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Demian Pacheco's avatar

First, about the review itself: it was a really enjoyable read for me. The topic interests me already, but I've seen many articles about similar topics that fail to grab my attention. Your writing was very engaging and I believe you've made your account quite clear. I would like to have seen your review among the finalists. If you want constructive feedback about the writing, all I have to say that a couple sentences were a bit confusing due to being a bit run-on (something I struggle with as well).

I really liked how you described the experiments described by the author. One thing that bugged me is the definition of naive intuitionism itself. I might have misunderstood it, as I started reading thinking that it was more of a tautological statement than a hard belief that our mind's processes are not influenced by the external world and that we are aware of them entirely.

Take the Echolocation experiment, for example: the blind subjects described their experience as feeling a "pressure" when they are closer to the object. What is this "pressure" that they describe? They're definitely not directly experiencing a physical pressure, as we do not directly experience anything that's outside our bodies - everything we experience goes through our sensory organs. They might or might not be experiencing a "sense of pressure" like the sense of pressure they would feel when facing the air of a blowing fan - this claim would be harder to disclaim, but as the author describes there are ways to verify this. There is a claim that is much hard to disprove though: the claim that they are "experiencing something that they call 'pressure'". This last claim, which is almost tautological, was what I used to think the "naive intuitionism" quotes you provide referred to.

I liked the Visual Percepts experiment as it describes an experience that bothers me. As a child (and in brief moments as an adult), I would see my desk / the world as the experimenters describe (with a relatively large area of precision). Most of the time now, however, I feel like I can only focus on a very small part of a picture at a time - almost like imagining the statue of liberty and having the details only come up when I pay attention to them. I try hard to get back the "wide area" view of reality, but it doesn't come back, and everything feels more like a dream than like reality. It's funny to read that the experience that I have today is actually more "realistic" than the more "real-feeling" wide-area experience I used to have.

Regarding the imagined breakfast desk / statue of liberty experiment, I self-assessed that my mental image had great illumination and coloring, but everything felt blurry and undetermined. I failed to answer all the questions about the details of the image. The "undeterminedness" of the image didn't feel unlike that that I experience looking at pictures, but with pictures I can pay attention to the details so the undefined becomes defined, while with a mental image there's no external data I can refer to and the details are completely mental.

Now coming back to my (mis)conception of what the naive intuitionism described was about, I find your proposal of a model quite interesting. For example, you say:

> So, for example, if the man with the busy job and the empty stomach says “no,” when we ask him whether he is hungry, it is not meaningless to say that he is wrong.

What does it mean to be "hungry"? I can think of three aspects to the meaning of hunger:

1 - The man's digestive system is sending "hunger" signals in some form, and the man interprets those signals as "being hungry". The doctor could measure those signals independently of the man's subjective experience, and state whether he really is hungry/not hungry. If the man claims he is receiving those signals but isn't, it can be easily disproved through such measurement.

2 - The man has an "unconscious" mental process that makes he feel hungry. He might claim that such process is affecting him right now. The doctor cannot easily measure such mental process, and the man might be mistaken about whether the process is in effect at the moment. However, his claim of being hungry through such process can be put to test through clever experiments such as the ones described on the book.

3 - The man states he is feeling hungry because he is currently feeling something and he puts that something into words as "feeling hungry". Maybe he is feeling something else entirely (such as boredom) but misattributing it to hunger - give him a game to play and he might say he was mistaken and wasn't really feeling hunger. He might be feeling nothing but "the idea of being hungry", believing he is hungry - in that case, one might be able to give him placebo "hunger pills" to stop him from being hungry. In both cases , his "hunger" is not associated with a hunger physiological process or with a mental process "independent" of his conscious. Yet his "hunger" still behaves like hunger in the sense that it makes he feels like he is crave eating. Would it really be wrong to state that that man "is hungry"? But if it is right to claim that, would the man be wrong if he later says that he "was not actually hungry, just bored"? The only statement that really stands is the statement that "the man says he is hungry at moment X". That statement can provide valuable insight on the subject's mind, and it's true by itself.

The first aspect of hunger (his body is lacking nourishment and is sending signals) can be measured directly and can be solved by giving the man food, or fixing his body's hunger signalling. The third aspect of hunger (the man says he "is hungry") is best measured through his words - they are tautologically true in this case. It can be solved by making the man stop believing he "is hungry". The second aspect might be the hardest one to solve - it does not express itself unambiguously, neither to the doctor nor to the patient.

Regarding Jhana, we can't effectively assess whether the experience know as "Jhana" is the same for Nick and for the first person to describe Jhana. It really does not seem possible to tell whether what he is feeling really is the same as what the Buddhist felt, unless there was some external aspect that was recorded by the buddhist, that we can measure. For example, if his description of Jhana somehow matched the description found in a buddhist text he hasn't read, it would be more likely that that really was the same experience.

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Nine Dimensions's avatar

The only critique I'd give about the review itself is about the structure. I feel like the intro didn't quite prepare me for what the bulk of the content would be, and I'd agree with Julius and other about the ending.

I wasn't confused or uninterested at any point - everything was well explained and engaging. I just felt a little lost in navigating the review itself (as opposed to the content) and could have used a metaphorical map with a "you are here" marker. I liked the preface from this finalist, as an example: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-mans-search-for

To pinpoint the moment of confusion for me - it probably starts with this line:

"Schwitzgebel, too, wants to really nail phenomenology. He sets out to pin down what inner experience is really like."

Which I vaguely took to mean that the book would offer some new framework for describing inner experience, and I was anticipating that the examples/thought experiments were building up to this framework. Until I realised I was most of the way through.

Overall a very interesting and enjoyable read though. And a good choice of topic - definitely a natural fit for the audience.

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