistaken about their experience of echolocation. [eg. Thomas Nagel’s denial that humans did anything remotely like bat echolocation, or near-blind people believing they perceived by ‘pressure’ on their face, dubbed “facial vision”]
If so, echolocation provides a counterexample to the view that we cannot be mistaken about our own current phenomenology.