Sniffnoy comments on Being Wrong about Your Own Subjective Experience - Less Wrong

37 Post author: lukeprog 24 April 2011 08:24PM

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Comment author: Sniffnoy 25 April 2011 07:28:15AM 4 points [-]

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.

Comment author: sark 25 April 2011 09:38:28AM 6 points [-]

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.

Comment author: wedrifid 25 April 2011 01:52:59PM 1 point [-]

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.

Comment author: shokwave 25 April 2011 11:37:42AM 2 points [-]

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".

Comment author: sark 25 April 2011 02:50:28PM 1 point [-]

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.

Comment author: Sniffnoy 25 April 2011 01:46:34PM 2 points [-]

It's certainly possible to say one thing while thinking you're saying another, though!

Comment author: FAWS 25 April 2011 12:00:14PM *  0 points [-]

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.

Comment author: shokwave 25 April 2011 12:21:31PM 0 points [-]

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.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 25 April 2011 11:32:14AM 5 points [-]

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.