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RobbBB comments on Rationality Quotes June 2013 - Less Wrong
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I don't think I've ever had an experience quite like that. I've perhaps had experiences that are transitional between images and propositions -- I'm thinking by visualizing a little story to myself, and the images themselves are seamlessly semantic, like I'm on the inside of a novel and the narration is a deep component of the concrete flow of events. But to my knowledge I've never felt a sudden revelation that my mental images were 'only a little voice making language-like statements to itself', à la Dennett's suggestion that all experiences are just judgments.
Perhaps we're conceptualizing the same experience after-the-fact in different ways. Or perhaps we just have different phenomenologies. A lot of people have suggested (sometimes tongue-in-cheek) that Dennett finds his own wilder hypotheses credible because he has an unusually linguistic, abstract, qualitatively impoverished phenomenology. (Personally, I wouldn't be surprised if that's a little bit true, but I think it's a small factor compared to Dennett's philosophical commitments.)
I've occasionally had dreams where elements have backstories--- I just know something about something in my dream, without having any way of having found it out.
This is common, I think, or at least I've seen other people discuss it before ( http://adamcadre.livejournal.com/172934.html ), and it fits my own experience as well. From which I had the rather obvious-in-hindsight insight that the experience of knowledge is itself just another sort of experience, just another type of qualia, just like color or sound.
In dreams knowledge doesn't need to have an origin-via-discovery, same way that dream images don't need to originate in our eyes, and dream sounds don't need to originate in vibrations of our ear drums...
Is this any different from how it feels to know something in waking life, in cases where you've forgotten where you learned it?
It's hard to be sure, but I think dream elements have less of a feeling of context for me. On the other hand, is the feeling of context the side effect of having more connections to my web of memories, or is it just another tag?
(nods) Me too. I've also had the RPG-esque variation where I've had a split awareness of the dream... I am aware of the broader narrative context, but I am also experiencing being a character in the narrative who is not aware. E.g., I know that there's something interesting behind that door, and I'm walking around the room, but I can't just go and open that door because I don't actually know that in my walking-around-the-room capacity.
He is known to be a wine connoisseur. Sidney Shoemaker once asked him why he doesn't just read the label..