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Alicorn comments on Being Wrong about Your Own Subjective Experience - Less Wrong
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"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.