Lightwave comments on Being Wrong about Your Own Subjective Experience - Less Wrong
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Comments (187)
Some neat tidbits about our ability to recall our conscious experience and about how difficult it is to hold a passing thought in memory long enough to analyze it, but it is a total strawman of Hume's (and many others') position that "I cannot be wrong about my subjective experience."
What you've done here is equivocate on the term "subjective experience," using it in the introduction as if it were going mean your current, right-this-moment experience (e.g., "I am in pain now," which imparts a huge wow factor for readers, so I can see why), then proceeded to give a bunch of examples where "subjective experience" means something you subjectively experienced in the past, or had trouble bringing fully into conscious awareness in the first place.
Then, at the very end, you equivocate back to the Humean sense of this-moment conscious experience and flounder into this whopper:
Sure, past subjective conscious experience is something we can be wrong about. We can misremember things. Hume's (and others') point is that we cannot be wrong about things like, "I am seeing blue right now." If you doubt things like that, you must apply at least that same level of doubt to everything else, such as whether you are really reading a LessWrong comment instead of being chased by hungry sharks right now.
I've been enjoying your recent posts, but I wish you would resist the urge to sensationalize and overgeneralize just to grab more eyeballs.
To add to FAWS' comment above, there are all sorts of factors that influence your subjective experience, e.g. your expectations can color (pun intended) your experience of seeing blue. And sometimes your brain can outright override sensory input, as this comment by Eliezer illustrates.
English doesn't give us a good way of distinguishing sensory input from sensations themselves - there's no easy way to distinguish "Light of a certain wavelength is entering my eye" from "I am seeing blue (in a dream or something)." So let me call the former seeing and the latter seezing (the purely subjective experience of seeing).
If you show me a standard American (red) stop sign and I seez this (blue), I may be in some sense wrong about what color the sign is, but not wrong about what I am seezing. In fact, it wouldn't even make sense to be wrong (or right) about what I am seezing.