Eremolalos's Review of Perplexities of Consciousness

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      A REVIEW OF ERIC SCHWITZGEBEL’S

  PERPLEXITIES OF CONSCIOUSNESS 

The sensory homunculus contemplates packet 3a09e1508ff7.

In Perplexities of Consciousness Eric Schwitzgebel takes on phenomenology, the study of the phenomena of human inner experience — percepts, mental images, emotions, thoughts. So I’m going to start us off with my absolute favorite bit of phenomenology, Vladimir Nabokov’s description of his childhood bedtime ritual. He would climb the stairs towards his mother with his eyes closed, moving up each time she said “step.” It was understood that she would not tell him when he reached the top of the stairs, but would say “step” one more time:

The keenest [delight] was not knowing when the last step would come. At the top of the stairs, one's foot would be automatically lifted to the deceptive call of 'Step,' and then, with a momentary sense of exquisite panic, with a wild contraction of muscles, would sink into the phantasm of a step, padded, as it were, with the infinitely elastic stuff of its own nonexistence. (from Speak, Memory)

Nabokov really nails the phenomenology here, capturing his mind in the act of scrambling to integrate the cognitive and proprioceptive expectation of the step with the sensory experience of stepping onto 6 inches of air, and then capturing his mind’s solution: conjuring a sort of chimera that satisfied both expectation and lived experience: a step of infinite softness.

Schwitzgebel, too, wants to really nail phenomenology. He sets out to pin down what inner experience is really like. His conclusion is that thoughts, percepts, emotions, etc. are a lot like Nabokov’s final, non-existent step. We expect these experiences to be, like a wooden step, solid representatives of a certain shape.  But if we examine these experiences closely, they are, like Nabokov’s final step, partial phantasms: “gelatinous, disjointed, swift, shy, changeable.” And, like Nabokov, we resist recognizing the way the reality departs from our expectations.

I should say at the outset that I agree with Schwitzgebel’s view – not because he persuaded me (though I think he is pretty persuasive), but because his picture of inner experience matches mine. I have ruminated  for decades about how one might depict the stream of someone’s experience without simplifying and reifying it. And all my graduate school research concerned phenomenology. However, phenomenology is not a topic that gets you research grants, and so I moved on to becoming a psychotherapist, and my fascination resumed the status of a private quirk. I was astounded and delighted to discover this book by someone who is fascinated by the texture of consciousness as I am, and has researched it, and has reached many of the same conclusions I have.

NAIVE INTROSPECTIONISM

Perplexities of Consciousness is an introspection-based case against what Schwitzgebel terms “naive introspectionism,” the view famously stated by Descartes, but also expressed in more modern language by Scott Alexander, on his blog Astral Codex Ten.

People can’t be wrong about their own experiences. . . .someone says they don’t feel hungry, maybe they’re telling the truth, and they don’t feel hungry. Or maybe they’re lying.. . . But there isn’t some third option, where they honestly think they’re not experiencing hunger, but really they are. . . .If we say that someone’s perception of Jesus standing in front of them is a hallucination, we don’t mean anything about the experience the little homunculus in their neocortex is having. The homunculus is receiving the exact same packet, 3a09e1508ff7, that St. Peter received in 30 AD when Jesus was standing in front of him. 

Almost everyone, myself included, feels instinctively that naive introspectionism is obviously valid. We know we may misidentify and misjudge things in the external world, but we have a strong sense of being quite clear about our inner percepts, thoughts, and feelings. The idea that we could be uncertain or wrong about these experiences seems not only clearly false, but almost incomprehensible – false in such a profound way that one can barely put into words the nature of the error. Our minds seem built to default to the Cartesian model. Even after we realize that including a homunculus in the model does not explain how sense data is transformed into experiences, but just creates an

infinite recursion, we are loath to give him up. Scott Alexander, discussing whether people can be wrong about their own experiences, comments ambivalently on his own Cartesian model:

I feel like there ought to be some specific ‘experiencer’ in the brain, with a bunch of algorithms and filters feeding stuff to the experiencer and although the experiencer might be deceived about the world . ..,it cannot be deceived about its experience.

He feels there’s a fallacy somewhere in this model, “but I’m also nervous rejecting that fallacy!”

I think Scott hits the nail on the head when he confesses to being nervous about giving up the Cartesian model. The problem is that it’s very hard to come up with an alternative model, and difficult to live with simply not having one. We crave a believable model that captures the relationship between the world, our physical selves, and our experiences. The relationship between our physical selves and the world does not seem perplexing. The difficult bits to model are the relationship between the inner conscious self and the world and the one between the body (including the brain) and the inner self. Try to come up with a good analogy for either one of these. Conscious inner self is to body as . . . captain is to ship? . .. flame is to fuel? . . . energy and work is to engine? (No, those are all terrible!) As ghost is to machine? (Yikes, no, that’s a cynical joke implying there is no conscious, non-physical self). Conscious inner self is to world as . . . whale is to krill? . . . puppeteer is to puppet theater? . . . buzz is to weed ?. . . (OK, I give up. How did you do?)

It seems to me that one particular feature of the  Cartesian model makes it especially compelling: It depicts what goes on inside the experiencing mind as an inner version of ordinary life in the world. We are, for instance, inclined to think of certain inner experiences as private, mental versions of real-world things: mental images are inner photographs, thoughts are inner monologues, dreams and fantasies are inner movies. Also, the Cartesian model seems to share some important features of real life in the physical world. One is that most of the entities we encounter in the real world are familiar, easy to tell apart, easy to describe. It’s effortless to distinguish between cars, trees, and dogs, and simple to describe what each is like. Analogously, most of us seem to feel that we can easily do the same regarding the familiar entities of inner life – say thoughts, feelings, and mental images. A second feature of real world life is that we are clear about what is outside of our body, and what inside at any given time. In the Cartesian model, there is the same clarity regarding what is inside or outside of our mind. The outer world, we feel, gives us data via our sense organs, but does not otherwise intrude.  Our brain processes the data and delivers it to our inner experiencing self in the form of percepts. We then integrate and interpret the percepts and choose a response using information and preferences stored in our brain, again without the world intruding.

  In short, there are some  very compelling reasons for us all to default to what Schwitzgebel calls naive introspectionism. Perplexities of Consciousness is a deconstruction of our default. 

THE CAR-DOG-TREE TEST

Schwitzgebel describes himself as a philosopher of psychology, and one of the pleasures of his book is that it is not the sort of supersmart obsessathon one usually lumbers through when reading philosophy. Schwitzgebel actually reports on the research literature concerning various inner experiences as well as on data he has gathered himself via interviews and studies. He is looking for answers to two questions regarding these experiences. You can think of his questions as the Car-Dog-Tree test (CDT for short): (1) Are people able to do regarding one of the denizens of inner experience – a thought, a mental image, a dream – what they are able to do with the familiar inhabitants of the external world? Can they describe the inner experience with ease and confidence, as they would a car, a dog or a tree? Or are the experiences what Schwitzgebel describes as “gelatinous” – amorphous, changeable and hard to describe? (2) If people do feel able to describe the experience clearly, is their description accurate? I’m going to summarize Schwitzgebel’s investigations of 5 phenomena, and the CDT results for each. Three of them involve brief experiments you can easily do yourself as you read along.

 Performing Echolocation 

Many blind people navigate space using echolocation, the process of detecting features of the environment that do not themselves produce sound using information about how sounds in the environment change as they pass through or bounce off these features. Some are so good at it that they are able to ride bicycles and to walk fairly confidently in unfamiliar places. They tap their canes or make small vocalizations, and form a picture of the space around them by noticing distinctive qualities of the sound in that space. 

Schwitzgebel reviewed and extended the research on human echolocation. He confirmed that the blind could indeed navigate a room using their sense of sound, and also found that sighted subjects in blindfolds could be taught to do the same. The sighted subjects could even learn to distinguish at rates better than chance between triangles, squares and circles when speakers emitting sound were placed directly behind the shapes. And yet, even though the sighted subjects had been instructed in using sound to sense objects, those who learned how to use echolocation to identify objects and empty spaces around them did not seem to gain the same awareness of the process as people do of, say, using the length of shadows to estimate how late in the day it is. And the blind people who had spontaneously developed the ability to navigate via echolocation seemed to have no introspective access to the process. Indeed, several misattributed their ability to detect objects around them to other sense experiences, such as a feeling of pressure on the face, which grew stronger the closer they came to an object; or to air currents. 

None of these subjects pass Schwitzgebel’s CDT.  The sighted ones who had been trained did not have introspective access to the process of using sound changes to identify space and objects around them; they were somehow using the sound without experiencing the process of doing so. And the blind subject’s introspective report, while confident, was wrong. Blind people cannot be recognizing the size and proximity of solid objects near them by changes in air pressure or air currents, because these things do not vary systematically with proximity and size.

Thought

Put down this review and think for 30 seconds or so about what you are going to do after you finish reading. Now, Schwitzgebel requests, “consider. Was there something it was like to have that thought? Set aside any visual or auditory imagery you may have had. The question is, was there something further in your experience, something besides the imagery, something that might qualify as a distinctive phenomenology of thinking?” Schwitzgebel is here probing for the answer to the first item on the CDP test: distinctive and describable, as opposed gelatinous. His question, “was there something it was like?” sounds a bit odd, perhaps. It is a way of asking whether something is describable. 

Schwitzgebel does not describe a research study that examined subject’s accounts of the process of thinking, but instead recounts a memorable meeting of philosophers in 2002, when 25 of them spent a full week discussing whether there is a distinctive phenomenology of thought, separate from the words and images that are sometimes part of thinking. They ended the week still divided into 3 camps regarding the matter. There are several possible explanations of this result. Maybe thought is highly gelatinous – so hard to describe and get a handle on that the philosophers could not even agree on whether it exists. Or, maybe there is substantial variation between different people in what thought is like, and each camp was confident and correct in identifying their style of thought. Or maybe all the camps were wrong.  Still, the fact that 25 people spent something like 60 hours discussing thought and were unable to reach a consensus about what, if anything, thought is like is certainly a demonstration of how hard it is to describe thought.

To give us an example to work from, here’s a brief train of thought that I had while writing this section: I wondered why Schwitzgebel had not had subjects do thought sampling and describe the thoughts they had when signaled. Then I thought that if he had used his grad students as subjects that might have been awkward both for him and for them. This thought was accompanied by a low-detail mental image of a desktop, and on the far side of it an unhappy-looking woman, the grad student being asked her thoughts. There were no words in my thought. It did not involve some subvocal phrase like “thought sampling” or “would be awkward.” And the only image was the one I described. I feel sure that my sample involved actual wordless, imageless thought. In fact it has to have, because the lone image certainly does not capture the entirety of what went through my mind. I do, though, find it nearly impossible to describe what the thought element was like. The best I can do is to say it was a series of ideas, unaccompanied by words or pictures – the idea that Schwitzgebel could have done thought sampling, the idea that I did not understand why he had not, the idea that perhaps it would have been awkward.

Visual Percepts

If you would like to try this one, read these instructions then close your computer or phone and look steadily at some part of your desk or other surface in front of you. I’m going to let Schwitzgebel himself administer the instructions for this one: “Consider your visual experience. . .  Does it seem to have a center and a periphery, differing somehow in clarity, precision of shape or color, richness of detail? Yes? It seems that way to me too. Now, how broad is that sense of clarity? Thirty degrees? More? Does it seem that a fairly wide swath of the desk (a square foot?) presents itself clearly in experience at any one moment?” 

Schwitzgebel has given these instructions to numerous subjects, many of them graduate students in philosophy – presumably bright, thoughtful people – and most of them were in agreement with the characterization of the visual experience he suggests: A broad swath in the center of what they are looking at is clear, with the shapes, colors and textures sharply defined. But every one of them who endorsed this description of their experience was mistaken, and if you agreed with Schwitzgebel’s characterization you were wrong too. Actually our area of precision at detecting color and shape is not 30 degrees wide, but only 1 or 2 degrees. A quick way to demonstrate this is to select a playing card from the deck, and then without looking at it hold it to one side at arm's length while you stare straight ahead. Slowly move it towards your line of sight, and you will discover the card has to be within a degree or 2 of directly in front of you in order for you to be able to determine its color, suit and value.

An accurate description of visual experience of one’s desktop at any given moment is that there is a very small center of clarity surrounded by an indistinct background that becomes less and less distinct with distance from the center. Schwitzgebel’s subjects in this introspective study were unable to give an accurate account of their visual percept. Their experience was that they were able to see in a single glance the entirety of the central square foot or so of a desktop. They were confident, but wrong. Eventually most, if they practiced for a while attending carefully to what they could see truly clearly, gained introspective access to their actual visual percept on occasions when their eyes were fixed on one spot.

I myself have not tried very hard to develop this skill, and while I believe Schwitzgebel regarding how small my area of focus is, I continue to experience the whole center of my desk as quite visible all the time. Occasionally if I stare fixedly at one spot and try hard I believe I am able to actually recognize that everything around that spot is sort of a blur. But it is hard to hold on to this accurate percept — and I am not sure whether I am just fooling myself into believing I am freeing myself of the illusion that I can see the whole center of the desk. The correct percept definitely has a gelatinous quality.

I believe I know the source of the illusion that one is continuously seeing the whole of the desk center clearly: It is just not useful to know what my percepts would be if I stared at a single spot on my desk while trying to get a good look at the post-it 5 degrees to the right of my line of vision. If I want to get a good look at the post-it, I effortlessly flick my eyes 5 degrees to the right. In fact while I’m at my desk my eyes are probably in motion most of the time, glancing from thing to thing so that within the span of a couple seconds I get a good look at every single thing in the center of the desk. I think that when I’m looking at any one spot my visual system kind of grandfathers in all the things I could see almost instantaneously at that moment by flicking my eyes – and also all the things I have seen there day after day – and registers everything in the center of the desk as clearly visible in the here and now.

Colors in dreams

Do dreams have color? Quite a few researchers have surveyed the public about dream characteristics, including the presence or absence of color in dreams. From about 1930 to 1960, the consensus of introspectionist researchers was that most people denied dreaming in color. As of approximately 1960 there was a sudden shift, with most people reporting color in their dreams, and people continue to report color up through the present day. There are two possible explanations for this remarkable shift. One is that something about modern life changed the nature of dream experience in about 1960. In that case, the people now saying that their dreams are in color are reporting accurately. The other explanation is that dreams did not change, but around 1960 something happened that pushed people to remember and describe their dreams in a different, and incorrect, way.

Schwitzgebel is inclined to the latter view, and is able to offer two pieces of data in support of it: First, 1960 is about when entertainment media changed from black and white to color. Perhaps, suggests Schwitzgebel, movies provided people with a model for thinking of what their dreams were like. Perhaps the color in someone’s reported dream sort of seeped into the dream from that model, rather than from the dream itself, just as someone’s knowledge that they know their desktop well seeps into their report of how much of it they can see clearly at a given moment. Of course it is also possible that seeing a lot of entertainment media in color might be causing more of our dreams to be in color. Still, as Schwitzgebel points out, we all look at a multicolored real world every day of our lives. Why would color in a few daily hours of entertainment media put color in our dreams when everyday life has not?

 A second bit of evidence in favor of Schwitzgebel’s view comes from dream reports. (While some dream researchers surveyed subjects about presence or absence of certain things in their dreams, some collected reports of actual dreams.) We have dream reports going back to 1940. If you calculate what fraction of words in dream reports are color words, the number has remained unchanged from 1940 to the present: approximately 0.2 percent. If many more dreams were in color beginning around 1960, surely some of those colors would have made their way into subjects’ accounts of their dreams.

There is no way to prove that the world’s dreams did not suddenly acquire color in approximately 1960, but I find Schwitzgebel’s case that it was reports that changed, not dreams, pretty persuasive. And if he is right, then current dream reports represent another instance of people’s report of their phenomenology being simply wrong.

Mental Images

In the 1870’s Frances Galton administered to several hundred men a questionnaire about the vividness of their mental imagery. Now you, too, can be a Galton subject, and this is a particularly good experiment to try, because we are going to delve more deeply into the results. Galton asked his subjects to visualize their breakfast table. In order to have all readers who try this experiment have comparable experiences I am asking you here to picture instead The Statue of Liberty, as viewed at midday from directly in front of it. Take some time to picture it as well as you can. Then, as you do, answer Galton’s questions (I have reworded them to make them apply to the statue). I am not sure what format the answers Galton collected were, but how about if you use a scale of 0 to 4 for each of the 3 questions: So, for question 1, “0” means there is no illumination, & “4” means your image is as bright as the actual scene would be. After you make your three ratings, add them up to get a total vividness score.

Illumination: Is the image dim or fairly clear? Is its brightness comparable to that of the actual scene?

Definition: Are all the parts of the statue pretty well defined at the same time, or do parts of it come into clear focus only when you mentally look right at them?

Coloring: Are the colors of all the various parts of the statue quite distinct and natural?

And there’s one more task. Please answer the questions below about details of the statue’s appearance in your mental image. They get progressively more difficult. Once you reach the ones that are impossible for you to answer, just leave off.

1) Which hand is holding the torch?

2) Is the statue’s face smiling, frowning, or serious?

3) How many spikes are coming out of her headdress?

4) She is mostly the greenish-blue of tarnished copper, but there are 2 areas, not counting the brownish platform she is standing on, that are very definitely not blue- green. What are the areas and what color are they?

5) For the hand holding the torch, how many of her fingers can you see at least part of?

6) She is draped in a loose garment with many folds falling downward. Most folds do not go straight down, but run diagonally. Which way do most of them run from your point of view – down and to your left, or down and to your right?

There was a great deal of variability in the reports Galton collected, with many men claiming they could produce no mental image at all, and also many saying that their images were indistinguishable from the actual sight of their breakfast table. The interesting and important question for Schwitzgebel is how to interpret this variability. Does it reflect the subjects’ actual variability in the ability to form mental images? Or is the actual variability much less, in which case some of the subjects were making errors in judging their mental images?\

This is a tough one to call. On the one hand, there certainly is enormous variability in the ability to draw, with some people of normal intellect being unable to draw anything better than stick figures, while others are able to paint the Mona Lisa. On the other hand, drawing is partly a learned skill, while forming mental images seems like basic mental equipment. Is it plausible there would be this much variability in basic mental equipment?. To use Schwitzgebel’s words about this matter, “human variability, though impressive, usually keeps to certain limits. For example, some people’s feet are lean and bony, some fat and square, yet all show a common design: skin on the outside, stout bones at the heel, long bones through the middle into the toes, appropriately arranged nerves and tendons. . . . Human livers may be larger or smaller, but none are made of rubber or attached to the elbow.” So one of Schwitzgebel’s arguments against the validity of Galton’s subjects’ reports is that it is implausible that there would be so much variation among normal people in the ability to perform an ordinary mental process.

Schwitzgebel also brings some data to bear on the question of whether Galton’s subjects were giving accurate reports. Reported vividness of mental imagery lends itself well to testing, because there are tasks that would surely be easier for those with vivid mental images: tests of visual memory, visual creativity, mental rotation, and other spatial tasks such as mental folding. However, research up through the 1980’s found virtually no correlation between reported vividness of mental imagery and scores on various tasks that seem as though they would be far easier for people with vivid mental imagery. A 1995 review and meta-analysis of 250 studies in this area found only a spotty (true for some subgroups but not others) relationship between imagery vividness and spatial memory, and no relationship between reported vividness and performance on 3 other tasks that should be easier for those with vivid images. While the author of the review suggests that further research is needed to flesh out the promise of the spotty and smallish positive results that his meta-analysis turned up, Schwitzgebel’s take is that several hundred studies with mostly negative results are enough, and we can fairly conclude that reported mental imagery vividness is unrelated to ability to perform tasks that call for high vividness. I’m inclined to agree.

It’s possible that vividness ratings do not measure whatever imaging ability makes the test tasks easier, but it seems likelier that the problem is that vividness ratings do not capture vividness. In other words, many of Galton’s subjects rated their vividness incorrectly. They were wrong, as the blind echolocators were about how they navigated, and the desk-gazers were about how much they could see. This then would be a case of subjects failing the second question on the CDT test: Their judgment of what their experience is like is incorrect.

Let’s evaluate Schwitzgebel’s case by looking at Galton’s test from a different angle, using our Statue of Liberty measures. First, how did you do with rating your image on Galton’s scales? Personally, I found the rating almost impossible to do. To me it seems that the 3 questions Galton asked about subjects’ images betray a deep failure to grasp what mental images are like. As it happens, one of Galton’s subjects shared my view, and with fine Victorian articulation rejected Galton’s questionnaire as profoundly wrongheaded:

These questions presuppose assent to some sort of proposition regarding the “mind’s eye” and the “images” which it sees . . . This points to some initial fallacy . . . It is only by a figure of speech that I can describe my recollection of a scene as a “mental image” which I can “see” with my “mind’s eye: . . . I do not see it. . . . any more than a man sees the thousand lines of Sophocles which under due pressure he is ready to repeat.

This irate fellow’s point is that calling a mental image an “image” is really a figure of speech. It is sort of like referring to someone’s ambition as a “flame within.” And just as you do not measure ambition by taking someone’s body temperature, so you do not measure the quality of mental images by rating them on scales appropriate for photographs. My experience was that my mental image of the Statue of Liberty was not at all like a photograph. It was unlike either a good, clear photo or a bad, blurry faded one. My image was certainly lacking in something. But what it lacked was not brightness, definition or color – rather it lacked . . . I guess the right word is specificity.

Let’s turn to the 6 questions asking about small details of the image. If you got all of them right then you have a truly extraordinary ability to form mental images. But I’m guessing that everyone found themselves unable to answer them all. My failure point was number of spikes coming out of the statue’s head dress. (Yours may have been on a different item. If so, the ideas here still apply.)

Here is an image of the Statue of Liberty’s head. There are 7 spikes.

While I cannot count the spikes on my mental image, I clearly have an idea of about how many there were. I would definitely notice the error if shown an image with way more than 7 spikes.

or way fewer.

But I could not count the spikes on her head in my image. Why not?

The image was not too dim for the spikes to be visible.

And it was not too blurry for them to be countable.

   Was something blocking my view of the spikes?  Nope.

Was the image just blank in the area where the spikes were? Nope.

OK, this is what my image was like in the spike area.

If I showed you my image of the entire Statue of Liberty, it would have many similar notations: “general impression of fingers at base of torch,” “general impression of many fabric folds in the long garment.” Of course the printed words did not appear on my image. They’re a way of indicating that I felt I had knowledge about something, but that it was not represented visually in the image. My mental image was not fully an image, in the way a photograph of the Statue of Liberty is. It seems to have been an amalgam of actual visual details and things I know. Maybe it’s a sort of thought/image hybrid? Overall, my image is highly gelatinous. It is changeable. And it is extremely hard to describe what having it is like.

If you gave fairly high vividness ratings (say a total score of 6 or more) to your Statue of Liberty image, yet were unable to answer all the questions about details, that result is good grounds for you wonder whether your mental image, like mine, was not exactly an image.  An actual image, even one of only so-so brightness and clarity, would have made it possible to answer all six of the questions about details.

DISMANTLING THE NAIVE INTROSPECTIONIST MODEL

Applying the Car-Dog-Tree test to people’s reports of the 5 phenomena above turns up some persuasive evidence that having these inner experiences is very unlike looking at dogs, cars and trees. The inner are quite difficult to recognize and describe clearly and accurately. Some experiences were amorphous and nearly impossible to describe (thoughts, mental images and, for me at least, visual images). For others, subjects gave confident descriptions of the phenomenology, but they were wrong (echolocation, quality of our visual percepts of things right in front of us, maybe vividness ratings and probably dream colors). Perplexities of Consciousness describes investigations of quite a few additional bits of phenomenology: the apparent changes in the size and shape of things when viewed from different angles and distances; afterimages; hearing the difference tones when 2 notes are played; emotions; whether there are ongoing tactile sensations from every part of the body. Overall the pattern of results for these other phenomena is similar. 

The picture Schwitzgebel’s results give of inner experience is that it is not at all like experience in the external world, which is made of entities we recognize and describe easily. These results challenge our default introspectionist model, in which our brain delivers algorithmically filtered and organized sense data to us in the form of clear and recognizable inner experiences, which we then contemplate and work with to produce big-picture knowledge, action plans, opinions etc. If Schwitzgebel’s findings are correct, many of our deliveries are amorphous and indescribable, and others are simply false information. Schwitzgebel’s results also challenge our intuitive model in another way. In the naive model, that data arrives pure and unshaped. What we  receive is shaped by our brain, using templates and libraries of our own. But several of Schwitzgebel’s studies suggest that external factors shape our actual experiences and the categories we put them into It seems likely that color or the lack of it in the movies and television programs we watch influences not what our dream experience is like, but how we remember and describe it. In the desktop percept task, it seems plausible that our knowledge that we can see any item on our desktop with a quick, effortless flick of the eye seeps into our actual percept when we are staring at the desk center, making us believe we can see the whole center. In fact, as Schwitzgebel suggests, it may be that quite a lot of our phenomenology is not the result purely of our personal neurological filters and algorithms operating on sense data, but is shaped partly by expectations acquired from life experience or other people:

 I know better what is in the burrito I am eating than I know my gustatory experience as I eat it. I know it has cheese. In describing my experience I resort to saying, vaguely, that the burrito tastes “cheesy” without any very clear sense of what that involves. Maybe in fact I am merely – or partly – inferring. The thing has cheese, so I must be having a taste experience of “cheesiness.” . . .I doubt we can fully disentangle such inferences from more “genuinely introspective” processes.

Overall, I’d say Schwitzgebel’s findings pretty well trash the idea that naive introspectionism is the right model of what is going on in our interiors.  And in fact after recounting the results I’ve described, Schwitzgebel rests his case.

In my view, then, we are prone to gross error, even in favorable circumstances of extended reflection, about our ongoing emotional, visual and cognitive phenomenology. . . . The introspection of current conscious experience, far from being secure, nearly infallible, is faulty, untrustworthy, and misleading, not just sometimes a little mistaken, but frequently and massively mistaken, about a great variety of issues. If you stop and introspect now, there is probably very little you should confidently say you know about your own current phenomenology. . . . The tomato in my hand is stable. My visual experience as I look at the tomato shifts with each saccade . . . .My thoughts, my images, my itches, and my pains all leap away as I think about them, or remain only as interrupted, theatrical versions of themselves. Nor can I hold them still, even as artificial specimens – as I reflect on one aspect of the experience, it alters and grows, or it crumbles.

WINE/KLEIN

If Schwitzgebel is right, we are not the sort of entity we intuitively feel ourselves to be: a container with sense organs on the outside – with a private and unbreachable interior to which our brain delivers the results of its various processes in the form of clear and recognizable data – which we then identify, and use to make higher order identifications and judgments.  Even a little introspective self examination tells us that a great deal of what we experience is amorphous, changeable and impossible to get a handle on, and that some things that we experience as pure, unprocessed perceptions are just wrong. And, worst of all, Schwitzgebel’s results tell us that a fair amount of how we label and categorize our various inner experiences is shaped by ideas and categories and images we have somehow imported without intending to, and some of them are probably incorrect.

 We are not sitting in the middle of the sealed container of self, receiving pure, accurate and recognizable packets of information, and putting them together like legos, following our private preferences and goals, to form beliefs, plans, etc. In fact we are less like wine bottles than we are like Klein bottles. It’s very unsettling. Have a drink.

THE INFINITELY ELASTIC STUFF OF OUR OWN NONEXISTENCE

If we are not what we think we are, what are we? Clearly our conscious experience is not the sort of Santa’s Workshop we imagine, in which information about the world is delivered to us in simple, granular form which we then shape by processes that are done consciously and deliberately, processes that we can access introspectively if we elect to and change by an application of will if we prefer to.

Even within the Santa’s Workshop model we recognize that information does not generally arrive in the form of raw sense data.  Instead, granules arrive already labelled as “the view of my desktop,” “mental image of the Statue of Liberty,” or “remembered image of rainy street from last night’s dream.”  But we feel that if we wanted to examine the pure sensory data of such labelled granules, we could — just for the fun of it, or as a way of double-checking the accuracy of the label. Schwitzgebel has given some powerful evidence that that is not the case. Intensive introspective examination of the sensory details that actually are accessible has turned up some material that is mislabelled, and other material that is “gelatinous” — vague, changeable, impossible to describe clearly. The labels, right or wrong, cannot be removed.  They were applied by a part of our brain to which we do not have introspective access, and which we cannot control.  It seems as though what is really arriving in consciousness is a label, the accuracy of which we do not doubt, accompanied by incomplete and amorphous bits of sensory data whose poor quality we do not notice.

So the brain, and not our homunculus and not our conscious self, is interpreting the world? It should come as no surprise that something  is in charge of the processes by which raw sensory data regarding our surroundings is labeled. After all, we mostly manage to make our way through life, mostly acting in a way that others seem to find comprehensible.  And since it is clear that we would not be able to function if all we had to go on was the gelatinous and/or simply inaccurate data accessible to introspection, it must be that quite a lot is going on in the brain that is not accessible to introspection. How much? Well, at the very least, some process we cannot observe is constructing our visual experience of our desktop, our mental images, our sense of what our dreams were like.  They arrive pre-labeled, and the labeled experiences, while perhaps bearing labels that are not strictly accurate, work fine in practice.  It seems likely that many other experiences of about the same level - smallish, discrete percepts, images etc. — also arrive pre-labeled: our memories of what various people and things look like, our percepts of common objects and scenes, our recall of last night’s dream and last week’s daydream.  We are not experiencing these things at some raw sensory level and deducing what they represent, we are accepting a labelled package and experiencing it as complete and accurate in its underlying details.

 What about higher-order processing? Identifying the objects and events around us is only the beginning. These basics are immediately processed in higher order ways that take into account relevant stored information, memories, emotions, etc. to produce a certain take on what is happening at the moment; and, further down the line, our take may have in impact on our opinions, plans, goals and feelings.  Schwitzgebel touches only briefly on such higher order processing. For example, he wonders whether he really enjoys Christmas, or is merely accepting the “wonderful and special time” label that we apply to what is usually a bundle of diverse Christmas-related experiences spread over several days. So at least as regards Christmas, he wonders whether the phenomology he could access intospectively would be clear enough to label confidently as “joyous,” or, for that matter, as anthing else. But other sources, too, challenge our sense that we arrive at our opinions via some private and uncontaminated inner judgment of what we feel and believe, carried out in ways we can observe and recount. Now and then we encounter unpleasant truths framed by cognitive psychologists and sociologists that challenge our sense that we are self-constructed in the way we feel ourselves to be:  People who sincerely believe they are free of race prejudice are found to be less likely to hire candidates named Ebony. Shoppers like a given pair of shoes better if they cost more. Our attitudes about various issues, which we feel we have arrived at via much private thought, can be predicted pretty well by our demographics. It seems worthwhile to at least try on the idea that a great deal of what we report as our life experience  and our opinions and the kind of person we are is the product of brain processes to which we have no more introspective access than we do to the current activity of our livers.

And yet, people who have known all this for years, including me, still somehow manage to experience themselves as crystal globes of clear vision and deliberate personal choice. We seem to be built to need our self to have certain qualities, and to be good at stretching the truth until it meets that need.