“We can be wrong about our subjective experiences” is a very broad and maybe misleading way of summarizing this information.
You’ve shown that we can sometimes fail to consciously pick up on certain channels of sensory information (like echolocation) or fail to consciously appreciate certain qualities of our sensory experience (like the ellipticalness of coins or the vagueness of imagery).
But all your examples have the quality that if we consciously think about them, we realize our mistake (I know this is kind of unfair to you as you couldn’t have used an example that didn’t have that quality because people wouldn’t admit they were wrong about it). So this post only re-affirms that there is a conscious-unconscious distinction, and that lots of the things we think are fully conscious processes are the conscious shadows of larger unconscious processes.
When I think of being wrong about subjective experience, I think of being wrong about the “contents” of “my” “own” “consciousness”. The problem here isn’t that I’m wrong about my consciousness, it’s that certain things never entered my consciousness to begin with and were handled by unconscious routines without me noticing. As soon as I think about them consciously, I’m no longer wrong.
This is also how people like Descartes used the idea of subjective experience, and I don’t think knowing about these examples would make Descartes hesitate to say with certainty that he can be sure he’s really thinking if he thinks he’s thinking.
Here’s a more straightforward case of being mistaken about one’s experience that happened to me:
Schwitzgebel describes somewhere an experiment you can do with a random playing card. Draw it, and hold it facing you at arm’s length directly to your left or right while focusing your eyes straight ahead. Slowly move it around in an arc at arm’s length, so it goes through your peripheral vision bit by bit, and try to guess if it’s red or black.
I tried this, and I had the weirdest experience. I thought I saw it as black(1), and then I realized it was red, and as the card moved, I did not experience a change in its apparent color; it just became plain that that color, the same one, was red.
So either the card looked black and then red without changing its apparent color (implausible), or I was mistaken about my subjective experience somewhere (the initial color perception, or the absence of a change perception).
(1) I don’t remember which it was actually, but it was the wrong one.
This is more convincing than Luke’s examples, but it’s still a case of a flaw in between stimulus and perception, rather than one in consciousness.
You think you perceive a quale of red. Then you think you perceive a quale of black. You notice that you never perceived a quale of change. Each time you are correct about which qualia you did or did not perceive.
You would be wrong if you asserted “my conscious perception of color did not change”, but you are correct in asserting “I did not consciously perceive the change in my perception of color.”
This might also make more sense if you think of a Photoshop-style gradient, eg a 200 px gradient between red and blue. You can’t perceive a change between each individual pixel and the pixel after it, but pixel 1 is definitely red and pixel 200 is definitely blue. You’re not wrong about your conscious experiences at any point, your conscious experience just isn’t picking up the change very well.
That reminds me of a weird experience. I was listening to and watching a singer do a song about his guitar. One verse described it as blue. The next verse described it as green.
Then I saw the guitar as a bright color that I couldn’t specify. I’m not sure I would have said it wasn’t red.
Fortunately, he concluded with a verse about it being teal, and my ability to connect the color of his guitar to words was repaired.
There are certain colors which I tend to identify as green which other people assure me are gray. I didn’t realize this until I got into an argument with a friend about her sofa. Now I see these colors in a weird superposition of green and gray. (I see some things as unambiguously gray, and correctly identify actual green things reliably.) I’m not sure if this is an actual vision issue (it doesn’t seem to be a form of colorblindness) or what.
The amazing thing is that people usually don’t confuse gray with one of the RGB colours (or possibly with one of the colours that you get from reducing one of the above). It would seem to require a rather complicated and ongoing calibration mechanism.
Interesting. This makes me less skeptical of Derren Brown’s color illusion video (summary: a celebrity mentalist uses NLP techniques to convince a woman yellow is red, red is black etc.).
Interesting. This makes me less skeptical of Derren Brown’s color illusion video (summary: a celebrity mentalist uses NLP techniques to convince a woman yellow is red, red is black etc.).
It’s only a small step away from what complete amateurs can do in a room in a university. Human judgement is careful not to get caught up with the actual real world when there is social influence at stake!
I don’t think social influence alone is a good explanation for the delusion in the video. Or more precisely, I don’t think the delusion in the video can be explained as just a riff on the Asch conformity experiment.
Derren Brown’s explanations for his effects are not to be relied on. Remember, he is a magician. Misdirection is one of the pillars of conjuring, and a plausible lie is a powerful misdirector.
I’m merely less skeptical that the woman in the video is a stooge after hearing what Nancy had to say. But yes, the anchoring techniques he uses in the video might be nothing but deliberate misdirection.
This is an excellent example, because it illustrates the two different ways one can be ‘mistaken’:
Having a mistaken ‘folk theory’ of subjective experiences.
Being wrong about the “contents of my own consciousness” as Yvain puts it.
So either the card looked black and then red without changing its apparent color (implausible), or I was mistaken about my subjective experience somewhere (the initial color perception, or the absence of a change perception).
What you call “implausible” here is just something that would cause you to radically change your theory of subjective experience. One can trivially eliminate “mistakes” in Yvain’s sense, simply by making ad hoc revisions to one’s “folk psychology”. The trouble is that, on the one hand, the “folk theory” cannot simply be ditched or we would have no way to even describe what we saw, but on the other, insofar as we have a theory at all, we cannot be certain that it won’t need to be revised.
The bottom line is that ‘infallibility’ is nowhere to be found.
I agree that lukeprog’s examples don’t really support his point very well. However there are other examples that do so better, that do not fit your criterion of “if we consciously think about them, we realize our mistake”—cases where people had to be actively convinced through experiment of what was really going on, denying it for quite some time. For instance, to reuse the same quote from Schwitzgebel I posted in another comment:
You might think that the blind, whose abilities at echolocation are generally thought to be superior to those of normally sighted people, and who often actively use echolocation to dodge objects in novel environments, would be immune to such ignorance. Not so. For example, one of the two blind participants in Supa and colleagues’ 1944 study believed that his ability to avoid collisions was supported by cutaneous sensations in his forehead and that sound was irrelevant and distracted him (p. 144 and 146). Although asked to attend carefully to what allowed him to avoid colliding with silent obstacles, it was only after a long series of experiments, with and without auditory information, and several resultant collisions, that he was finally convinced. Similarly Philip Worchel and Karl Dallenbach (1947) report a nearly blind participant convinced that he detected the presence of objects by feeling pressure on his face. Like Supa’s subject, he was disabused of this idea only after long experimentation. (This participant, it turned out, used his impoverished visual sense of light and dark more than tactile or echoic information.) Such opinions used to be so common among the blind – until Supa, Dallenbach, and their collaborators demonstrated otherwise – that the blind’s ability to avoid objects in novel and changing environments was widely regarded as a tactile or tactile-like “facial vision”, perhaps underwritten by feeling air currents or the like (see Diderot 1749/1916; James 1890/1981; Hayes 1935; Supa et al. 1944; the negligible relevance of air currents is shown by participants’ excellent performance when ears are uncovered and cloth is draped over the rest of the face and their poor performance when ears are stopped and the face is left clear). Presumably, if blind people experience auditory echoic phenomenology, and if they are – as people in general are widely assumed to be – accurate judges of their phenomenology, it should occur to them that they detect silent objects at least in part through audition. They should not make such large mistakes about the informational underpinnings of their object sense.
In those examples, it seems to me they were mistaken about how they perceived something rather than what they perceive, the ‘implementation detail’ of the experience, rather than its content.
Most of the time we just experience things, and we don’t think about via which modality we do so. This is not surprising, as unless when explicitly called for most of the time such knowledge would be quite useless. When you are blind, it’s likely there comes a time you wonder, or were asked, how you managed to navigate as well as you do. Here you will apply some lousy introspection and your brain will serve up some lousy post-hoc ‘explanation’. Thereafter, that hypothesis will just become an additional belief you have about what is going on with your perception.
Of course, modality seems quite intrinsic to various qualia. ‘Red’ is obviously a visual thing. ‘Birds chirping’ obviously an auditory thing. But the understanding of ‘red’ as visual is a meta cognitive process separate from the visual experience of ‘red’ itself. For example you expect ‘red’ to be amenable to being painted on the surface of an object, when the same is not possible for ‘chirping’. So no, the modality is not part of the content of the subjective experience.
I would put it this way: You can be wrong about what your experience is referring to out there in the world or elsewhere in your body or mind. But you cannot be wrong about the contents of your immediate experience.
Most of the article seems to be about missing what is there in direct sensory experience and not noticing what’s missing in imagined experience.
I’m not sure where this is heading, though my snap reaction is “Why are you worried about living in a simulation when you’re already living in a low-rez simulation?”
One clue pointing in these directions is what people are willing to accept as immersive art. Why can people call a video on a screen plus stereo “virtual reality”? How can reading fiction be so engrossing that everything else gets forgotten?
And one more small fact on the sensory front—The Dance of Becoming by Stuart Heller has a little experiment of observing one’s reactions to horizontal and vertical lines. My results were, as predicted, gung V qerj zlfrys hc va erfcbafr gb n urnil iregvpny yvar, naq qvqa’g (V’z abg fher jung, vs nalguvat, V qvq qb) va erfcbafr gb n urnil ubevmbagny yvar.
You can be wrong about what your experience is referring to out there in the world or elsewhere in your body or mind. But you cannot be wrong about the contents of your immediate experience.
Well, yes, but this feels to me to be about as trivial as saying “You can be wrong about the correct answer to a maths question, but you can’t be wrong about what answer you’re giving”.
Perhaps it’s simply my lack of experience with philosophy, but I fail to see any qualitative distinction between common perceptual failures like optical illusions, versus those examples given by lukeprog in the OP. I’m sure lukeprog is setting this up to do some work in one of his later posts in the series. But at this point given no particular reason to draw a boundary anywhere except at the tautology, I draw it at the tautology.
IMO you can be wrong about all of those things, just like you can be wrong about anything else. Your apparent belief that you can’t seems to indicate that you define the contents of those beliefs in a self-referential way which seems weird to me. The only beliefs I’d even consider as candidates for being impossible to be wrong about in that way would be unambiguously tautological ones.
I am far closer to your position than sark’s, I must admit. Lukeprog provided examples of how we can be wrong about our subjective experience, and commenters reached for more abstract subjective experiences; some of which we can also be wrong about (ie Alicorn’s peripheral vision card experiment, the story about blind echolocation believed to be “forehead touch”) and some of which are defined self-referentially so that we can’t be wrong about it, purely by the virtue of the answer we give being the answer required. The self-referential subjective experiences (such as “I experience myself giving the answer 5 to the question 2+2=?”) aren’t useful; they’re tautological. When it comes to subjective experiences that actually do work, we can be wrong. The only work that tautological subjective experiences do is contradict lukeprog’s claim.
I would put it this way: You can be wrong about what your experience is referring to out there in the world or elsewhere in your body or mind. But you cannot be wrong about the contents of your immediate experience.
That almost sounds like a challenge. People can be wrong about a lot. Especially when it comes down to their experiences.
“We can be wrong about our subjective experiences” is a very broad and maybe misleading way of summarizing this information.
You’ve shown that we can sometimes fail to consciously pick up on certain channels of sensory information (like echolocation) or fail to consciously appreciate certain qualities of our sensory experience (like the ellipticalness of coins or the vagueness of imagery).
But all your examples have the quality that if we consciously think about them, we realize our mistake (I know this is kind of unfair to you as you couldn’t have used an example that didn’t have that quality because people wouldn’t admit they were wrong about it). So this post only re-affirms that there is a conscious-unconscious distinction, and that lots of the things we think are fully conscious processes are the conscious shadows of larger unconscious processes.
When I think of being wrong about subjective experience, I think of being wrong about the “contents” of “my” “own” “consciousness”. The problem here isn’t that I’m wrong about my consciousness, it’s that certain things never entered my consciousness to begin with and were handled by unconscious routines without me noticing. As soon as I think about them consciously, I’m no longer wrong.
This is also how people like Descartes used the idea of subjective experience, and I don’t think knowing about these examples would make Descartes hesitate to say with certainty that he can be sure he’s really thinking if he thinks he’s thinking.
Here’s a more straightforward case of being mistaken about one’s experience that happened to me:
Schwitzgebel describes somewhere an experiment you can do with a random playing card. Draw it, and hold it facing you at arm’s length directly to your left or right while focusing your eyes straight ahead. Slowly move it around in an arc at arm’s length, so it goes through your peripheral vision bit by bit, and try to guess if it’s red or black.
I tried this, and I had the weirdest experience. I thought I saw it as black(1), and then I realized it was red, and as the card moved, I did not experience a change in its apparent color; it just became plain that that color, the same one, was red.
So either the card looked black and then red without changing its apparent color (implausible), or I was mistaken about my subjective experience somewhere (the initial color perception, or the absence of a change perception).
(1) I don’t remember which it was actually, but it was the wrong one.
This is more convincing than Luke’s examples, but it’s still a case of a flaw in between stimulus and perception, rather than one in consciousness.
You think you perceive a quale of red. Then you think you perceive a quale of black. You notice that you never perceived a quale of change. Each time you are correct about which qualia you did or did not perceive.
You would be wrong if you asserted “my conscious perception of color did not change”, but you are correct in asserting “I did not consciously perceive the change in my perception of color.”
This may make more sense if you think of perception of change as a specific thing which the brain has to detect and register separate from the changing inputs, rather than as a “natural” consequence of stimuli changing.
This might also make more sense if you think of a Photoshop-style gradient, eg a 200 px gradient between red and blue. You can’t perceive a change between each individual pixel and the pixel after it, but pixel 1 is definitely red and pixel 200 is definitely blue. You’re not wrong about your conscious experiences at any point, your conscious experience just isn’t picking up the change very well.
That reminds me of a weird experience. I was listening to and watching a singer do a song about his guitar. One verse described it as blue. The next verse described it as green.
Then I saw the guitar as a bright color that I couldn’t specify. I’m not sure I would have said it wasn’t red.
Fortunately, he concluded with a verse about it being teal, and my ability to connect the color of his guitar to words was repaired.
There are certain colors which I tend to identify as green which other people assure me are gray. I didn’t realize this until I got into an argument with a friend about her sofa. Now I see these colors in a weird superposition of green and gray. (I see some things as unambiguously gray, and correctly identify actual green things reliably.) I’m not sure if this is an actual vision issue (it doesn’t seem to be a form of colorblindness) or what.
It might be a form of color hypersensitivity—you might be noticing that some grays have a greenish cast.
This might be checked with artists who work with color and/or with color chips.
The amazing thing is that people usually don’t confuse gray with one of the RGB colours (or possibly with one of the colours that you get from reducing one of the above). It would seem to require a rather complicated and ongoing calibration mechanism.
Interesting. This makes me less skeptical of Derren Brown’s color illusion video (summary: a celebrity mentalist uses NLP techniques to convince a woman yellow is red, red is black etc.).
It’s only a small step away from what complete amateurs can do in a room in a university. Human judgement is careful not to get caught up with the actual real world when there is social influence at stake!
I don’t think social influence alone is a good explanation for the delusion in the video. Or more precisely, I don’t think the delusion in the video can be explained as just a riff on the Asch conformity experiment.
I agree (for the right definition of ‘social influence’, of course). That ‘small step away’ really is a step away.
Derren Brown’s explanations for his effects are not to be relied on. Remember, he is a magician. Misdirection is one of the pillars of conjuring, and a plausible lie is a powerful misdirector.
I’m merely less skeptical that the woman in the video is a stooge after hearing what Nancy had to say. But yes, the anchoring techniques he uses in the video might be nothing but deliberate misdirection.
This is an excellent example, because it illustrates the two different ways one can be ‘mistaken’:
Having a mistaken ‘folk theory’ of subjective experiences.
Being wrong about the “contents of my own consciousness” as Yvain puts it.
What you call “implausible” here is just something that would cause you to radically change your theory of subjective experience. One can trivially eliminate “mistakes” in Yvain’s sense, simply by making ad hoc revisions to one’s “folk psychology”. The trouble is that, on the one hand, the “folk theory” cannot simply be ditched or we would have no way to even describe what we saw, but on the other, insofar as we have a theory at all, we cannot be certain that it won’t need to be revised.
The bottom line is that ‘infallibility’ is nowhere to be found.
I agree that lukeprog’s examples don’t really support his point very well. However there are other examples that do so better, that do not fit your criterion of “if we consciously think about them, we realize our mistake”—cases where people had to be actively convinced through experiment of what was really going on, denying it for quite some time. For instance, to reuse the same quote from Schwitzgebel I posted in another comment:
In those examples, it seems to me they were mistaken about how they perceived something rather than what they perceive, the ‘implementation detail’ of the experience, rather than its content.
Most of the time we just experience things, and we don’t think about via which modality we do so. This is not surprising, as unless when explicitly called for most of the time such knowledge would be quite useless. When you are blind, it’s likely there comes a time you wonder, or were asked, how you managed to navigate as well as you do. Here you will apply some lousy introspection and your brain will serve up some lousy post-hoc ‘explanation’. Thereafter, that hypothesis will just become an additional belief you have about what is going on with your perception.
Of course, modality seems quite intrinsic to various qualia. ‘Red’ is obviously a visual thing. ‘Birds chirping’ obviously an auditory thing. But the understanding of ‘red’ as visual is a meta cognitive process separate from the visual experience of ‘red’ itself. For example you expect ‘red’ to be amenable to being painted on the surface of an object, when the same is not possible for ‘chirping’. So no, the modality is not part of the content of the subjective experience.
I would put it this way: You can be wrong about what your experience is referring to out there in the world or elsewhere in your body or mind. But you cannot be wrong about the contents of your immediate experience.
Most of the article seems to be about missing what is there in direct sensory experience and not noticing what’s missing in imagined experience.
I’m not sure where this is heading, though my snap reaction is “Why are you worried about living in a simulation when you’re already living in a low-rez simulation?”
One clue pointing in these directions is what people are willing to accept as immersive art. Why can people call a video on a screen plus stereo “virtual reality”? How can reading fiction be so engrossing that everything else gets forgotten?
And one more small fact on the sensory front—The Dance of Becoming by Stuart Heller has a little experiment of observing one’s reactions to horizontal and vertical lines. My results were, as predicted, gung V qerj zlfrys hc va erfcbafr gb n urnil iregvpny yvar, naq qvqa’g (V’z abg fher jung, vs nalguvat, V qvq qb) va erfcbafr gb n urnil ubevmbagny yvar.
Well, yes, but this feels to me to be about as trivial as saying “You can be wrong about the correct answer to a maths question, but you can’t be wrong about what answer you’re giving”.
It’s certainly possible to say one thing while thinking you’re saying another, though!
Perhaps it’s simply my lack of experience with philosophy, but I fail to see any qualitative distinction between common perceptual failures like optical illusions, versus those examples given by lukeprog in the OP. I’m sure lukeprog is setting this up to do some work in one of his later posts in the series. But at this point given no particular reason to draw a boundary anywhere except at the tautology, I draw it at the tautology.
IMO you can be wrong about all of those things, just like you can be wrong about anything else. Your apparent belief that you can’t seems to indicate that you define the contents of those beliefs in a self-referential way which seems weird to me. The only beliefs I’d even consider as candidates for being impossible to be wrong about in that way would be unambiguously tautological ones.
I am far closer to your position than sark’s, I must admit. Lukeprog provided examples of how we can be wrong about our subjective experience, and commenters reached for more abstract subjective experiences; some of which we can also be wrong about (ie Alicorn’s peripheral vision card experiment, the story about blind echolocation believed to be “forehead touch”) and some of which are defined self-referentially so that we can’t be wrong about it, purely by the virtue of the answer we give being the answer required. The self-referential subjective experiences (such as “I experience myself giving the answer 5 to the question 2+2=?”) aren’t useful; they’re tautological. When it comes to subjective experiences that actually do work, we can be wrong. The only work that tautological subjective experiences do is contradict lukeprog’s claim.
That almost sounds like a challenge. People can be wrong about a lot. Especially when it comes down to their experiences.