I'm still working my way through it but wanted to let you know that the formatting got messed up. Take a look at the part under "NAIVE INTROSPECTIONISM"
I found your review interesting throughout, but I should caveat that with the fact that a) I enjoy ethical philosophy enough to have finished a bachelor's degree in it, of which a substantial portion was phenomenology, and b) like most neuroatypical people, being able to accurately understand and emulate how other people think is a skill I am required to cultivate, often manually. For both these reasons, my interest feels more like "I, too, have a pre-existing investment in this topic" than "your presentation of the topic overcame my indifference".
By far the strongest section is in the middle, with the examples of how naive introspectionism is intuitive, convincing, and in some sense provably wrong. The Statue of Liberty segment could have felt a little belabored, but the alternate illustrations were entertaining and made it feel rewarding, as well as very quickly making it very clear what the brain *isn't* doing; I would say it is my favorite piece of the review.
I thought the ending was very abrupt, and it kind of threw me. I was thinking about how to apply what I'd learned to the jhana question, looking forward to coming back to the concepts with an example of how they fit together, and then the review was over in one line. I find that some kind of "tell me what you told me" conclusion is invaluable in this format. It lets me know that you've already told me all or most of the things I should pick up from this, and so gives me a chance to check that what I've got is a cohesive set of ideas. It also lets me know what you expect me to have noticed, so if I see something in the conclusion that I completely don't remember I know I've missed something substantial. I'm not sure if you meant for the end of "A DIFFERENT MODEL" to be the conclusion, and the Jhana discussion as a sort of epilogue-by-way-of-case-study, but as is, I was pretty discombobulated.
As for why the brain settles so stubbornly on naive introspectionism, I freely admit my inability to explain it, so this next section is going to be spitballing with a side of personal anecdote more than any kind of coherent theorizing. I think that human minds have some kind of *very strong* psychological need to tell themselves "your perception of the world is accurate and you understand what's going on". The eyes section stood out to me especially because, as I've previously mentioned, I lost a substantial amount of vision in my early 30s. This includes a brief period where my eyes stopped doing saccades in a way that my brain could filter out correctly. As a result, I became acutely aware of how much moving an eye does. This stopped partly because the eye recovered some, and partly because my brain adjusted to how my eye sees now; I can remember what my vision was like at that time, but it is more-or-less impossible to "revert" my vision to that state. Why is my mind so good at hiding this from me that that's the only time I can recall in my life to date where the illusion broke down?
I liked this one a lot, I'd say it it's the best one we've looked at so far (apologies to Nine Dimensions, Rolaran and myself). Certainly an interesting subject, the parts about the phenomenology of echolocation and ordinary sight especially.
It's not a subject have much knowledge about, but I remember feeling a little dissatisfied with the discussion when Scott covered Jhana and the stuff about mental imagery (not sure if that's been featured in ACX, but it's been discussed in the subreddit a fair amount). I had a vague sense there was some important perspective missing. Something along the lines of "Obviously nobody can "see" things in their mind, you'd be a world class artist if you could, people are just confused about their internal experiences." The concept of naïve introspections seems to articulate that idea more clearly and solidified it in my mind.
I thought commenters (and Scott from what I remember) were much too credulous that apahantasia was even a real phenomenon and not just some misunderstanding. Maybe this review could have cleared up the confusion.
I've never really read much about it, but consciousness has always been something I found intriguing, like most people I'm sure. Particularly that mysterious quality it has in being maybe the only non-material part of reality and the philosophical question of why we experience anything anyway, and aren't just Cartesian automata. I'm not sure if naïve introspection's claim that our experience of experiences isn't reliable (assuming that's a fair summary) goes some way to explaining that mystery or just deepens it even more.
I thought you presented NI clearly and I found it compelling. Still, subjectively phenomological experience certainly feel very definite, especially when you notice them change over time. Personally I quite clearly remember having "clearer" mental visualisations and more of them than I do now (basically none), I'm wondering that change was actually illusionary now. And I was bilingual growing up and I'm pretty sure my "internal monologue" was in a different language back then and that it's been more or less active over time. Even though I had some scepticism that "internal monologues" were a real thing and not just ordinary thinking, which NI seems to suggest might have been correct.
As I understand it there are different schools of thought regarding phenomenology in philosophy, I' be interested to know if Schwitzgebel's view lends support or aligns with any of them in particular.
The main body of the review was definitely engaging, but I wasn't so much hooked by the introduction. I didn't get much from the bit about walking down stairs at the start, maybe it would have been better to open with one of the examples from the book, maybe the try-it-at-home desk one, those felt more engaging. And also, the discussion about whether the ideas are persuasive and their implications, might be better at the end of the review, I was a bit lost about what we we're even talking about before the examples of NI were introduced. I did like the hooks promising new insights on Jhana and other stuff that's been discussed by Scott, and they were delivered on, perhaps they could be the central feature of a slimed down intro.
Overall though, interesting novel (to me at least) ideas well presented, I thought.
Thanks for the review. A really good and really thorough exploration of the ideas. I didn't read the book and I don't know much about the topic, so I don't know how many helpful things I can say.
I would have liked a recap at the end. You introduce your framework, then talk about the Jhana stuff, and then it ends. To someone who isn't familiar with this topic, another "here's what I just told you" would have been helpful. I think you raised an interesting framework for introspection but I'm going to have to think through it and then come back and read the review again to make sure I really understand it.
FWIW, I believe that I dream in color. I had heard the claim that we can't dream in color and can't create new faces (faces we've never seen before). One time I was sleeping and dreaming of looking someone in the face and seeing the color in their blue eyes and was suddenly awoken. I still had the image of the face clearly in my mind, and because I had heard that claim, was particularly aware of how it conflicted with the experience I just had. Most of the time I couldn't tell you if I dreamed in color or not, but that time I strongly believe that I did.
I liked the Statue of Liberty example. In part, because it was so clear (my image looked just like yours, with a general impression of spikes), and the images were a good break from the text. I think it's good to have breaks in the text, especially for people for whom this content is new and unfamiliar.
I don't think I fully understand your claim though. Maybe you could help me out? Given the Introspection S / Introspection O framework, can you help me understand the case when someone is mad but angrily yells, "I'm not mad". Is this a failure of Introspection O?
I noticed quite a recommend running it through Grammarly or something to clean that up. You also say both Introspection O and Intraspection O.
Thought and dreams feel to me like an imprint. When I imagine a flower, it's not like there's a picture of the flower in my mind. It's like I'm replicating the experience of looking at a flower - or, replicating the imprint that the flower makes on my mind as I look at it. And I can "recall" things about that flower by (subconsciously) observing the imprint and considering what "shape" of flower could have made it, but it's not like I'm studying an image. In fact, there are multiple potential "shapes" of flower that could have made the same imprint - so the conversion is lossy, and thus open to suggestibility (eg. colour in dreams).
I started off the review pretty disengaged. I'll agree with some of the other commenters--the Nabokov excerpt didn't do much for me. But I was invested by the end of the review.
I liked the "play along at home" sections in the middle, especially the statue of liberty experiment. It served as a good way to clarify precisely how fuzzy internal images can be. I did try the playing card experiment as well, but found that my ability to see the card was much greater than 1 or 2 degrees--it felt like maybe 10 or 15. Perhaps I was unconsciously cheating, but it did weaken the argument for me. If the argument is relying on empirical data about the unreliability of perception and my personal data contradicts that, I'm inclined to assume his overall conclusions aren't true, or, at the very least, don't apply to me, personally.
Thoughts on the ideas presented:
The idea that people are accurate in their perceptions of themselves does not seem particularly controversial to me. I've known many people (as I'm sure most have) who have wild misconceptions about themselves, or whose stated beliefs or preferences do not line up at all with their behaviors. People are exceptionally good at deluding themselves.
I think people can talk themselves into all sorts of false beliefs, especially if they're in a community that's affirming it. For example, I'm Christian, and I have known many Christians who spend a great deal of time talking about selflessness, charity, etc., but reflexively behave the way most people do: in their own self-interest above all, even when the sacrifices they'd have to make are fairly small.
A trivial example from my own life: at some point I decided I was going to make an effort to be neater. I spent two weeks keeping my apartment clean and tidy, at which point I decided I had succeeded. About a month later, I realized I was still patting myself on the back for having become a "clean person," while falling back into the exact same old untidy habits.
That said, I think the author's conclusion is stronger than I agree with. I don't believe that incorrect models of perception of the external world or false beliefs about identity imply an inability to trust all of one's internal perceptions.
I think part of this disagreement is philosophical. I think people can be wrong about perceptions or narratives they have about the external world, but it feels meaningless to say they are wrong about perceptions or narratives about their internal world, because their internal world is simply the sum of their perceptions and narratives. For example, if someone says "I'm really doing a great job at work right now," and they're missing deadlines or turning in shoddy work, it feels fair to say they're wrong. Their own definition of "great job" is probably contradicted by the reality of the situation, they're just perceiving it wrong.
But if someone says they're "going through a hard time" because they missed seeing a movie they really wanted to see, it feels like a category error to say they're wrong. While that hardship is trivial, presumably they are genuinely sad about it, and are using the phrase "a hard time" to attempt to communicate that fact. If my mom just died, I'll probably be annoyed that they're using the same language to describe something far less impactful, but I can't say they're wrong--my definition of "a hard time" is simply different from theirs.
To some extent this is just semantics, but I think there's a category of human thinking that's dealing purely with constructed ideas that have no grounding in the real world, at which point semantics becomes critically important. There may be communication breakdowns at that point, but I don't think it's meaningful to talk about "right" and "wrong."
Based on your description of the Jhana example, this feels like a big part of the dispute. "Jhana" isn't some objective thing. It's a word that's attempting to describe an internal experience. Is the twitter practitioner's Jhana exactly the same as the Buddhist's who coined the term? Probably not. But I've experienced a few very odd altered states as the result of meditation. It's not hard for me to imagine that someone could use meditation to achieve intense bliss. If I understand someone saying "I achieved Jhana" as meaning "I meditated and achieved a state of intense bliss. There's a word that seems to describe that sensation, and that word is 'Jhana', so I'm going to say 'I achieved Jhana,'" that feels trivially true.
The crucial element here, in my mind, is that the word "Jhana" is serving as a tool that attempts to communicate an internal experience. That experience may be unimaginable for someone else, but I don't think it makes sense to tell someone that they didn't have that experience. I would imagine that most of the Jhana skeptics could be convinced that the claimer did experience some interesting mental state if they sat down and had a conversation without the baggage of spiritual jargon attached.
There's something I want to get off my chest about the Jhana guy's report. It really has nothing to do with Schwitzgebel and models of the mind. To be frank, the Jhana guy's report made my bullshit detector's go off. It had a braggy, "I'm special" quality, sort of like rock climbers I've met who exaggerate the risk and difficulty of what they've recently climbed. And I felt as though someone who was able to reach Jhana, and was feeling content in life and much less plagued by horniness, sugar cravings, etc. would not put that info up on the internet -- he'd just live his life.
A second and unrelated reason why I distrusted him is that I have some close friends to whom Buddhism is very important, and so I've met a lot of Buddhists. And I've met 2 Buddhist spiritual leaders and heard a lot about 2 more from people who actually knew them. OK, so these spiritual leaders have to do a huge amount of meditation in their training, and continue to do a lot once they are spiritual leaders. And it seems like the more you meditate the likelier you are to have become able to experience jhana -- that's logical, right? So it's very likely the spiritual leaders had accessed jhana, and continued to be able to. Well 3 out of the 4 were some of the most impulse-ridden people I have ever encountered. One was a severe alcoholic who died of cirrhosis of the liver, and was chugging alcohol in the hospital during has last illness. He also had sex with a huge number of women, most of them in the sangha (congregation), many of them married. And when I say huge, I mean I heard stories about him having sex with several in one night -- it really sounding like the total number was something like a hundred women a year. Another one was a moderate alcoholic but also used a bunch of other drugs. He was gay, and had about as much sex with Buddhist men as the other did with Buddhist women -- some of them straight guys who really were not into it, but felt that the should participate as part of their spiritual development. And that leader had AIDS, did not inform his partners, and gave it to several. The third one , who was married, got very into ayahuasca and other psychedelic drugs as part of having an affair with a woman at the monastery who was also married. He eventually left the monastery he was head of, divorced his wife and married the other woman, and still does a shit ton of psychedelics. So, I'm not seeing a lot of support in the lives of these guys for the idea that jhana reduces cravings for pleasure. Also, of the Buddhists I know, those who have been practicing for a long time do not seem to me to have any less trouble with eating, weight, drinking and drug use that anyone else of their age and background. They do have a special quality I can't put my finger on. They seem to do very little bickering or gossiping. They seem to have more kindness and acceptance of people's differences than other people. But when it comes to ice cream and drinks, they're just like everybody else -- except maybe that they seem less troubled by their own appetites. They kind of smile and spread their hands, as though to say "people just enjoy this stuff -- why get upset about it?"
Anyhow, wondering if anyone wants to weigh in about the Jhana guy.
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.
I’m sorry I’m late on this. My wife has had some health problems the past few weeks and I’ve been stretched a bit thin.
I remember you mentioning a few weeks ago that you cared a lot about prose and I can tell. It’s very good at the level of the line. I particularly enjoyed this part:
“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?)”
Looking at the comments this will be a controversial statement, but I really liked the intro with the Nabokav quote. It gave the whole review some literary flavor and also was a great example.
I think this book was a great choice for the ACX audience since they like books on consciousness. I also think it was a good choice to write on a topic that you clearly have expert knowledge of and have done graduate-level work on. You had me hooked with these questions: “Can machine-made minds become conscious? What is mental illness? Can some illnesses be culturally acquired?” But I felt like the review didn’t address them as much as I would have liked.
In particular, I didn’t see much direct connection though to AI. I think fleshing that out would be something the ACX audience would enjoy. However, I’m not quite sure how. It seems like everyone in the field has read “Godel, Escher, Bach” and I wonder if there’s some connection between his book and this one that would make for an interesting comparison. Not as many people are into Theory of Affect, but Brian Massumi’s essays in “Parables for the Virtual” might have some interesting connections here as well.
I think this could be tightened up. You mentioned it was 8k words. I know that the other ACX reviews are like 8k - 12k words, so maybe I’m not the typical ACX reader, but I think taking it down by a few thousand would really move it along more quickly. That might be my personal preference though.
I think the narrative could be stronger. For example, if you have sections [A, B, C] and you can re-arrange them into [B, C, A] then section A did not lead to section B. For example, you have the sections on echolocation, thought, percepts. But I think they could be arranged in any order and still make sense. That can be tough to do with non-fiction topics though.
I loved the Statue of Liberty test, and suddenly I was *very* engaged in this. I wanted more challenges. I also really enjoyed the pictures afterwards of your mental image of the spikes. It seemed to make these ideas very concrete.
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.
I'm still working my way through it but wanted to let you know that the formatting got messed up. Take a look at the part under "NAIVE INTROSPECTIONISM"
I found your review interesting throughout, but I should caveat that with the fact that a) I enjoy ethical philosophy enough to have finished a bachelor's degree in it, of which a substantial portion was phenomenology, and b) like most neuroatypical people, being able to accurately understand and emulate how other people think is a skill I am required to cultivate, often manually. For both these reasons, my interest feels more like "I, too, have a pre-existing investment in this topic" than "your presentation of the topic overcame my indifference".
By far the strongest section is in the middle, with the examples of how naive introspectionism is intuitive, convincing, and in some sense provably wrong. The Statue of Liberty segment could have felt a little belabored, but the alternate illustrations were entertaining and made it feel rewarding, as well as very quickly making it very clear what the brain *isn't* doing; I would say it is my favorite piece of the review.
I thought the ending was very abrupt, and it kind of threw me. I was thinking about how to apply what I'd learned to the jhana question, looking forward to coming back to the concepts with an example of how they fit together, and then the review was over in one line. I find that some kind of "tell me what you told me" conclusion is invaluable in this format. It lets me know that you've already told me all or most of the things I should pick up from this, and so gives me a chance to check that what I've got is a cohesive set of ideas. It also lets me know what you expect me to have noticed, so if I see something in the conclusion that I completely don't remember I know I've missed something substantial. I'm not sure if you meant for the end of "A DIFFERENT MODEL" to be the conclusion, and the Jhana discussion as a sort of epilogue-by-way-of-case-study, but as is, I was pretty discombobulated.
As for why the brain settles so stubbornly on naive introspectionism, I freely admit my inability to explain it, so this next section is going to be spitballing with a side of personal anecdote more than any kind of coherent theorizing. I think that human minds have some kind of *very strong* psychological need to tell themselves "your perception of the world is accurate and you understand what's going on". The eyes section stood out to me especially because, as I've previously mentioned, I lost a substantial amount of vision in my early 30s. This includes a brief period where my eyes stopped doing saccades in a way that my brain could filter out correctly. As a result, I became acutely aware of how much moving an eye does. This stopped partly because the eye recovered some, and partly because my brain adjusted to how my eye sees now; I can remember what my vision was like at that time, but it is more-or-less impossible to "revert" my vision to that state. Why is my mind so good at hiding this from me that that's the only time I can recall in my life to date where the illusion broke down?
I liked this one a lot, I'd say it it's the best one we've looked at so far (apologies to Nine Dimensions, Rolaran and myself). Certainly an interesting subject, the parts about the phenomenology of echolocation and ordinary sight especially.
It's not a subject have much knowledge about, but I remember feeling a little dissatisfied with the discussion when Scott covered Jhana and the stuff about mental imagery (not sure if that's been featured in ACX, but it's been discussed in the subreddit a fair amount). I had a vague sense there was some important perspective missing. Something along the lines of "Obviously nobody can "see" things in their mind, you'd be a world class artist if you could, people are just confused about their internal experiences." The concept of naïve introspections seems to articulate that idea more clearly and solidified it in my mind.
I thought commenters (and Scott from what I remember) were much too credulous that apahantasia was even a real phenomenon and not just some misunderstanding. Maybe this review could have cleared up the confusion.
I've never really read much about it, but consciousness has always been something I found intriguing, like most people I'm sure. Particularly that mysterious quality it has in being maybe the only non-material part of reality and the philosophical question of why we experience anything anyway, and aren't just Cartesian automata. I'm not sure if naïve introspection's claim that our experience of experiences isn't reliable (assuming that's a fair summary) goes some way to explaining that mystery or just deepens it even more.
I thought you presented NI clearly and I found it compelling. Still, subjectively phenomological experience certainly feel very definite, especially when you notice them change over time. Personally I quite clearly remember having "clearer" mental visualisations and more of them than I do now (basically none), I'm wondering that change was actually illusionary now. And I was bilingual growing up and I'm pretty sure my "internal monologue" was in a different language back then and that it's been more or less active over time. Even though I had some scepticism that "internal monologues" were a real thing and not just ordinary thinking, which NI seems to suggest might have been correct.
As I understand it there are different schools of thought regarding phenomenology in philosophy, I' be interested to know if Schwitzgebel's view lends support or aligns with any of them in particular.
The main body of the review was definitely engaging, but I wasn't so much hooked by the introduction. I didn't get much from the bit about walking down stairs at the start, maybe it would have been better to open with one of the examples from the book, maybe the try-it-at-home desk one, those felt more engaging. And also, the discussion about whether the ideas are persuasive and their implications, might be better at the end of the review, I was a bit lost about what we we're even talking about before the examples of NI were introduced. I did like the hooks promising new insights on Jhana and other stuff that's been discussed by Scott, and they were delivered on, perhaps they could be the central feature of a slimed down intro.
Overall though, interesting novel (to me at least) ideas well presented, I thought.
Thanks for the review. A really good and really thorough exploration of the ideas. I didn't read the book and I don't know much about the topic, so I don't know how many helpful things I can say.
I would have liked a recap at the end. You introduce your framework, then talk about the Jhana stuff, and then it ends. To someone who isn't familiar with this topic, another "here's what I just told you" would have been helpful. I think you raised an interesting framework for introspection but I'm going to have to think through it and then come back and read the review again to make sure I really understand it.
FWIW, I believe that I dream in color. I had heard the claim that we can't dream in color and can't create new faces (faces we've never seen before). One time I was sleeping and dreaming of looking someone in the face and seeing the color in their blue eyes and was suddenly awoken. I still had the image of the face clearly in my mind, and because I had heard that claim, was particularly aware of how it conflicted with the experience I just had. Most of the time I couldn't tell you if I dreamed in color or not, but that time I strongly believe that I did.
I liked the Statue of Liberty example. In part, because it was so clear (my image looked just like yours, with a general impression of spikes), and the images were a good break from the text. I think it's good to have breaks in the text, especially for people for whom this content is new and unfamiliar.
I don't think I fully understand your claim though. Maybe you could help me out? Given the Introspection S / Introspection O framework, can you help me understand the case when someone is mad but angrily yells, "I'm not mad". Is this a failure of Introspection O?
I noticed quite a recommend running it through Grammarly or something to clean that up. You also say both Introspection O and Intraspection O.
Love this.
Thought and dreams feel to me like an imprint. When I imagine a flower, it's not like there's a picture of the flower in my mind. It's like I'm replicating the experience of looking at a flower - or, replicating the imprint that the flower makes on my mind as I look at it. And I can "recall" things about that flower by (subconsciously) observing the imprint and considering what "shape" of flower could have made it, but it's not like I'm studying an image. In fact, there are multiple potential "shapes" of flower that could have made the same imprint - so the conversion is lossy, and thus open to suggestibility (eg. colour in dreams).
Answering your main questions:
I started off the review pretty disengaged. I'll agree with some of the other commenters--the Nabokov excerpt didn't do much for me. But I was invested by the end of the review.
I liked the "play along at home" sections in the middle, especially the statue of liberty experiment. It served as a good way to clarify precisely how fuzzy internal images can be. I did try the playing card experiment as well, but found that my ability to see the card was much greater than 1 or 2 degrees--it felt like maybe 10 or 15. Perhaps I was unconsciously cheating, but it did weaken the argument for me. If the argument is relying on empirical data about the unreliability of perception and my personal data contradicts that, I'm inclined to assume his overall conclusions aren't true, or, at the very least, don't apply to me, personally.
Thoughts on the ideas presented:
The idea that people are accurate in their perceptions of themselves does not seem particularly controversial to me. I've known many people (as I'm sure most have) who have wild misconceptions about themselves, or whose stated beliefs or preferences do not line up at all with their behaviors. People are exceptionally good at deluding themselves.
I think people can talk themselves into all sorts of false beliefs, especially if they're in a community that's affirming it. For example, I'm Christian, and I have known many Christians who spend a great deal of time talking about selflessness, charity, etc., but reflexively behave the way most people do: in their own self-interest above all, even when the sacrifices they'd have to make are fairly small.
A trivial example from my own life: at some point I decided I was going to make an effort to be neater. I spent two weeks keeping my apartment clean and tidy, at which point I decided I had succeeded. About a month later, I realized I was still patting myself on the back for having become a "clean person," while falling back into the exact same old untidy habits.
That said, I think the author's conclusion is stronger than I agree with. I don't believe that incorrect models of perception of the external world or false beliefs about identity imply an inability to trust all of one's internal perceptions.
I think part of this disagreement is philosophical. I think people can be wrong about perceptions or narratives they have about the external world, but it feels meaningless to say they are wrong about perceptions or narratives about their internal world, because their internal world is simply the sum of their perceptions and narratives. For example, if someone says "I'm really doing a great job at work right now," and they're missing deadlines or turning in shoddy work, it feels fair to say they're wrong. Their own definition of "great job" is probably contradicted by the reality of the situation, they're just perceiving it wrong.
But if someone says they're "going through a hard time" because they missed seeing a movie they really wanted to see, it feels like a category error to say they're wrong. While that hardship is trivial, presumably they are genuinely sad about it, and are using the phrase "a hard time" to attempt to communicate that fact. If my mom just died, I'll probably be annoyed that they're using the same language to describe something far less impactful, but I can't say they're wrong--my definition of "a hard time" is simply different from theirs.
To some extent this is just semantics, but I think there's a category of human thinking that's dealing purely with constructed ideas that have no grounding in the real world, at which point semantics becomes critically important. There may be communication breakdowns at that point, but I don't think it's meaningful to talk about "right" and "wrong."
Based on your description of the Jhana example, this feels like a big part of the dispute. "Jhana" isn't some objective thing. It's a word that's attempting to describe an internal experience. Is the twitter practitioner's Jhana exactly the same as the Buddhist's who coined the term? Probably not. But I've experienced a few very odd altered states as the result of meditation. It's not hard for me to imagine that someone could use meditation to achieve intense bliss. If I understand someone saying "I achieved Jhana" as meaning "I meditated and achieved a state of intense bliss. There's a word that seems to describe that sensation, and that word is 'Jhana', so I'm going to say 'I achieved Jhana,'" that feels trivially true.
The crucial element here, in my mind, is that the word "Jhana" is serving as a tool that attempts to communicate an internal experience. That experience may be unimaginable for someone else, but I don't think it makes sense to tell someone that they didn't have that experience. I would imagine that most of the Jhana skeptics could be convinced that the claimer did experience some interesting mental state if they sat down and had a conversation without the baggage of spiritual jargon attached.
There's something I want to get off my chest about the Jhana guy's report. It really has nothing to do with Schwitzgebel and models of the mind. To be frank, the Jhana guy's report made my bullshit detector's go off. It had a braggy, "I'm special" quality, sort of like rock climbers I've met who exaggerate the risk and difficulty of what they've recently climbed. And I felt as though someone who was able to reach Jhana, and was feeling content in life and much less plagued by horniness, sugar cravings, etc. would not put that info up on the internet -- he'd just live his life.
A second and unrelated reason why I distrusted him is that I have some close friends to whom Buddhism is very important, and so I've met a lot of Buddhists. And I've met 2 Buddhist spiritual leaders and heard a lot about 2 more from people who actually knew them. OK, so these spiritual leaders have to do a huge amount of meditation in their training, and continue to do a lot once they are spiritual leaders. And it seems like the more you meditate the likelier you are to have become able to experience jhana -- that's logical, right? So it's very likely the spiritual leaders had accessed jhana, and continued to be able to. Well 3 out of the 4 were some of the most impulse-ridden people I have ever encountered. One was a severe alcoholic who died of cirrhosis of the liver, and was chugging alcohol in the hospital during has last illness. He also had sex with a huge number of women, most of them in the sangha (congregation), many of them married. And when I say huge, I mean I heard stories about him having sex with several in one night -- it really sounding like the total number was something like a hundred women a year. Another one was a moderate alcoholic but also used a bunch of other drugs. He was gay, and had about as much sex with Buddhist men as the other did with Buddhist women -- some of them straight guys who really were not into it, but felt that the should participate as part of their spiritual development. And that leader had AIDS, did not inform his partners, and gave it to several. The third one , who was married, got very into ayahuasca and other psychedelic drugs as part of having an affair with a woman at the monastery who was also married. He eventually left the monastery he was head of, divorced his wife and married the other woman, and still does a shit ton of psychedelics. So, I'm not seeing a lot of support in the lives of these guys for the idea that jhana reduces cravings for pleasure. Also, of the Buddhists I know, those who have been practicing for a long time do not seem to me to have any less trouble with eating, weight, drinking and drug use that anyone else of their age and background. They do have a special quality I can't put my finger on. They seem to do very little bickering or gossiping. They seem to have more kindness and acceptance of people's differences than other people. But when it comes to ice cream and drinks, they're just like everybody else -- except maybe that they seem less troubled by their own appetites. They kind of smile and spread their hands, as though to say "people just enjoy this stuff -- why get upset about it?"
Anyhow, wondering if anyone wants to weigh in about the Jhana guy.
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.
I’m sorry I’m late on this. My wife has had some health problems the past few weeks and I’ve been stretched a bit thin.
I remember you mentioning a few weeks ago that you cared a lot about prose and I can tell. It’s very good at the level of the line. I particularly enjoyed this part:
“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?)”
Looking at the comments this will be a controversial statement, but I really liked the intro with the Nabokav quote. It gave the whole review some literary flavor and also was a great example.
I think this book was a great choice for the ACX audience since they like books on consciousness. I also think it was a good choice to write on a topic that you clearly have expert knowledge of and have done graduate-level work on. You had me hooked with these questions: “Can machine-made minds become conscious? What is mental illness? Can some illnesses be culturally acquired?” But I felt like the review didn’t address them as much as I would have liked.
In particular, I didn’t see much direct connection though to AI. I think fleshing that out would be something the ACX audience would enjoy. However, I’m not quite sure how. It seems like everyone in the field has read “Godel, Escher, Bach” and I wonder if there’s some connection between his book and this one that would make for an interesting comparison. Not as many people are into Theory of Affect, but Brian Massumi’s essays in “Parables for the Virtual” might have some interesting connections here as well.
I think this could be tightened up. You mentioned it was 8k words. I know that the other ACX reviews are like 8k - 12k words, so maybe I’m not the typical ACX reader, but I think taking it down by a few thousand would really move it along more quickly. That might be my personal preference though.
I think the narrative could be stronger. For example, if you have sections [A, B, C] and you can re-arrange them into [B, C, A] then section A did not lead to section B. For example, you have the sections on echolocation, thought, percepts. But I think they could be arranged in any order and still make sense. That can be tough to do with non-fiction topics though.
I loved the Statue of Liberty test, and suddenly I was *very* engaged in this. I wanted more challenges. I also really enjoyed the pictures afterwards of your mental image of the spikes. It seemed to make these ideas very concrete.
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.