we all agree that visualizing things is a voluntary behavior.
Do you actually mean that? I’d thought there were plenty of situations in which visualizations were involuntary… PTSD comes to mind. If that’s wrong, I’ll be very interested to know it.
This is peripheral to your main point, though. Yes, if I voluntarily visualize being in the Arctic, and that entails my temperature rising, that is in some sense different from voluntarily raising my temperature.
That said, this is a very fuzzy line, and I’m not sure if it’s a useful one. When I was regaining motor control and speech after my stroke, there were lots of functions that I could only access at first via indirect and circumlocuitous pathways, but which I would not want to describe as “involuntary”. For example, there was a long period where I could only move my knee by moving my foot around. (Yes, I know that sounds ridiculous; it seemed ridiculous to me at the time, but there it was. As far as my experience of my body was concerned, i could not voluntarily move my leg, but I could voluntarily move my foot. It felt rather like i imagine telekinesis would.)
And in many cases it’s really not clear to me that I ever changed the pathway that accessed the function after that, it’s just that I stopped attending to the path, much as I don’t attend to the specific muscle movements associated with typing the letter I. (Well, OK, I just did, then. But I usually don’t.)
Do you actually mean that? I’d thought there were plenty of situations in which visualizations were involuntary… PTSD comes to mind. If that’s wrong, I’ll be very interested to know it.
This is peripheral to your main point, though. Yes, if I voluntarily visualize being in the Arctic, and that entails my temperature rising, that is in some sense different from voluntarily raising my temperature.
That said, this is a very fuzzy line, and I’m not sure if it’s a useful one. When I was regaining motor control and speech after my stroke, there were lots of functions that I could only access at first via indirect and circumlocuitous pathways, but which I would not want to describe as “involuntary”. For example, there was a long period where I could only move my knee by moving my foot around. (Yes, I know that sounds ridiculous; it seemed ridiculous to me at the time, but there it was. As far as my experience of my body was concerned, i could not voluntarily move my leg, but I could voluntarily move my foot. It felt rather like i imagine telekinesis would.)
And in many cases it’s really not clear to me that I ever changed the pathway that accessed the function after that, it’s just that I stopped attending to the path, much as I don’t attend to the specific muscle movements associated with typing the letter I. (Well, OK, I just did, then. But I usually don’t.)