lukeprog 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: Psychohistorian 25 April 2011 04:05:35AM *  16 points [-]

I may simply be unclear on what it means to be "wrong about the subjective quality of your own conscious experience," but it seems to me that this post is completely irrelevant to that question. All of the evidence shows flaws in our predictive ability, our memory, and our language. I don't see any contradictions or wrongness; indeed, I'm still unsure what such would look like. I'll go through it step by step.

Someone predicted that people couldn't experience echolocation. He was wrong. No evidence was offered that he could experience echolocation. Moreover, comparing the ability of the untrained to notice the difference between a T-shirt and a mixing bowl, and the ability of a bat or dolphin to render rich detail is disingenuous. But disputing the detail is besides the point: his mistake was about his abilities, not his actual experience. It's not like he experienced echolocation and didn't know it, or failed to and thought he did.

Does a coin look circular? This seems to be purely semantic and, if anything, a product of language. No one is disputing my ability to see a coin or predict or understand its properties. The problem is mostly whether we're describing the image on our retina or the translation our brain maps onto it. We see an elliptical image which we almost inseverably perceive as round because of the operations our brain does. I don't see anyone making a mistake about what coins look like, or having some erroneous experience.

When you're asked to imagine something, your brain does one thing. When you're asked to reflect on your imagination, or recall your brain has trouble doing so. This doesn't seem like someone being wrong about conscious experience so much as (at most) having difficulty consciously remembering a prior experience. Where's the error?

Dreaming in color - I don't even see where you're going with this. Some people do, some don't. It changes over time. Where's the error? Are there people who think they dream in color but don't, or vice versa? How is this relevant?

[ETA: Further discussion suggests the argument: there isn't a real change in frequency of color in dreams, but there is one in reporting, therefore, people are making mistakes. To that, I think there are two responses:

  1. This evidence is very weak. It's entirely possible that there has been a change in dream color. Since we have no idea what causes it, it's rather hasty to say, "More (or fewer) people must be making mistakes than did before." It's not impossible, it's just weak evidence where we have no understanding of the mechanism.

  2. This is likely a language error. For many people, dreams are unlike the waking world. This is rather like the circular/elliptical coin. It's not information about the dreams. It's not a problem with us experiencing our dreams.]

There are things that occur below our consciousness - this seems principally an issue of memory. Our brain doesn't register (and certainly doesn't record) certain things. There's no error here. It's not that I feel I have no feet when I do, or that I feel I am not driving when I am.

It's possible I've simply misinterpreted the claim you're making. But if it's:

you can be wrong about the subjective quality of your own conscious experience.

I really fail to see a single shred of evidence in everything you cite. You show that there are errors in our memory and our ability to predict, but you do not offer a single example of someone being wrong about the subjective quality of their own experience - it doesn't even seem like you suggest what such error would look like.

Even if I am missing something, it still seems like your point is that "What constitutes your subjective experience is unclear" not "X is a subjective experience that is wrong."

Comment author: lukeprog 05 May 2011 04:08:05PM 4 points [-]

All of the evidence shows flaws in our predictive ability, our memory, and our language. I don't see any contradictions or wrongness...

Of course it's logically possible that we could still be 'right' about our subjective experience but then have our model be immediately corrupted by memory and language, but given the above I see little reason to expect that.

But even if we are 'right' about our subjective experiences, but then our ability to think correctly about our subjective experience is immediately corrupted by memory and language, that still blocks our ability to use subjective experience for certain grounding in a foundationalist epistemology, for example.

Comment author: Psychohistorian 05 May 2011 08:19:08PM *  1 point [-]

It's a bit more than a "logical possibility." Consider these two options:

  1. We actually dream in color, but we experience it as black and white, and remember it and report it correctly.

  2. We actually dream in color, but we don't remember it very well (particularly old dreams, and particularly because the memory centers of the brain do not function properly during dreaming), so our answers to questions about old dreams are inaccurate, possibly biased by television or our most recent memory or some other factor we're unaware of.

It's unclear to me that your position is logically possible, insofar as it is represented by 1. I don't know what it means for a subjective experience to be something different from how it is experienced. I know exactly how things can be misremembered, I do it all the time. So it's 2, which is not merely logically possible, but actually relies on a common and pretty unremarkable phenomenon, versus 1, which actually may not be logically possible because it doesn't seem to actually mean anything.

As for your second point - didn't say immediate, but I think you need to be a bit more specific than "certain grounding in a foundationalist epistemology." I can't disagree with you because I'm not entirely sure what you're saying. If you can point to a specific epistemological problem that arises from any of the problems you've pointed out, well, that'd make this discussion a whole lot more useful.