Aphantasia and p-zombies
Here's an account by a man who, at 30 years old, realized that other people could visualize things without seeing them.
https://www.facebook.com/notes/blake-ross/aphantasia-how-it-feels-to-be-blind-in-your-mind/10156834777480504/
He never could, and was unaware that anybody else could. He thought that phrases like 'mind's eye,' were figures of speech.
The medical term for this condition is called aphantasia. What's curious about this is how long it lasted in his lfe undiscovered. Visualization is such an active and present piece of our waking lives – how did it never 'come up in conversation' that this man was missing some basic element of human experience?
Well, it seems like things that are private aren't optimized to be expressed publicly in language. In fact, the man documents how hard it is to get people to describe precisely what it is they experience when he asks them about this ability which was, to hum until this point, mysterious. It takes some sort of odd occurrence or breakdown to even understand that this major disconnect in experience has any real world implications. Otherwise, things just 'work.' And in fact they seem geared to work and paper these sorts of things over.
Now, what's interesting about this is that this man is a partial p-zombie. There are certain sorts of qualia that he simply doesn't have. And what's more, he was unable to understand that he didn't have them, because the notion that anyone did didn't occur to him. Some conversation explicitly raising the subject had to prompt him to realize what he was missing.
Now, if there are partial p-zombies demonstrably, why is it so odd that there might be actual p-zombies? Maybe the philosophers who claim not to have, or understand qualia, literally don't have them. And the conversational 'trigger' that made them realize this was someone talking about the 'hard problem.'
Maybe our difficulty in discussing the 'hard problem' is physiological. Maybe a number of philosophers are p-zombies. These same philosophers might scoff at the idea that such a thing is possible – but this is in part because like the man who was aphantasiac, they would say 'of course all human beings experience' just like he'd say 'of course all human beings imagine things.' But they are using the words in a way that people who can experience don't quite understand them – and on those terms, they don't understand them.
Philosophers talk about whether p-zombies are metaphysically possible, but what a priori grounds do we have for ruling out the possibility that they're actual?
https://www.facebook.com/notes/blake-ross/aphantasia-how-it-feels-to-be-blind-in-your-mind/10156834777480504/
He never could, and was unaware that anybody else could. He thought that phrases like 'mind's eye,' were figures of speech.
The medical term for this condition is called aphantasia. What's curious about this is how long it lasted in his lfe undiscovered. Visualization is such an active and present piece of our waking lives – how did it never 'come up in conversation' that this man was missing some basic element of human experience?
Well, it seems like things that are private aren't optimized to be expressed publicly in language. In fact, the man documents how hard it is to get people to describe precisely what it is they experience when he asks them about this ability which was, to hum until this point, mysterious. It takes some sort of odd occurrence or breakdown to even understand that this major disconnect in experience has any real world implications. Otherwise, things just 'work.' And in fact they seem geared to work and paper these sorts of things over.
Now, what's interesting about this is that this man is a partial p-zombie. There are certain sorts of qualia that he simply doesn't have. And what's more, he was unable to understand that he didn't have them, because the notion that anyone did didn't occur to him. Some conversation explicitly raising the subject had to prompt him to realize what he was missing.
Now, if there are partial p-zombies demonstrably, why is it so odd that there might be actual p-zombies? Maybe the philosophers who claim not to have, or understand qualia, literally don't have them. And the conversational 'trigger' that made them realize this was someone talking about the 'hard problem.'
Maybe our difficulty in discussing the 'hard problem' is physiological. Maybe a number of philosophers are p-zombies. These same philosophers might scoff at the idea that such a thing is possible – but this is in part because like the man who was aphantasiac, they would say 'of course all human beings experience' just like he'd say 'of course all human beings imagine things.' But they are using the words in a way that people who can experience don't quite understand them – and on those terms, they don't understand them.
Philosophers talk about whether p-zombies are metaphysically possible, but what a priori grounds do we have for ruling out the possibility that they're actual?
Comments (214)
It also isn't just an 'example' – we now know that a certain percentage of the population is aphantasiac.
As we get better at sussing out phenomenological differences, more of them may become part of common knowledge. What is so absurd that we might find out that there's a large divide between people, some of whom can experience and some of whom can't?
Note that those who couldn't might not be aware they can't, just like the guy was unaware he couldn't visualize things, because the idea that he should be able to never occurred to him.
Because if you asked them 'how do you feel', then they wouldn't be able to answer.
Actually, in talking about this sort of thing with some people, there responses are often split in just such a way. Some, when they try to get a handle on what's being talked about, start to sound like aliens – their reflections on and descriptions of experience are odd, as if there's a crucial piece missing. Other people just 'get' the thrust of the problem immediately.
Also reminds me of Temple Grandin, who is the opposite of aphantasia. She's a visual thinker, and language is a secondary means of understanding that has to be translated from imagery. She compared her mind to a holodeck. But she had great difficulty understanding certain philosophical writings. They were too abstract.
I'm a poor visualizer, but I do visualize. Would love to know what it's like to have the equivalent of a holodeck in my mind. Would really help with certain skills.
What about inner dialog? I have an inner dialog going throughout the day. It's hard for me to imagine other people not hearing their own thoughts, outside of meditation. Aphantasics don't hear their thoughts? Do they have memories? Can they tell themselves a story?
I do dream, though I don't remember them often, but they aren't visual either, I just have a sense of what was going on. Same with hallucinations, I don't actually see things that aren't there, I just get really confused, and keep thinking things are there that aren't, or stuff is going on that isn't. I never had a continuous hallucination for this reason probably, because I can't actually see things that aren't there when I look for them.
I remember a debate on a philosophy forum once in which someone alluded to hearing songs in their head, in the sense of 'having a song stuck in your head.' Someone responded and said this was a bad way of speaking, that it's just thinking about a song, you can't actually 'hear songs in your head' and that this was a philosopher's confusion etc. etc. But the first guy was like, no, you don't get it, people literally have a quasi-auditory experience of music.
Philosophy relies a lot on intuitive evidence – it's interesting that it's remained so uninterested in variation in the power of different people to access that evidence.
I get songs stuck in my head as well. It's not a philosophical confusion either. I literally have a quasi-auditory experience. Anyone who says otherwise is simply wrong, although maybe they don't have such experiences. Most people do, I suspect. Which is why the phrase is popular.
Dennett in his early career defended the notion that dreams are a coming-to-seem-to-remember upon awakening. That we don't actually experience dreams while asleep, but rather the false memories are creating during awakening.
That's prima facie absurd for most people who have decent recall of dreaming, particularly lucid and semi-awake dreaming. Also, the dream studies support dreaming as an experience while asleep. But it's interesting how far distinguished philosophers like Dennett will go out of their way to deny subjective experiences.
This can't be tenable with modern scientific evidence. I once read an article by a guy who claimed dreaming was a purely linguistic phenomenon – that there was nothing to dreaming but reporting that one dreamt the next morning. Pretty retarded.
I don't see why it would be – moral intuitions about killing don't center on the suffering of the killed, for obvious reasons. Also, there would only be a sense in which a p-zombie doesn't suffer.
That's an example of doing bad philosophy.
zombies are dead already, so it wouldn't make any difference. That's part of their shtick.
If you're referring to life in the biological sense then this isn't true; having consciousness isn't a requirement to be alive.
Sure, but is that difference one that would lead to behavioural differences? It seems to me that if it would then either experiences are (uniquely) causally efficacious or experiences are a necessary by-product of the (unique) causes of human behaviour (e.g. brain activity).
So which is it? Are experiences (uniquely) causally efficacious? If so, is that because experiences are physical things (e.g. identical to brain states) or because non-physical things can have a (unique) causal influence on the physical world? Or are they a necessary by-product of the (unique) causes of human behaviour (e.g. brain activity)? If so, how would one verify (or falsify) such a thing? Obviously we can't look to behaviour (or brain activity).
So you were just making a joke? My bad.
The point about zombies is, they're dead. That's why they're used as a 'thought experiment' - they look like 'a being' but they're not actually beings. They're simply simulcra, or mannequins, or something - they move and speak but are dead. I don't know why people bring up 'zombies' if that is not the point.
We're talking about philosophical zombies, not "corpses said to be revived by witchcraft, especially in certain African and Caribbean religions". You're conflating.
Philosophical zombies aren't dead. They're just not conscious.
Three posts ago you defined a zombie as a corpse revived by witchcraft. Now you're defining it as something with no inner life. You're conflating.
And in saying that this philosophical zombie is dead because the original definition of the term "zombie" included the term "corpse" is conflation. The philosophical zombie isn't a corpse. It simply doesn't have an inner life. And having an inner life isn't a requirement to be alive. The biological definition of "life" is one that references things like homeostasis, organization, metabolism, growth, adaptation, response to stimuli, and reproduction. That's why we say that plants are alive, and are not required to choose between animals either having consciousness or being dead.
Just look at the sponge. It's a living, non-conscious animal. Or are you going to say that either it's conscious or it's dead?
Are you going to say you can converse with a sponge?
No. That's a really obvious strawman. I'm saying that it's wrong to say "X isn't conscious, therefore X is dead" because having consciousness isn't part of the biological definition of life.
Philosophical zombies are living things that lack consciousness.
Okay, so how about hurting them? If that particular sense of "suffering" does not apply to p-zombies, than any moral judgments related to causing people to suffer in that sense would not apply to p-zombies. If a p-zombie cannot suffer in some specific sense, then any attempt to stop them from suffering in that sense is pointless, because it won't happen anyway.
On second thought, though, my reasoning here looks a little suspicious. You could argue that the ethical treatment of a human being is not significantly altered by the kinds of experiences that p-zombies lack. They lack qualia, but you say that they can suffer regardless. So pain qualia ("pain" understood in a general sense) aren't necessary for suffering, or at least, that's what I assume.
If that's what you mean - that someone can suffer without pain qualia - then I'd like to know what you mean by "suffering," because I would identify it with having certain experiences, and I assume that having an experience just is having a particular set of qualia.
I know you follow Schopenhauer on a lot of stuff, so let me try that: pain is when there's an impression in the body of a subject that the subject does not will, so, basically, a contradiction in the Will that the subject is (I think?), apprehended by the subject in the subject's representation of itself. Okay, it looks to me like the subject has to have qualia if it is an object for itself because then it's having an experience, and if we're qualia theorists, you can't experience stuff without qualia. Or am I just wrong to read this from the Schopenhauer angle, because the qualia terminology doesn't mesh with his philosophy? I only bring him up because I know you follow his line on a lot of things, thought it might work. Let me know where I went wrong.
So it's not possible to hurt someone with congenital insensitivity to pain? Surely that they suffer physical injury is relevant, even if there's no pain?
Well, I guess it depends what you mean as you brought up harm. If by "harm" you mean "cause pain to" then it doesn't even make sense to say "it is (not) wrong to harm p-zombies" as p-zombies can't be harmed (in this sense) at all.
And if by harm you mean "injure", and if it's wrong to harm others, then what does having or not having consciousness have to do with it?
Replace a p-zombie with someone with congenital insensitivity to pain. Is it not wrong to perform acts on them that would cause pain to someone who could feel pain?
I think I'd rightly be condemned for punching someone who couldn't feel pain even though it wouldn't cause them pain.
As are sponges. The difference is, you're supposed to be able to converse with them. That is not a straw man argument, to say so simply shows you're not representing the concept properly.
Quoting Michael
If they were a zombie, it wouldn't matter if they were injured or cut into small pieces and fed into the waste disposal, because they're not persons.
I am attacking your claim that p-zombies are dead because they're not conscious. Whether or not we can converse with sponges has nothing to do with this.
On what grounds do you justify the claim that it is only wrong to injure something if it is a conscious human (which I assume is what you mean by "person")?
And what about animals? Are they persons? If not then it's not wrong to injure them or cut them into small pieces and fed into the waste disposal?
They're not conscious. That is the definition of 'zombie'. They appear to be conscious, but they're zombies. They act like 'conscious beings' but they're not. Again, that is why they're called 'zombies', a.k.a. 'the living dead'. If you say they're conscious, then you don't know what 'zombie' means, nor the point of the argument.
Quoting Michael
Because they are subjects of experience, which, by definition, zombies are not.
Quoting Michael
They're also subjects of experience, but not persons.
Again, you're conflating. That a traditional zombie is defined as "the living dead" (an oxymoron anyway) is not that a philosophical zombie is defined as "the living dead". Philosophical zombies are living, non-conscious humans.
I've shown you – and you've accepted – that something can be alive but not conscious (e.g. sponges and plants). Therefore it is a non sequitur to argue that philosophical zombies are dead because they're not conscious. Being conscious is not a defining feature of biological life.
Then – assuming that you're accepting that it's wrong to injure animals – it's a non-sequitur to argue that "it wouldn't matter if they were injured or cut into small pieces and fed into the waste disposal, because they're not persons". Instead you should argue that "it wouldn't matter if they were injured or cut into small pieces and fed into the waste disposal, because they're not subjects of experience". But you're yet to justify this claim. Why is it only wrong to injure something if it can experience?
When reading the article, the subject may not be able to picture a beach for instance, but he is still able to articulate it based on his experience at the beach. So when thinking about Wittgenstein' private language argument, the meaning behind the expression is enough verification that the subject is not a p-zombie since he is able to declare sand, sea, beach ball or whatever, despite the fact that he is unable to imagine it. His mental state is irrelevant when he is functionally capable of expressing, behaving etc &c., and awareness of our own subjective experience - since the subject is aware that he cannot see images - is perhaps enough.
If we focus the attention on the physiological, perhaps we would not really be talking about the hard problem, but maybe attempting to define what makes 'personhood' such as Singer' view of the differences between sentience and consciousness.
Quoting Wayfarer
They're not dead. They're brain dead, purely instinctual and what Aristotle refers to as the "masses and the most vulgar" that think that happiness is founded through pleasure. :P
They're not brain dead as the brain still functions.
Mind dead?
What makes it wrong?
I don't know. Do you know what makes it wrong to cause someone pain?
It depends on who is punching; one could feel emotional or subjective pain if someone they cared about used violence against them because it may express hate or rejection. It doesn't need to physically hurt.
This is really an over-read of what is occurring. Aphantasiacs most certainly can experience things. They just don't experience them in a visual way. I would say that the vast majority of my experience is non visual. It's not like I read these posts and have anything really concrete in my mind in terms of sensation (like sounds, pictures, etc.). Most of our experience is not represented that way. Nevertheless it's an experience. If you told me a cat walked down the street, I could visualize in my head an actual cat walking down a street, but I probably wouldn't if you just told me that. There's be no reason to. Sometimes when someone is telling a story, they may ask you to actually imagine the events happening, but that's not necessary to relay the story.
Sure, it's an interesting fact that some can't visualize, but I don't see this implying that we have real life p-zombies walking around. It just means that experience is holistic, with all sorts of feelings, understandings and whatever wrapped up into that very experience. No one has ever suggested an experience is just a clump of pictures and sounds swirling in your head and that without that clump, you'd have no experience.
Would you expect someone with no experiential states to behave overtly the same as those that have them? If not, is that because experiential states are the only things that can cause such behaviour or because experiential states necessarily emerge from the only things that can cause such behaviour (e.g. particular brain activity)?
Of course, this question only really matters if your claim that "there's a world of difference between having limited internal experience and entirely lacking the ability to experience" refers to a world of behavioural differences.
Well, I never said they couldn't, so I'm not sure of the relevance.
I think a lot of people say suffering is bad, but then by that they can just mean whatever it is happens to people whether p-zombie or not. Whether they specifically mean the qualitative experience of suffering isn't clear, since people would be repulsed by it anyway.
Actually, a lot of analytic philosophers come strangely close to denying that pain, in this sense, exists – check out Georges Rey and Richard Rorty's stuff. Yet they don't for all that seem to deny that we shouldn't make people suffer. It's like how people disapprove of incest – more of a 'thou shalt not' that for obscure social and biological reasons became traditional.
Quoting The Great Whatever
This was the comment I was referring to:
Quoting The Great Whatever
If all you're saying is that there are great variations in phenomenological experience, I do think that's an interesting scientific fact, but I don't know how it matters to this philosophical question any more than the well accepted fact that there are great variations in how well different people's perceptions work as well as their intellect in deciphering the meaning of their experiences.
I think there are better explanations as to why some philosophers deny qualitative experience than the hypothesis that they are actually p-zombies. The history of their ideas is grounded in some kind of positivism and/or physicalism, and a repudiation of theism and dualism or any of the other theories on the "opposite" side of the spectrum. For example, the motivation for eliminativist materialism was not that it actually made any sense, but rather it saw that science was so successful in some areas and assumed this would carry on to the mind as well, reducing it away.
But say people like Dennett or the Churchlands are actually p-zombies. This has implications for the nature of qualia in general. It would mean it is epiphenomenal, as the p-zombies like Dennett seem to operate just as well as those who firmly believe we have qualia. However we can ask why it is epiphenomenal; why would qualia even exist, and why would the brain use energy to produce it (assuming it is a result of neural activity)?
So probably the better hypothesis, in my opinion, would be that those who deny qualia have an irrational attachment to a worldview that they prophetically believe to be the most rational which is nevertheless in major contradiction to our own lives, and that epiphenomena that last for an extended period of time are at odds with a universe that is maintained through parameters. In short, epiphenomena are even more strange, especially when only some creatures have them and not every creature and furthermore when they cannot be reduced to the physical.
The point is that in conducting philosophy, it seems not to be assumed that people differ in a very basic way as to their experiential capabilities and therefore in their access to certain kinds of intuitive evidence, except in the obvious cases, like blindness.
These differences may be at the heart of the misunderstandings surrounding the existence of, or how to interpret, certain sorts of intuitive evidence.
They do until they are explicitly asked questions about consciousness. Then they become noticeably different.
Then aphantasia is not being used to address the p-zombie debate contrary to the name of this thread, but is only being cited as evidence of the significance of variation among philosophers?
It may guide different philosophers intuitions about the mind. As I stated in an earlier post, I've read that some philosophers were skeptical that people could do visual rotations in their head. This is probably because those philosophers were poor visualizers, not because nobody is capable of doing so.
And for those philosophers like Dennett, who deny that there is any experience whatsoever in the head, it's all external (there is no Cartesian Theatre), one has to wonder whether they have aphantasia.
Do they, though? Aren't they like beetles-in-boxes? Indeed the machinery of the world seem to have little room for them.
At the same time, though, there needs to be an explanation as to how the brain produces epiphenomenal qualia, and why it would (presumably) use energy to create something that is entirely useless.
Maybe that's because the machinery of the world is understood as an abstraction. So, materialism has a mind/body problem, because the mind was taken out of it in order to get at the objective properties.
I also mentioned earlier the college experiment, and keeping track of a minute from Chomsky, where he discovered that he was audibly counting, and his friend was imagining a clock counting. This meant that Chomsky could read, but not talk, he was too busy counting in his head, and his friend could talk but not read, because he couldn't take his "mind's eye" off of the clock.
And, indeed, some people do always visualize everything they think and hear.
I'm clearly a bad visualizer, because when I try to imagine a zebra I certainly don't imagine something that can be said to have an exact number of stripes. I can't really describe what it is I imagine (except the trivial "a zebra"), but it's nothing like the image of a zebra as ordinarily seen.
Although if I close my eyes and really focus I can sort of "see" the five-side of a die.
What I thought was odd about Dennett's explanation was the bizarrely verbal way he'd put it, as if he himself 'imagines' things by repeating words to himself in his head rather than concocting a quasi-visual image.
Well, what does imagining a diabetic racist sitting at home reading a cover-less copy of the Lord of the Rings consist of? I can understand having a quasi-visual image of a person reading a book, but the rest isn't so clear. What's the visual quality of that person being a diabetic racist, of the location being that person's home, and of the cover-less book being the Lord of the Rings? Surely it just comes down to the fact that we say it's of these things?
It would be nice if I could track down where Dennett said this, if he really did. Someone just told it to me once offhand.
Access your memory on church steeples. Most people will see a picture in their mind of a generic "generalized" steeple. I only see specific steeples; there is no generalized one. Images of steeples flash through my mind like clicking quickly through a series of slides or pictures on a computer screen. On the other hand, highly verbal thinkers may "see" the words "church steeple," or will "see" just a simple stick-figure steeple.
http://www.grandin.com/references/thinking.animals.html[/quote]
I find that fascinating, because I'm a poor visualizer like Michael. My guess is that if Dennett was like Grandin, his philosophy would go in a different direction. But then again, he probably wouldn't be a philosopher.
Although when Dennett describes qualia to show he gets it he always mentions listening to a string quartet or something. Which is weird, because it implies sees having experience as some quasi-spiritual or artistic experience (a string quartet is like 'real experience'), whereas it's totally mundane and utterly pervasive in waking life.
Men tend to be more autistic, but Grandin is an autstic woman. From her writings, she seems to have trouble understanding other people's feelings. The nuance of social situations have been difficult for her.
Men also seem to identify less with their bodies than women (experience a greater degree of dissociation). I wonder if this motivated philosophers in the past to think of the soul or mind independent of the body.
I tend to suspect that philosophy is heavily influenced by human biology. Notice how often visual language is used. Wasn't the notion of matching up propositions with pictures a primary motivation of the Tracticus?
Step 1 in avoiding philosophical mistakes:
Resist the urge to generalize from yourself to all others.
The thing about women being 'earthy' and men having their 'heads in the clouds' – women as unified bodies and men as souls attached to bodies – is an old stereotype. The general consensus among modern Westerners is that it's highly sexist and demeaning of women (as is I take it the notion of 'feminine wisdom,' which is supposed to be more earthy, less abstract wisdom). But who knows? Maybe men tend naturally to dualism and abstraction away from their embodied circumstances.
Quoting Marchesk
Well, in their defense, whenever early modern philosophers pulled this sort of thing, they entreated others to see whether they could not do it in their case, and said for their own cases only they couldn't. But there was always an air of irony in this entreaty, i.e. the implication that they did not actually expect anyone else's capabilities to differ significantly from their own.
The modern trend is to downplay biological differences between men and women in the interest of equality. But that doesn't mean those differences can't be significant in some ways, generally speaking. Maybe one day when the equality issue is fixed, we can be more objective about our biological differences, individually and gender wise.
I recall reading one feminist who would become outraged at any suggestion of biological differences, claiming that culture makes any such differences irrelevant. That sounded quite dogmatic to me, but I understand the motivation for it.
What about sexual preferences? I think women are far more likely to be attracted to men than men are.
First time in my life I had a bad thought involving Einstein.
That's a true fact, you got me there.
This sort of reasoning seems to crop up in moral philosophy. Theories about morality are often judged according to whether or not they conform with one's own moral intuitions – which of course must be right – and if anyone disagrees with the "obvious" moral facts then it just means that they're lacking something and not worthy of a reasoned rebuttal.
And I guess the same with metaphysics. Obviously if one really thinks about it, the continued existence of things that aren't being seen is nonsense/evident.
Perhaps it all just bottoms out with people having fundamentally different thought processes that makes it impossible, or at least unlikely, for them to come to an agreement.
Yes, this was essentially my response to your OP. It's a coherent theoretical idea but I don't really think it is what is actually going on. The idea of phenomenological differences sort of reminds me of the bicameral theory of mind. Literature was analyzed through a historical lens and what was found is that right around the time when Homer would have written his epics we find a distinct change in way language was written. Before then we see lots of command-like writing that is third-person, and not until later do we see actual introspection and the sense of "self".
But it's probably not true, either.
I have a pretty vivid visual imagination.
I actually had a specific picture pop up to your question. Clearly it could be different, but I saw something particular.
I certainly agree that our internal lives differ -- not so radically that it's impossible to discuss, but still different. And that language usage of a certain type seems to mask these differences -- in particular, functionalist-oriented discourse.
But I rather doubt I'm the target of your example, here. I'm the low fruit. ;)
What's the visual property of being a diabetic racist? How could you see that the cover-less book was the Lord of the Rings? What about the image of the location showed it to be that person's home?
Or as another example, what about imagining an invisible man reading an invisible book and imagining an invisible cat sitting on an invisible mat. Surely we can do both, but that in neither case is there any visual imagery. So what, exactly, does this imagining consist of if not have some inner visual imagery? I can certainly understand where Dennett is coming from in saying that this imagining is verbal in nature, that really just involves considering and understanding certain words and phrases.
And if we can imagine invisible cats sitting on invisible mats in a verbal manner then surely we can imagine a visible zebra in a verbal manner.
So yeah, there are all sorts of ways people visualize, and I'd imagine he sees every zebra stripe.
I saw some show on a guy who perform complex math in his head, and he insisted that he did it by visualizing complex shapes and manipulating them. He proved it by using clay and showing what those shapes looked like with consistency.
Interesting stuff.
Did you read my Temple Grandin quote where she said that she does not think verbally at all, but only in pictures? She has the opposite condition of aphantasia.
As for your difficult to visualize examples, someone like Grandin might not be able to visualize it, and would therefore have a hard time understanding what is meant, based on some of the other things she has written.
Why wouldn't people differ in their abilities to visualize and verbalize internally?
I'm not saying that people don't imagine things visually or must be able to imagine things verbally. I was simply addressing TGW's remark that "What I thought was odd about Dennett's explanation was the bizarrely verbal way he'd put it, as if he himself 'imagines' things by repeating words to himself in his head rather than concocting a quasi-visual image" by providing an example of something that he might be able to imagine but which can't be imagined visually. That might give him a better understanding of Dennett's position.
Of course, if he can only imagine things visually then it won't help.
There is some controversy about true photographic memory, with some saying it exists only in a small percentage of children (not adults) and some say it doesn't exist at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eidetic_memory.
That is to say, I don't think there's anything at all unusual about those who say they have limited visualization skills because that's the norm. I still contend, though, that the question of whether qualia exist is not addressed by this issue, but, more specifically, it addresses only the question of what is the nature of qualia. It would seem we're all admitting that qualia exists, but we're now asking how it varies from person to person.
I'm not sure what it means out of context to say people have limited visualization skills – limited as judged by what standard? Obviously people can't literally reproduce visual impressions in their imagination, but no one has ever claimed that.
People with aphantasia seem to have no visualization skills, in the relevant sense.
Ex hypothesi, the existence of p-zombies (partial or not) cannot be demonstrated, because empirically (behaviorally) they are indistinguishable from people. I would think that the capacity to visualize things makes some difference in our behavior, even if it is not easy to tease out. And obviously, in your referenced case the difference did come out, which demonstrably disqualifies the proposed example.
This is more than a quibble. Behaviorists are committed to the idea that exhibiting a particular behavior is a sufficient condition for being conscious, so for them a true p-zombie is an oxymoron.
But I still think even the idea that there are people without qualia, who differ in some minimal functional way from those who do, is still one people rule out a priori.
Isn't that the same thing as redefining consciousness? Or are behaviorists merely claiming that certain behaviors are indication of consciousness? That you can't have a conscious organism without some resulting behavior, thus p-zombies are impossible? That it would make no sense for a p-zombie philosopher to be discussing qualia.
One should note that not all behavior is conscious, that machines can be made to mock some conscious behavior, that we don't agree on what sort of behavior would qualify a non-human animal for being conscious, and we can't tell whether a comatose patient is sometimes conscious. We also can't consistently guess what someone is thinking.
It seems a more accurate use of the word to say that I had a photographic memory if I can precisely itemize every detail of an image, or words of a book without missing anything, then I think this would be called a photographic memory, because of my perfect recollection, not because the mode of my recollection is visual.
Nor do I suppose that really super vivid visual imagination skills necessitates a better memory of anything at all, but just a better ability to represent visual images to oneself, and that is all.
What's assumed is that we're all the same.
I didn't know that was an ability you could develop. That blew my mind.
They're not redefining consciousness, but claiming that what we refer to by consciousness is just behaviour.
It's similar to the physicalist who might say that what we refer to by consciousness is just electrical activity in the brain.
Having no experience myself, I think that I can authoritatively field this one. There is no inherent meaning in sounds, sensations, images, smells or tastes, so that I think that it doesn't matter the form or mode, they're just used to represent things to ourselves that reside in the understanding. What detail about anyone's house makes it their house? It's simply understood to be their house. Likewise, a coverless book is just understood to be the lord of the rings, and etc.
There is no property for being a diabetic racist. It's not a singular aspect like red or square. It's more like a cultural archetype -- it's not necessary, unique, or fixed, but all the same a visual picture came to me which fit.
Quoting Michael
I think my response here is similar to my previous response. Visual imagery doesn't have to be unique and differentiated from other books. But an image which fit the words involuntarily still appeared.
Actually, my copy of Lord of the Rings is what came to me, because it is now cover-less, and images from Lord of the Rings too.
Quoting Michael
Sitting on a porch.
Quoting Michael
Honestly, I saw an outline of each of those things -- the visual representation of invisibility.
Quoting Michael
I don't think I'd say there's no such thing as a verbal imagination. I don't think the imagination is strictly visual. I was just noting that the particularity of things doesn't restrict proper visual imagery. The visual imagination doesn't need to map perfectly to the verbal imagination in order for one to have a visual imagin-thing (not sure what to call it) of particularities.
It's a good line of thought. But isn't it also the case that to be able to realise there is a gap in experience - like a lack of visual imagery - there must also be the counterfactual contrast ... which is having that image without having to make an effort at imagining?
So the guy with aphantasia both knows he sees his girlfriend vividly when she stands in front of him, and then that contrasts with his efforts to visualise her. What he says is in fact quite detailed and counterfactually phrased:
A p-zombie would have to lack all such psychic contrast. So there would be nothing for its reasoning to latch on to.
Aphantasia is therefore no more evidence for p-zombies than other irregularities of neurology, like blindness, dyslexia or other lacks which we don't treat as philosophically puzzling. We accept biological variation as causal of neuro-atypicality as there is no grounds to question that.
And in fact that is the strong argument against p-zombies. Can we really imagine a neuro-typical body that is doing all that "information processing" and it not feeling like something? What actually warrants that belief apart from an ability to ignore facts like aphantasia as indeed another of the many demonstrations of the exact correlation between biological structure and experiential reports.
Aphantasia is actually fine-grain evidence for the non-existence of p-zombies as it takes the causal connection between neurology and phenomenology to another level - at least it will once we can check theories that it is all to do with the functional top-down connections needed to drive the primary visual cortex to highly vivid states of perceptual impression, or whatever the case turns out to be.
So p-zombie theory has to posit that a neurotypical person could completely lack neurotypical phenomenology. Anything less than that is a cop-out. And a physicalist theory only has to admit that it doesn't have a complete account of phenomenology. It already stands on the ground of having a partial physicalist account in that no-one sees a problem in attributing blindness to a lack of the relevant equipment, or aphantasia now being due to some similar plausible and demonstrable neural lack. Aphantasia becomes simply, at worst, a promise of physicalist explanation still to be cashed out.
Of course, a physicalist can and should also admit that physicalism has its limits. It will remain radically incomplete - there is an epistemic hard problem - once it gets to the point of being unable to raise theoretical counterfactuals. We can't know the unknown unknowns - even if we can suspect they lurk. So what would it be like to experience grue, etc, etc. Explanation generally loses its purchase when we start trying to tackle differences that don't make a difference. And that is true of physicalism also as an explanatory enterprise.
However that is also not a big issue in practice. It certainly isn't any kind of argument for a positive belief in p-zombies. Just as aphantasia is precisely the kind of further fine-grain counterfactuality that argues in favour of physicalism rather than against it.
(But I'm entertained by the point that Dennett might simply be neuroatypical and that might biologically explain the vigour of some of his beliefs. And neuroscience would say we are all atypical anyway - much more phenomenologically unalike than we realise. That in itself ought to be a fact that informs philosophy of mind - likely a very good paper someone ought to write, if it hasn't been already.)
I experience very vivid visual images (particularly when falling asleep, under the influence of psychotropics, or dreaming) until I try to examine them (actually under the influence of hallucinogens I usually can examine them). I know I experience these powerful images because I can remember them; I don't think the argument that they are constructed after the fact is at all plausible, and so does not constitute any reason to doubt that they are indeed experienced.
So, I tend to think that the experience of this kind of life-like visualization is a subconscious process which dissipates under conscious scrutiny, like mist does under strong sunlight.
James had a health condition wherein insulin would not be produced, and he was a participant in political organizations which promoted the white race. Today he walked around at his apartment reading the most famous fantasy book ever written, with its cover torn off. He had the unusual ability by which he couldn't be known by words, as well.
The verbal imagination can differ from itself, as well. There are various ways to say similar things. And the verbal imagination can craft sentences which negate our ability to understand said sentences too.
Also part of falling asleep is the internal disconnection that does away with an integrated state of attention feeding a digested view of the world into short-term, then long-term memory. So a shut down of higher executive functions. That is why the dream imagery bubbling up is a series of fragmentary and loosely associative impressions coalescing.
In actual REM dreams, we are physiologically aroused enough in terms of our habits of executive fuction to try and chase a meaning. There is an inner-voice attempt to narratise and give the usual discursive shape to our flow of experience.
But in hypnagogia - that specific instant of falling asleep - there is just the bare dream imagery as the narrative function has to let go of the day. So - once you are primed for its existence and have had some practice at reawakening enough to catch it and fix it retrospectively - it has an even greater naked intensity than partial narratised REM dreams.
So as for waking powers of visualisation, this always has to compete with a flow of incoming sensation. It is thus more the other way round. It is a conscious attentional effort to conjure up such imagery - the kind of narrative daydreams we might entertain ourselves with. But then you can do that even when driving your car in busy traffic - so long as the world is predictable enough to hand that off to your subconscious or habit-level brain to deal with (the basal ganglia-level motor control) while you dwell in private fantasies and mental imagery of "elsewhere".
There is plenty of other neuroscience to explain the phenomenology. It takes about half a second to generate a full strength mental image - that is how long it takes to turn a high-level inkling into a low level fully fleshed out perceptual image. But then the image fades equally fast because all the neurons involved habituate. They "tire" - because it is unnatural in the ecological setting to hold one image fixed in mind if it is not actually functioning as a perceptual expectation about something just about to happen.
Imagery is for predicting the immediate future - what the world is going to be like in the next split second. That is why it feels like an impossible attentional effort to hold the one picture in your mind for much longer without a refresh of some kind, or the switch to a different but related view.
Again, eidetics show that there is considerable neuro-variation. But everything here can be explained in terms of neuro-typical functionality - which is why philosophy of mind can be criticised for getting so easily carried away by the whole p-zombie and explanatory gap debate.
The idea that there is a metaphysical dualistic divide - mind vs matter - can only flourish in a positive ignorance of the neuroscience. That is not to say we have some fully worked out scientific theory of the mind - I'm of course forever pointing out that current mainstream physicalism really needs to understand semiotics to be able to claim any level of completeness. But the ghost in the machine become pretty residual the more you understand the complexity of the "machine" (that is, how the mind/body is not a machine at all).
I don't claim that anything is constructed after the fact.
In Schopenhauer's the art of controversy he says something about it being great if people's head were transparent and you could see their brains. Unlike Phrenology, it is true that people's brains can tell you a lot about them. May not be able to explain consciousness and things, but lots of different characteristic structures have been linked to certain practices, and skills. This is basically what neuroplasticity means, that the structure of the brain can be changed based on the things you're doing. So that, there is a characteristic structure for playing piano, and things like that. As I mentioned with Einstein, he had a big visual cortex, and wasn't as great with language.
I doubt that I have a super vivid visual imagination hiding in the subconscious that I just can't access. I think that it's more likely that I have a small, or even damaged visual cortex, and you have a big and well developed one.
Lol, it's not the size that matters, but how you use it!
That's redefining consciousness to be behavior. It's not at all what most people mean by consciousness. Nor is it traditionally what is meant in philosophy.
Quoting Michael
This is again redefining consciousness to mean brain activity. It is not the same meaning, not remotely.
It's an easy way to try and win a debate, though. Just change the meaning of the term under question and claim there's no hard problem. But it's bad philosophy.
He was great with language. Just slow to start speaking. And the suggestion is that he had a "well developed" inferior parietal lobe - which chimes well with the idea that this is a high-level area for spatial imagery. So the mathematical ability to manipulate rather abstracted geometric directions in your head.
The opposite would be a poor ability to spatially manipulate. And that seems born out by the fairly recent recognition of dyscalculia as an academic handicap. People can't learn to tell the time or master maths easily, and there is some brain scan evidence to link that to the same part of the brain.
So talking of visual imagination, there would be two broad divisions with their own variation to start with. You have the parietal "where" pathway for all aspects of imagining spatial relations. And then the temporal "what" pathway where object identification takes place and so also the generation of concrete imagery of things. A weakness in one could be associated with a strength in the other. My daughter has dyscalculia and yet has photographic level ability as an artist.
Quoting csalisbury
This is another relevant dichotomy of brain design. Abstraction is about being able to forget the concrete details to extract the essence. So if you listen to people like Einstein describe their creative process, they do stress that it does feel like an imageless mental manipulation of pure possibility - a kind of juggling of shapes and relations which aren't specific.
So in one sense, this is a powerful imaginative faculty - to be able to think in a concrete fashion about the juggling of generalities. Instead of picturing a triangle, you have to be able to picture "triangleness". And you have to suppress or shed the literal detail to get there. You have to be able to vividly ignore as much as vividly imagine you could say.
Think also of tip of tongue experiences, or the moment that you know you have cracked some puzzle before you actually spit out the full answer. The brain is divided between its high level abstract conceptions and its low level fleshed out concrete impressions. So just having that "first inkling" where it all clicks into place in an abductive way we know already bound to work out as the solution, already most of the intellectual work is done.
This is why thought can often seem wordless and imageless - we already know where that snap of connections was going to lead and can move on before its gets said in the inner voice, or pictured in the visual cortex. Why dwell on experiencing in an impressionistic way what we feel conceptually secure about?
Though of course, actually slowing to flesh out thought and experience it that way - as even when typing it out as a post and wondering if it still makes as much sense - is pretty important for our thinking to be more that rapid habitual shoot-from-the-hip response.
Thought and consciousness are wonderfully various activities. And again, that complexity maps to known neuroscience and even rational (dialectical) principles.
An unimportant aside but that's how I first got into dichotomies and hierarchies. It just ended up screaming at you from neuroanatomy. It is the logic that shapes the architecture of the brain from the first neuron and its receptive field design.
"Scientific studies have suggested that regions involved in speech and language are smaller, while regions involved with numerical and spatial processing are larger." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein%27s_brain
Not according to what I've read about him, or his brain. Why disagree?
I don't think you can have the zebra with exact stripes and the triangle with hazy angles.
I'd say that's exactly what he's doing. The vision is of the abstracted idea of triangle. It has no geometry in a visual sense.
The idea of triangle is used to substitute for any visual image, for it is known a priori to signify a visual/pattern of a three cornered shape of three sides. It's this abstraction which is visualised-- not the visual, but a meaning of commonly expressed by many different visuals.
OK, granted there is the suggestion his Broca area was "funny" in a way that would explain a developmental delay in expressive speech, But what I mean - and why I disagree - is that Einstein was pretty articulate as an adult. And it would be just as plausible that part of being very smart when young is that it can inhibit attempts to speak because the ideas are bigger than the capacity to put them into words.
So see for example this summary of his alleged language difficulties, which both still allows for some possible neuro-structural reason for delayed expressiveness, and yet gives evidence for top-of-the-class level performance - http://www.albert-einstein.org/article_handicap.html
I've been reading a lot of fiction lately, and I've noticed I can have a visual presence in the story while barely deciding on any visual details, if I don't want to imagine anything – so just the visual outlines of the scene appear to me. The characters might not even have any specific eye, hair, or skin color, or height.
I think that it's simpler, and less fellating, based on both the knowledge that he wasn't super quick to pick up language, and his language brain regions are smaller than average, while his spacial and mathematical ones are bigger than averages suggests that he leaned more into these faculties because of a deficit in his speech faculties. I doubt that he was just too brilliant to figure out "dog" and "cat" because he needed his first words to be about complex physics or something...
More to the point, why suppose that the existence or ability of something depends on it's ability to be visualized? I can't visualize a tree falling in the woods with nobody around, but I can conceive of it. I'm sure Hellen Keller was able to conceive of things without utilizing visual or auditory signs.
That is wise. Not to make you question the legitimacy of your whole life, but I can have that effect.
As usual, the conventional thing is to try to deal with a dichotomy by reducing it to one or the other of two options. So in labelling the mind, either we are dealing with one common faculty or two very different ones.
Yet my point is that a dichotomy - a symmetry breaking that leads to hierarchical organisation - is in fact the proper natural option. The brain is organised by this logic. And so that is what our language would most fruitfully capture. Rather than fighting the usual lumper vs splitter battles, we should be amazed if any "mental faculty" wasn't divided in this mutually complementary fashion. That is the only way anything could exist in the first place. The idea of one hand clapping makes no sense.
So yes, I have to use conventional language to communicate here. I have to talk about abstract vs concrete, or conceptual vs perceptual - the terms of art of philosophy. But I don't actually think about brain architecture in the literally divided fashion this implies. I would prefer systems jargon like talk of global constraints and local freedoms. But I know also where using that outsider jargon gets me. :)
Anyway, the whole sense-impression deal gets you into a computational/representational model of mind that my ecological and anticipatory modelling approach rejects. Which makes my understanding of conception very different too. And it is a fact both phenomenological and theoretical to me that abstraction in thought involves the relaxation of constraints.
So a proper mathematical conception of triangleness does shed specific details and yet still leaves behind a "Cheshire Cat's grin" as its "true gist" that I can then manipulate in ways that - under a brain scanner - will show up as concrete activity in expected places. Or in fact - as it ceases to be an effort with practice - the activation involved shrinks in a fashion that it seems those parts of the brain aren't even doing anything much.
Think of expert chess players who can see all the dangers and opportunities with a glance at the board. They don't have to work stepwise through a succession of future moves - like a computer. The general patterns are immediately obvious. They can focus in on some narrower gameplay and visualise that in the level of detail required.
And all mental activity is like that. A rough gist is good enough to get started - throw down the preliminary detail-light sketch. Then flesh that out with detail as required. Add in the information that is further constraint on various uncertainties. Its standard engineering - hierarchical decomposition from broad intention to exact model.
If we start to build computers that think the same way, then we might need to get worried.
Lol, yeah, I knew it was more fellating, and you weren't actually questioning the legitimacy of your life. Yourself that time.
You give a nice summary of thought processes, I would agree and indeed follow an equivalent process to the chess player in creating my art work. However I would add another two perspectives, (which are essentially covered in your account, but not specified).
Firstly, like how you describe a thorough thought processing going on unconsciously with its results emerging in the conscious thinking process fully formed, effortlessly. I would suggest that this entire unconscious processing system can through training be brought into conscious thinking activity, where required, or as an alternative to the purely unconscious or effortless means. This is something I do for various reasons, including being able to observe and manipulate the process.
Secondly, there may be transcendent intuitive processes going on which are subtle(from the neuropathology perspective) and which may play an important role in anchoring a being within the experiential context of the body. I realise this probably seeks to go beyond current scientific thinking, but can be considered philosophically.
There is evidence of exact replication of experience in the bower bird, who can hear a unique sound once and then endlessly mimic the sound precisely like a digital recording.
In her case, it would have helped that she was hearing and sighted until she was two. And before she was taught a finger-spelling system by Annie Sullivan, she was using her own made-up system of signs, like a shiver for ice-cream and miming putting on glasses for her father. So there was a neural basis established for both language and those conceptual modalities.
That's not how it works. If you were to go back to some relevant period in history and tell the people there that stars were luminous spheres of plasma held together by their own gravity, would it be right for them to reject your claim on the grounds that that's not what they mean by "star" and that you're just redefining the word? Of course not. The word "star" refers to some real thing in the world that we just might believe to be something other than what it is (e.g. a hole in the sky, or whatever it was they believed). And in this case, the word "consciousness" refers to some real thing in the world that we just might believe to be something other than what it is.
In this case, the behaviourist or physicalist is saying that the real thing that we refer to by the word "consciousness" is behaviour or brain states, and that if we believe it to be something else then we're mistaken. You can argue that consciousness isn't these things, but you can't argue that their position relies on a redefinition of "consciousness".
But why should language require visual or auditory signs? Humans utilize those two senses heavily, but that doesn't mean they're necessary for language.
It is a redefinition of consciousnes because consciousness means subjectivity, and those two things are objective.
So what the behaviorist and physicalist are arguing is that consciousness doesn't exist. But they want to keep using the word, and here the problem is that English allows more than one meaning for conscious, which would be awake versus asleep for the behaviorist.
Notice how Dennnett wants to quine qualia, but still wants to use consciousness to mean functional states. If you quine the subjective away, then human beings are p-zombies, and Dennett has said as much.
A p-zombie by definition is lacking consciousness in the subjective meaning of the word, which is what the behaviorist/physicalist is arguing when they say that consciousness is behavior or brain activity, full stop.
I know where you got that from. It's from the eliminative materialism, where beliefs and desires are eliminated from an explanation of in favor or neurological explanations for behavior. But if the discussion is over intentionality in philosophy of mind, then eliminating intentional states means you are redefining what mind is.
I read an interesting short science fiction story set in the future where humans travelling in deep space come across a five million year old escape pod of an alien race thought to be extinct. The pod held an alien in cryostasis. The humans revived it. It was a crab like creature that had no eyes or ears. It primarily detected the world through smell or taste, but it's race was much more advanced.
It ended up using pieces of the pod to synthesize materials and plants, then sampled one of the humans for DNA to grow a human hybrid child that had a vastly larger number of neurons throughout it's body (similar to the alien crab). The child then learned human language, history, technological capabilities and politics from the ship's AI at high speed in a short period of time. After that, it interface with the alien and then communicated its desires back to the humans through the hybrid child.
The humans realized at first they were going to have troubles communicating with the alien because it had no sight or vision, and was crab-like, but luckily the alien was smarter than them.
No they're not (always). They're saying that the real thing that we refer to by the term "consciousness" is just behaviour/brain states and not some non-physical thing. Just as the real thing that we refer to by the term "star" is a ball of plasma and not some hole in the sky.
"Consciousness" isn't one of those words that we create a meaning for and then either correctly or incorrectly use to refer to real things in the world (e.g. "atom", which originally meant "indivisible" but which we then incorrectly applied to particles which are in fact divisible). It's one of those words that we use to refer to real things in the world which we then either correctly or incorrectly make sense of (e.g. "star").
Without some qualia, you mean. But then, our mental functioning differs in many ways as it is, so perhaps we should just talk about individual variability of qualia.
We have the reverse situation with synesthesia: there is a small minority of people, with respect to whom the rest are "partial p-zombies" in that they lack the qualia of associating colors to sounds. This ought to be a pretty overt trait though: after all, it is easy to describe and one can see how it might come up in a conversation. , when did you first realize that you did not visualize like most others did?
I don't see sounds in a automatic way the way synesthetic people do, although I mentally associate colors to some musical notes. D, my favorite, is blue. But this might also be a verbal association: having a perfect pitch, I am used to "hearing" the names of the notes whenever I hear them played.
I am no expert, but AFAIK behaviorists see behavior (understood more or less generally - possibly even including neuronal events) as the explanatory terminus for psychology. Mental concepts, if they have any validity at all, should be reducible to behavioral concepts.
So when we talk about inner, private, subjective states, we're really just talking about behavior or brain states, according to behaviorists or physicalists. Where behavior or brain states are objective.
That's exactly like saying that when we talk about belief/desire, we're really talking about brain states. But they're not the same concepts.
So then the question is what's the referent both sides are talking about? When Dennett argues that consciousness is functional states, and Chalmers argues that consciousness is qualia not reducible to physical, behavioral or functional states, how can they be referring to the same thing?
I understand the star analogy, but what would be the star in this case, since one side means qualia, and the other means behavior or brain activity? I'm not seeing a common referent. Rather, I see the same word "consciousness" being used differently.
If Bob argues that stars are holes in the sky and Mary argues that stars are balls of plasma, how can they be referring to the same thing?
They're referring to pinpoints of light in the night sky, but I don't see how the analogy applies to consciousness, other than the use of that word.
So your answer is just that they're referring to the same thing?
If by same "thing", you mean using the same word, then sure. But words can have multiple meanings, and consciousness is one of those words.
I love icecream. I love how the boss schedules these stupid meetings. I love my family. I'm in love with that girl. I love that dancer!
You're not addressing the issue. Surely you accept that when Bob talks about stars being holes in the sky and Mary talks about stars being balls of plasma you accept that they're both referring to the same things but that Bob's account of what those things are is mistaken? Then why is it so hard to accept that when one philosopher talks about consciousness being physical and another philosopher talks about consciousness being non-physical that they're both referring to the same thing but that one of their accounts of what that thing is is mistaken?
No.
They're referring to the same phenomenon in the night sky, yes.
Quoting Michael
This started with behaviorism. The physicalist is more challenging, because they might say that there is a physical explanation for consciousness, not that consciousness is brain activity. But we'll stick with equating consciousness to behavior or brain states.
In that case, there isn't a common referent like there is with those lights in the night sky. This is because the behaviorist and physicalist are not talking about the same thing at all. They are referring to behavior when someone is in a wakeful state, or the activity of a brain in a wakeful state.
But consciousness in the qualia or subjective sense is not behavior or brain states. The closest you can get to making this claim work is identity theory of mind where brain states and mental states are said to pick out the same thing somehow, despite differing conceptually.
It's easier to see this is not the case if we avoid the word consciousness and stick with qualia and behavior.
It's clear that when speaking of qualia we are not talking about behavior, and vice versa. A behaviorist would deny the existence of qualia, not say that qualia is actually behavior, because that makes no sense.
I have a big family of vivid visual thinkers, a couple of whom are great artists. When I was a kid I knew something was wrong because I couldn't look away from something, and then draw it, because I couldn't keep an image of it in my mind.
My little brother was great at art, and had an imaginary friend when he was really young. He told me that he could see images pretty good in his mind. I got a book on "drawing for left brain people" or something like that, which was basically just about drawing when you suck at visualizing.
Long story short, I still draw for shit from imagination, but I can replicate things alright, I just had to learn to draw without looking at my hands.
The analogy with "qualia" here is to "hole in the sky". We can deny that there are holes in the sky while affirming that stars exist. Similarly, a behaviorist or physicalist can deny the existence of qualia, while affirming that dropping a rock on your toe hurts and that roses are red. For them, qualia serves no explanatory purpose.
In other words, a behaviorist or physicalist can affirm that consciousness is real, but deny the dualist explanation of consciousness.
But what does a behaviorist mean when when they say that dropping a rock on your toe "hurts"? If they mean you hop up and down and yell, then that's not consciousness. That's simply behavior. It they mean certain nerves are firing resulting in that behavior, it is again not consciousness, it's neurological activity.
In both cases, the behaviorist and physicalist are using the word consciousness to mean something entirely different.
Going back to this:
Hurting means to feel pain. It's an experience. It can be accompanied with behavior, but not always. It's also not a neurological explanation, because people felt pain before they knew anything about neuroscience.
The rose being red is problematic for the physicalist because the experience of red color isn't part of the physical description of the world. The physicalist is put into a difficult position of defending color realism.
The behaviorist is put into a extremely counter intuitive position of reducing feels to behavior, despite the fact that people do feel plenty of things without behaving in a detectable manner. That's why we can't always tell what people are thinking or feeling. Behaviorism has no answer for that other than to fall back on neuroscience.
In any case, my argument would be that some of our concepts are subjective and not behavioral or physicalist. When I say that it hurts or the rose is red, I mean my experience of feeling pain and seeing red, not howling and jumping around, or a scientific account of optics and reflective surfaces.
I think that alone makes it clear why the behaviorist and physicalist cannot simply redefine consciousness to avoid the hard problem. Instead, they have to argue for reducing experience to behavior or physical explanations.
I don't think behaviorism can possibly succeed, and it's fallen out of favor, with functional cognitive explanations and neuroscience taking it's place. Turns out the black box really does matter.
The jury is still out on physicalism, with some physicalists arguing for nonreductive and emergent accounts of consciousness.
Are you talking about bodies, or beings?
Bodies enact qualia, but don't have them.
Beings experience qualia, but cannot experience anything absent a body, they can't enact them.
They presumably mean the same thing as you do. They're not redefining the term "pain" as hopping and yelling even in the absence of any felt sensation. Instead, they're attempting to provide an explanatory account of such experiences in terms of observable behavior or neural activity.
I would agree, however, that the behavioral project fails since I think it rests on a category mistake. Mental terms don't reduce to physical terms.
Quoting Marchesk
I basically agree, though I would note that we mean roughly the same thing when we say that dropping a rock on our foot hurts or that the rose is red, or else ordinary communication would not be possible.
So while mental terms don't reduce to physical terms, they are still grounded in ordinary observation.
When a rock is dropped on my foot and I say that it hurts, I certainly don't mean the resulting behavior, I mean the felt pain. Similarly, when I comment on the redness of a rose, I don't mean the wavelength of light.
What I'm communicating is the experience, not the behavior or optics. The reason we can communicate experience is because we're human and thus have similar experiences. But you notice how it doesn't always work. Sometimes what one person experiences is not entirely communicable to another. Sometimes we struggle to put into words what we feel.
Sometimes I just don't understand what you're talking about. I can't relate. There is a sense in which we're all our own island, separated from the other by this gulf of lack of understanding that cannot fully be breached by language. What is to be me is not what it is to be you, and you can't know that fully because you don't experience being me, and vice versa. There is definitely a private, unshareable aspect to our being.
Yes and your usages of "pain" and "red" here are the ordinary usages.
So, per physicalism, this is where the impossibility of p-zombies becomes apparent. You can't have two atom-by-atom identical beings where one is sentient (experiences pain, sees redness) and one is not.
Quoting Marchesk
So the philosophical question is whether this is an in-principle radical privacy, or whether language and technology can potentially bridge this. This is really a version of the Mary's Room thought experiment.
Yeah, that's similar to my usual experience when reading fiction. It takes conscious effort for me to deeply visualize anything. (I first noticed this as a kid, reading the redwall series, when I became aware i was both thinking of the characters as animals, and not thinking of the characters as animals.)
But I guess I'd just say that this is exactly the 'zebra with some stripes' thing you mentioned above, so I don't think the idea is all that alien. I'd say this is more common than deep,detailed visualization for most people.
But to go back to the triangle - my hazy triangles tends to be hazy equilaterals. If I try, I can it make it a hazy right. I can't imagine what it would be to visualize a hazy triangle without it being at least a little determined. It seems like, at that point, it would literally be just a concept with a feeling attached. (though I think that a lot - though not all - of what we spontaneously describe as imaginative visualization is actually of the concept with feelings type. )
Why should the objects seen by the mind's eye be any different?
Sure, but maybe having a "a super vivid visual imagination" is to at least some degree dependent on the capacity to bring more of the processes of visualization that are going on below the conscious level into consciousness.
This would not be to suggest that the intensity or quantity of such purportedly sub-conscious processes must be the same in all people, though, so differences there could also be a factor in having "a super vivid visual imagination" or not.
Not to just repeat myself, but I just feel like, given the knowledge of brain structures, that simply can't be the case. One develops their faculties through there use, rather than gaining greater and greater access to a static capacity.
In practice, it wouldn't make much difference what one supposed what going on though, I would think. If I thought that through whatever process I was gaining greater and greater access to my sub-conscious visualizations, or I was just becoming better and better at visualization because of the activities I'm engaged in.
The results of either idea are the same.
So that the development of one's visual cortex is indicative of their ability to access the non-conscious tools of visual formation.
So, looking at it this way, I think you're also right.
Perhaps it is the time dilation effect of psychotropics that allows me to sustainedly examine them. That seems to beg the question as to what, in the subjective sense, "half a second" may be capable of becoming.
Sure, but I was speaking about different "natural" capacities enjoyed by different people, which I think undeniably obtain. Ones could certainly develop their "natural" capacities through use, however meager or great those capacities may "naturally" be.
I'm not sure what that means, so I'm not sure.
You're not sure what it means to say that people have different levels of ability? Think of athletic ability; it's a good example since it seems so apparent. One person could have naturally great athletic ability and yet never develop it; whereas another might have moderate ability and through diligent effort surpass the one with great natural ability.
I know what it means to say that people have different levels of ability, but you didn't say that until just now, you say a far less clear thing which doesn't mean that.
You then go on not to talk about different levels of ability, but different starting potentials or something. How that works precisely isn't clear to me.
OK, but for me ""natural" capacities" and "natural abilities" are not two different things.
Different levels of ability, and different natural capacities that may contradict actual levels of ability are not the same things to me.
Then we are confronting different understandings of the terms. For me 'capacity' is synonymous with 'ability'. So, it makes no sense to me to say that a natural capacity could "contradict" a natural ability. On the other hand an "actual level of ability or capacity" might, if not "contradict", at least differ from a natural ability or capacity, insofar as it was either an enhancement or a diminishment, of the natural ability or capacity.
Quoting Marchesk
Quoting Marchesk
When you call it an aspect, that seems less troubling; but when it is isolated linguistically as 'the quale of red', it has become a veritable beetle in a box, whereof one cannot speak. There's been a shortage of beetle talk in this otherwise excellent thread.
If we try to compare our private unsharable experience of red, one might say, 'it reminds me of the peace and comfort of the womb, I have my bedroom painted red, because it is relaxing', and the other might say, 'I find it stimulating and exciting, I also have my bedroom painted red, but for quite different reasons', and another might not like red at all, and find it provokes anxiety and stress.
We share the particularity of our different associations and responses to red, but we fail to quite touch the beetle in the box, because the beetle has been defined to be the purified essence of privacy. We have talked of individuality, of subjectivity, in relation to our response to red, but you want to say that this is not the experience of red: the quale always escapes - by definition. But if you strip out every association, every response, is there in fact anything left, some other, unsharable secret?
How is it that these three people aren't sharing their "unsharable" experience of red, when they use language to share their experiences of red? If it were "unsharable", then we shouldn't even be able to communicate it, much less have listeners understand it.
It's a problem isn't it? One has to say that they are sharing associations, responses (behaviours) but not the quale. Because that is what the quale is supposed to consist of - the unsharable aspect of experience. But strip away all the associations and responses that we clearly can talk about because we just did, and there seems to me at least, to be nothing left that is the quale itself. The box turns out not to have much of a beetle after all.
Dark blue...that's my true love now. And another color from my past: I first met it on a box of Japanese incense. I call it pumpkin mushroom. Most recently it showed up again in the fleece of a churro. Together with white and my midnight blue, it creates a feeling of being at sea.
Fawn is another word for it...the mushroom.
I would feel sad for people who lack this rich relationship with color, but I figure they must have something else in place of it. Maybe something I'm clueless about?
If this were the case, then we'd be able to share color experiences with people blind from birth, and what's it's like to be a bat would have no meaning at all. We wouldn't wonder whether a machine could be conscious, or just programmed to fool us.
I think Wittgenstein was wrong about the beetle in the box. We can somewhat share our subjective experiences because we have them in common by virtue of being human. We're not a mix of bats, lions and aliens with different sensory modalities trying to communicate.
My experience of pain isn't a behavior. It's a feeling. It's true that I've learned the language of expressing pain to others in a community of language speakers, but that doesn't remove the fact that my pain is mine and not shared by anyone else. I stub my toe and you don't feel it, although you could empathize and say it looks like that hurt. But then again, maybe I was wearing steel toed boots and just pretending to be in pain.
It's obvious that we each experience things a bit differently. Notice how several people in a room will complain about the temperature being wrong. One person might say it's a bit chilly, and the other that it's warm. I might find it to be just fine. And yet we can communicate our feeling on the temperature and whether it needs to be adjusted, despite each person's experience of the room's temperature being private. It's private in that I don't feel your chilliness or warmness. I only feel what my body feels.
You might argue that I can know you're cold by your behavior. But that's only when you have behavior accompanying your feeling, and your behavior isn't deceptive, or open to interpretation, which it often can be. I might not be able to tell that you're cold, because you're not shivering, and you choose not to complain. Or you might shiver because you felt like someone walked on your grave, and I thought that meant you were cold, when you felt something else entirely. And so on and so forth.
I feel like he's not the only philosopher who had a poor theory of mind. What is your view on language, subjectivity and the ability to communicate our private experiences?
And how did the Cyrenaics think we communicated if it was all subjective?
There's no Cyrenaic theory of language, but there are comments to the effect that words can have common usages without reflecting any common internal reality.
But earlier, you were rejecting this 'somewhat' in favour of a radical separation between subjective and objective.
Quoting Marchesk
This latter is what W is arguing against; the radical separation of experience and behaviour, of inner and outer. Not that he is defending behaviourism either, of course. One has never finished the tale of associations and responses to red, and so there is never a complete understanding of each other's experience, sharing is 'somewhat', and open to discovery of ends to sharing as differences.
If someone is blind, then we know they do not have the visual experiences we talk about, so perhaps they will not understand our visual talk. Their experience is different, and we know that well enough, as do they. Aphantasia is a more subtle deficit, that is hard to notice on either side.
It reminds me of the way the west thought for ages there were only 4 tastes - sweet, salt, sour, and bitter. And then someone invented umami... Now what was the private subjective experience of umami doing before we started talking about it? Presumably it was disguising itself as an aroma? And was that a different experience or the same experience?
You see someone in the street and you say to your companion "Hey look at that guy; he really looks like our friend Paul". Your companion replies, " No, he looks absolutely nothing like Paul at all". She simply cannot see it.
You are sharing your general experience with your friend insofar as she knows what it is like to find that someone looks like somebody else. But she cannot share the particular experience of seeing the person in the street as looking like Paul. And yet the experience of seeing that is far from being "nothing".
Same thing with my cousin who has perfect pitch. The piano confirms that we're different. The difference indicates privacy.
No it doesn't. One knows the difference by making a comparison. Making a Comparison denies privacy.
We compare our private parts and find out that boys and girls are different; but in comparing them, we make them public.
True sharing means we aren't different. If we are different there is only the sharing of that fact.
But how can we share quale without becoming the person themselves? That would be like asking what it is like for that apple to have the same colors, shape, texture, aroma, taste and position in space-time that this apple has. If that were the case, it would be the same apple.
Why would we want to share our quale anyway? What would be the point? What new knowledge would we acquire that we can't already acquire via our own observations, or via language? If I told you I see a blue sky, why would you need to experience my quale? What new knowledge you you gain that you wouldn't have by looking at me looking at the sky, or by hearing my words?
Agreed. But you can share it with me, because we aren't different in that regard. Or perhaps when we discuss the experience further, we will find we are different, after all.
Does the earth move for you,
When you experience blue?
So we 'truly' share experience to the extent we are the same - that is what you are saying. But then all you have to do is find your soulmate, and nothing is private.
I'm with you.
"Strangers passing in the street
By chance two separate glances meet
And I am you and what I see is me
And do I take you by the hand
And lead you through the land
And help me understand the best I can"
Pink Floyd, Echoes.
I would say that identity and identification (two different things) are of the empirical (the shareable realm) and difference is of the transcendental, which is not determinable, or comparable, but is encounterable. So, I would say that the private realm cannot rightly be denied, or counted as nothing, as it is the necessary 'other face' of the public realm.
Quoting unenlightened
Then asking why we can't access other people's quale is one of those nonsensical philosophical questions that, even if we did answer, wouldn't provide us with any useful knowledge.
If our "subjective" experiences are unshareable then that would mean that the world outside our minds is also unshareable - meaning that the information out there never gets in here, and the information in here never gets out there. But it does get in here and out there, and it does so via the process of causation. Effects carry information about their causes.
What sort of information? The black ball that fell in the pocket doesn't "carry" information about the colour of the ball that pushed it – or even that it was a ball that pushed it. The only information it "carries" is (as far as I'm aware) the momentum of its cause.
:)
I have my doubts. I think maybe the mind creates information about the world. The world exists as it is, but we derive information about it as we interact with the world.
The interesting question is whether the information is created or derived. If derived then it suggests that our thinking is an integral part of the world-process. The world creates information about itself via minds, yet minds are themselves creations of the world. On the other hand the world comes to be in the fullest sense only in the reflexive process of its self-creation.
I have the sense of gathering or acquiring information, not arbitrarily creating it. If the relationship between a criminal's behavior and the evidence that is left behind didn't exist independently of the criminal investigator's mind, then the criminal investigator is jut making up the relationship between the evidence and some cause of the evidence's existence.
When a lumberjack cuts down a tree, he can see tree rings in the stump. These rings carry information about the age of the tree. The lumberjack's mind didn't create this relationship between the tree rings and the age of the tree. The tree did, naturally, by how it grows throughout the year.
The relationship between cause and effect exists independently of our minds. Our minds create time and space, which essentially is the stretching of these relationships. Our sensory-brain system is a causal system and is part of the world as well, and the frequency at which it functions is relative to the rest of the processes of reality. So our minds have this kind of skewed view of reality with all relationships appearing relative to each of us (hot/cold, small/large, near/far, fast/slow, past/present (ME)/future, etc.). This is why these causal relationships seem to be connected yet stretched out over "time" to us.
I'm going to venture a guess a ton of important mathematicians and logicians have minds along this line. It let's you get in the proper head space for conceptualizing non-visual dimensions. Now, that the term aphantasia*; but, differently
exists we can start moving towards a definition of conciousness, and learn how to intentionally alter our concious states.
Now, the big question resulting from this discovery goes, like so. The STEM field has a disproportionate amount of aphantasiacs functioning at an extremely high level. There are literally top researchers and professionals in STEM with the condition. Some of the work actually becomes easier to conceptualize, as a result. So, they designed the modern conception of the computer based on how they believe humans think. Is conciousness computation? Are computers concious in some meaningful sense of the word? Is it possible to alter the concious state so everyone could experience all possible mental states?
Aldus Huxley claimed to have aphantasia, until ingesting large quantities of mescaline, and having a vision trip. Sounds like there might be some truth to the stoned ape theory. Maybe, only a P-zombie is capable of completely rational thought, since no hallucinatory elements get added to the experience?
I'm not an expert on Christian theology, by any means, but aphantasia might be a direct assault against the foundations of their beliefs. I believe there is some Bible line about God putting visual thoughts in heads that is a theological crux for the argument of the existence of God. Either 20% of STEM are irredeemable sinners, or the theology is wrong. Take that to mean what you will.
* P-zombie has too many negative connotations to it, considering that they do philosophize, and it leads well intentioned thinkers astray. But, it is different from how someone who believes p-zombies exist conceptualize philosophy; however, they can still understand continental philosophers, such as the existentialists, by approaching the problem from the angle of time. Heidegger is extremely visual, but at the end of Being and Time he realizes it is literally possible to approach Being from the position of time and space, both must must exist where the other exists. It is a pre-condition for being. They speak of moving through their surroundings mentally non-visually. It is extremely difficult to describe without referring to mystical concepts such as sight without vision. They literally externalize a portion of their mind to the world, and realize their own internal states through listening to monologues, and engaging in dialogues. Which is why Dennet developed the Heterophenomenological model.
If congenital blindness caused by malfunctioning eyes and not the brain can be cured late in life, and the man mentions, "oh, blue looks just how I had thought." We would have to say he was experiencing blue all along; but, through lacking a mental or physical sense (thinking of biology in terms of hardware and virtualization helps so much with this) his experience contains an unsharable quasi-privacy, in his native tongue, which might be expressable in another language or through the invention of new languages capable of capturing newly discovered private experiences succinctly for others.
You're unlikely to get any responses from old posters in this thread, considering it took place 3 years ago.
The a priori ground is our assumed metaphysics. P-zombies is completely a derivative problem of mind-body dualism:
Quoting 'Human Zombies are Metaphysically Impossible' – William Robert Webster
If you are a physicalist, traditionally, you will automatically reject the idea of zombies — there are only physical facts and two individuals with the same physical facts will both have consciousness or not. If you are a dualist, you may reject the idea or not depending on your flavour of dualism. If you are an idealist, I don't know[s], I haven't dropped acid yet[/s].
Each will come with its own set of its issues (which the SEP article redundantly covers in every derivative problem), and the debate has raged on since Antiquity — pick your poison and accept you can't solve the conundrum.