I may simply be unclear on what it means to be “wrong about the subjective quality of your own conscious experience,” but it seems to me that this post is completely irrelevant to that question. All of the evidence shows flaws in our predictive ability, our memory, and our language. I don’t see any contradictions or wrongness; indeed, I’m still unsure what such would look like. I’ll go through it step by step.
Someone predicted that people couldn’t experience echolocation. He was wrong. No evidence was offered that he could experience echolocation. Moreover, comparing the ability of the untrained to notice the difference between a T-shirt and a mixing bowl, and the ability of a bat or dolphin to render rich detail is disingenuous. But disputing the detail is besides the point: his mistake was about his abilities, not his actual experience. It’s not like he experienced echolocation and didn’t know it, or failed to and thought he did.
Does a coin look circular? This seems to be purely semantic and, if anything, a product of language. No one is disputing my ability to see a coin or predict or understand its properties. The problem is mostly whether we’re describing the image on our retina or the translation our brain maps onto it. We see an elliptical image which we almost inseverably perceive as round because of the operations our brain does. I don’t see anyone making a mistake about what coins look like, or having some erroneous experience.
When you’re asked to imagine something, your brain does one thing. When you’re asked to reflect on your imagination, or recall your brain has trouble doing so. This doesn’t seem like someone being wrong about conscious experience so much as (at most) having difficulty consciously remembering a prior experience. Where’s the error?
Dreaming in color—I don’t even see where you’re going with this. Some people do, some don’t. It changes over time. Where’s the error? Are there people who think they dream in color but don’t, or vice versa? How is this relevant?
[ETA: Further discussion suggests the argument: there isn’t a real change in frequency of color in dreams, but there is one in reporting, therefore, people are making mistakes. To that, I think there are two responses:
This evidence is very weak. It’s entirely possible that there has been a change in dream color. Since we have no idea what causes it, it’s rather hasty to say, “More (or fewer) people must be making mistakes than did before.” It’s not impossible, it’s just weak evidence where we have no understanding of the mechanism.
This is likely a language error. For many people, dreams are unlike the waking world. This is rather like the circular/elliptical coin. It’s not information about the dreams. It’s not a problem with us experiencing our dreams.]
There are things that occur below our consciousness—this seems principally an issue of memory. Our brain doesn’t register (and certainly doesn’t record) certain things. There’s no error here. It’s not that I feel I have no feet when I do, or that I feel I am not driving when I am.
It’s possible I’ve simply misinterpreted the claim you’re making. But if it’s:
you can be wrong about the subjective quality of your own conscious experience.
I really fail to see a single shred of evidence in everything you cite. You show that there are errors in our memory and our ability to predict, but you do not offer a single example of someone being wrong about the subjective quality of their own experience—it doesn’t even seem like you suggest what such error would look like.
Even if I am missing something, it still seems like your point is that “What constitutes your subjective experience is unclear” not “X is a subjective experience that is wrong.”
Dreaming in color—I don’t even see where you’re going with this. Some people do, some don’t. It changes over time. Where’s the error? Are there people who think they dream in color but don’t, or vice versa? How is this relevant?
Dream in colour? With, like, pictures? I think I mostly dream in concepts. With occasional pictures included for effect now and again.
I always have visuals in color going on in dreams. I’m not sure that I hear sounds. I get some kinesthesia. Sometimes I get concepts in the sense of “just knowing” the backstory for something in a dream. I only remember taste/smell happening once.
I’ve read that no one dreams of landing a real punch, which I assume means a plausible amount of tactile/kinesthetic input.
I read once in a book that you never eat anything in a dream. Shortly later I had a dream where I was eating my mother’s homemade pumpkin molasses muffins, and they tasted very good...and had texture in my mouth, and the satisfying solidness as I swallowed. In general, what distinguishes my dreams from reality is how the locations are similar-yet-different to real life. If I notice that “wait, this bus stop looks too similar to the one outside my rez to be a different place, but it’s not the same” then sometimes I can realize I’m in a dream. Also, my schedule gets mixed up; in a dream, I might be going to choir practice directly from class, even though I know I don’t have classes on Thursdays. All my senses are involved in dreams though, and usually fairly elaborate plots, like trying to get to class on time when things keep going wrong (buses not showing up, people coming to distract me) and I’m worried about something else.
I’ve read that no one dreams of landing a real punch, which I assume means a plausible amount of tactile/kinesthetic input.
I’ve found my dream senses work about as well as my imagination and memory do—which is, admittedly, certainly a bit fuzzier than reality, but I have all my senses.
Admittedly, upon being told I “can’t” do something in my dreams (dream in color, read in a dream, observe fine detail), I’ll usually have a dream within a week that contradicts that assertion. My subconscious is ornery like that. It’s also annoying having learned that if I pinch myself in a dream, it does in fact hurt, which lead to one dream where I was utterly convinced it wasn’t a dream until after I woke up >.>
(Inexplicably, light switches never work in my dreams. This is the sole “sign you’re dreaming” that has actually worked for me)
Interesting, thank you! I don’t recall that information on the “pinch test” last time I read.
That said, the “look at ground” has never worked for me, and I realized “look at numbers/text” doesn’t work for me when I started doing comparison price shopping in my dreams. I’ll have to try the breath holding one, but, ahh, given it’s a very familiar sensation, I doubt that test will work for me either ^^;
In a study published in the journal Human Brain Mapping, participants who were in REM “dream” sleep were also monitored by special MRI imaging designed to visualize brain activity. The researchers found activity in areas of the brain that control sight, hearing, smell, touch, arousal, sleep-wake transitions, balance and body movement.[4][5]
I get concepts in the sense of “just knowing” the backstory for something in a dream.
I heard, and then self-interrogated and found it plausible, that most of a dream is backstory. Suppose a dream lasts 5 minutes subjectively, then the dream would actually be 5 minutes of subjective backstory with a few seconds of visual images. In particular, the dream only lasts a few seconds. (I also understand that the visual images come first, perhaps semi-randomly, and then the brain overlays a story.) Also from the same Wikipedia page:
During dreaming, the primary visual cortex is inactive, while secondary areas are active. This is similar to when subjects are asked to imagine or recall a visual scene, and different from what happens when they are actually seeing the scene.[6]
In one of Patricia Garfield’s books (either Pathway to Ecstacy or Creative Dreaming), she concludes after much introspection that dreams are stories built around bodily sensations.
Like playing a MUD or being absorbed in a good book. The story, scenario and actions are just there in the brain without necessary requiring an actual visual intermediary.
Note that for many people, reading books is a very visual experience. One of my friends is an eidetic imaginer. If she reads a book, she actually sees the events in almost the same vividness as if she was witnessing them for real. (I don’t know about MUDs, but I don’t see why they should be any different.) So “like playing a MUD or being absorbed in a good book” isn’t necessarily a very useful way of describing this.
So “like playing a MUD or being absorbed in a good book” isn’t necessarily a very useful way of describing this.
Not very useful, merely the most useful way that is practical in a brief sentence. Not all inferential differences can be crossed in a few words. The second sentence comes closer, an essay would have gone further and a neuroscience textbook further still. But for those with particularly different default styles of thought actually grasping in detail the entirely different forms of experience would take extensive mental training—when possible at all. It is hard to explain to a blind guy what it is like to see when you are deaf and dumb yourself.
Actually, now I’m curious. I wonder if any blind guys have ever hooked up with deaf chicks (or vice versa or vice vice). If I were in one of the groups I would definitely set out to do it at least once, even if only briefly. The two major communication lines cut off but two brains there that would, I expect, learn to cross that chasm regardless.
The solution that came to mind was typing (with a text-to-speech or text-to-braille solution for the blind person). If the deaf person could read lips and speak understandable English (and some can), they could just talk.
The solution that came to mind was typing (with a text-to-speech or text-to-braille solution for the blind person).
That seems to be the obvious solution. The part that makes me intrigued, however is how the increased overhead of verbal communication would encourage a heavily intuitive physical language to emerge. Even more fascinating would be if the participants started their interacting as children. I would expect a full physically mediated grammar to evolve.
If the deaf person could read lips and speak understandable English (and some can), they could just talk.
I distinctly remember typing ‘deaf and dumb’. I must have edited that out while making the phrasing fit.
Me to, but unless I’m paying attention my brain often tries to reinterpret and overwrite the memory with best-fit images (and sounds, and occasional sprinkling of other senses, in abaut the same proportions that memories of real events have) when I try to recall it awake. If I hadn’t realized what was going on I could have easily thought there were carefully rendered images the whole time, and I do suspect this could be the source of a lot of people thinking exactly this...
EDIT: never mind this. I just discovered that as I keep reading this thread the memories and introspections shift in big and contradictory ways without me noticing. My current best guess is that I only have a few damaged memory fragments and that 99% of what my brain reports as memories are guesses based from what I know of how dreams work in general.
My current best guess is that I only have a few damaged memory fragments and that 99% of what my brain reports as memories are guesses based from what I know of how dreams work in general.
Sounds about right. Waking memories aren’t that much better. :)
This is my experience—I think. I don’t remember dreams very well, so it’s possible that I simply don’t remember the images or their colours, just some vestigial concepts.
I think I do this too most of the time, but this post made me question it. I think I at least sometimes have pictures in dreams, especially when I was younger. I don’t remember my dreams very often, so I have very little data.
Thanks for taking the time to point out the problem with each example.
The key issue seems to be that “subjective experience” could refer to all subjective experiences, both past and present, or it could refer to one’s current, this-moment subjective experience. The OP draws people in because it sounds like it’s going to be talking about doubting the latter—which would be pretty shocking—but it ends up as a sort of bait-and-switch because it is really talking about doubting the former, more mundane and familiar sense, where one simply fails to accurately recall one’s past experience or fails to catch all aspects of one’s experiential phenomena as they whizz by.
All of the evidence shows flaws in our predictive ability, our memory, and our language. I don’t see any contradictions or wrongness...
Of course it’s logically possible that we could still be ‘right’ about our subjective experience but then have our model be immediately corrupted by memory and language, but given the above I see little reason to expect that.
But even if we are ‘right’ about our subjective experiences, but then our ability to think correctly about our subjective experience is immediately corrupted by memory and language, that still blocks our ability to use subjective experience for certain grounding in a foundationalist epistemology, for example.
It’s a bit more than a “logical possibility.” Consider these two options:
We actually dream in color, but we experience it as black and white, and remember it and report it correctly.
We actually dream in color, but we don’t remember it very well (particularly old dreams, and particularly because the memory centers of the brain do not function properly during dreaming), so our answers to questions about old dreams are inaccurate, possibly biased by television or our most recent memory or some other factor we’re unaware of.
It’s unclear to me that your position is logically possible, insofar as it is represented by 1. I don’t know what it means for a subjective experience to be something different from how it is experienced. I know exactly how things can be misremembered, I do it all the time. So it’s 2, which is not merely logically possible, but actually relies on a common and pretty unremarkable phenomenon, versus 1, which actually may not be logically possible because it doesn’t seem to actually mean anything.
As for your second point—didn’t say immediate, but I think you need to be a bit more specific than “certain grounding in a foundationalist epistemology.” I can’t disagree with you because I’m not entirely sure what you’re saying. If you can point to a specific epistemological problem that arises from any of the problems you’ve pointed out, well, that’d make this discussion a whole lot more useful.
Perhaps the post could be improved if it laid out the types of errors our intuitions can make (e.g. memory errors, language errors, etc.). Each type of error could then be analyzed in terms of how seriously it impacts prevalent theories of cognition (or common assumptions in mainstream philosophy). As it stands, the post seems like a rather random (though interesting!) sampling of cognitive errors that serve to support the somewhat unremarkable conclusion that yes, our seemingly infallible intuitions have glitches.
Dreaming in color—I don’t even see where you’re going with this. Some people do, some don’t. It changes over time. Where’s the error? Are there people who think they dream in color but don’t, or vice versa? How is this relevant?
It surely seems improbable that most of people in the 1920s were dreaming black and white while today 80% dream in color. The perceptions can be culturally influenced in principle (I don’t assume a significant biological change happening during the 20th century), but it is far more probable that a substantial part of people report about their subjective experiences incorrectly. The probable reason is that people can’t remember what their dream was exactly like (or perhaps it even has no sense to speak about colors in dreams) and their report is contaminated by their expectations of what it should be, which are more easily subject to cultural influences. We may say that the flaw is in the memory and not in the experience itself, but that doesn’t contradict the point of the original post. Lukeprog hasn’t said that the experiences are wrong, but only that people can be wrong even about thier own experiences—and inconsistent reporting about the quality of dreams certainly requires being wrong about them.
It surely seems improbable that most of people in the 1920s were dreaming black and white while today 80% dream in color.
If this study occurred in the US then it isn’t so improbable. In the 1920s the primary form of entertainment were black and white movies. This might have had enough influence that many of the people who would have had dreams in color had substantial parts of those dreams in “color” but the only relevant colors were black and white. (This notion is partially inspired by my own dreams- I dream in color, but occasionally cartoon characters show up, and when they do, they look like they would in the cartoon even as they interact with normal people, or something sort of like that. So it isn’t implausible to me that something similar could happen with black and white characters.)
That did occur to me, but I doubt the real influence of movies can be that big as to make all dreams of 80% of people black and white. What seems more likely to me is that the colour of dreams (or actually the whole visual quality of dreams) is hard to remember, a person familiar with b/w movies would be likely to assume that dreams are similar to movies, and therefore report that they were black and white. But the two theories seem very hard to distinguish empirically.
But the two theories seem very hard to distinguish empirically.
You could have people watch only black and white movies for a while and see if they were more likely to report dreams being in black and white. This would work since people today know that entertainment isn’t in black and white. Alternatively, one could take black and white media and project it in some strange color scheme (like say orange and blue) and see if people started dreaming in that.
I believe the primary form of entertainment for the last million years has had plenty of color.
How is that relevant? If the entertainment at any point (especially when there’s lots of entertainment) impacts what dreams are like then what entertainment our ancestors have had won’t be relevant.
It surely seems improbable that most of people in the 1920s were dreaming black and white while today 80% dream in color.
Why? Do you know what causes people to dream in color? Is this change less probable than 50%+ of the population being incapable of remembering with any accuracy an event that happens several times a week?
I don’t know the cause, and I don’t know the relative odds. But if your claim is that people are systematically making a large and serious error, I think you need more than broad population comparisons with a complete absence of mechanism. There is not a sufficiently direct contradiction to infer that people are collectively mistaken; I’m assuming that’s why Lukeprog didn’t actually connect the dots—because the evidence doesn’t support dot-connecting.
I don’t know what causes colours in dreams, but my expectation is that the causes are mostly biological, rather than cultural. My experience: I haven’t noticed any significant change in perceptual qualities of my dreams in my life, although the contents of the dreams changed a lot. I suppose thus that while the topic of dreams may be strongly influenced by our daylight experiences (and the cultural environment in general), the low-level facts about dreams, such as their duration, colour and sound are rather biological. They may be influenced by diseases, drugs, perhaps meditation practices and such, but I am quite skeptical that watching black and white (or, on the other hand, coloured) movies could do that (this is the only mechanism I could think about now).
Also, I am not entirely sure whether my dreams are coloured (and whether they have sound, for that matter). I can remember having only one dream where colour was salient—it was a rather nightmarish dream perhaps 20 years ago about an asteroid coming to destroy the Earth, and the asteroid was red—and still I am not much sure whether it actually was red inside the dream, or whether the idea of its redness emerged by later thought. I haven’t noticed a particular colour-related fact in any other dream. On the other hand, when I wake up from dreams (and sometimes even inside the dream), I find the dream-world very strange and inconsistent, but never because of its colour. So my ability to distinguish between coloured and black and white dreams is pretty weak, which contributes to my estimate that it is fairly probable to misreport that, especially when answering a brief binary question of “do you have colour dreams”?
Finally, I attach a non-negligible probability to the possibility that the dream qualia are very different from the daylight ones, and that all colour perceptions are created after waking up after trying to remember the dream and describe it in terms of the daylight qualia (not sure whether this statement has some sense empirically, but that’s true for most of this discussion).
So it is true that lukeprog’s H1= “people misremember the subjective qualities of their dreams” isn’t the only explanation of the data, since there is H2= “the average subjective qualities of dreams change in time”, and I agree that I have little evidence to support my opinion that p(H2 ) < p(H1). But neither you have strong evidence to the contrary, and since the data strongly support H1 or H2, they support (less strongly) H1.
my expectation is that the causes are mostly biological, rather than cultural.
My expectation is that you’ve been moving through different cultures at a rate comparable to the one at which you’ve been moving through different biologies. This is a rather enormous problem with most “X must be biological” claims, particularly as applied to individual anecdotes.
Bigger picture, this all adds up to a memory error, assuming all claims in your favor. This is particularly unsurprising in the area of dreams where our memory isn’t really supposed to work—you dream several times per night, but most of these dreams are not stored in accessible memory. Your argument seems to be that people are actually experiencing dreams in color, but incorrectly remembering them as being non-color. My point may seem trivial, but this remains a memory error, not an error of subjective experience. Memory errors are extremely common, so that they occur in memories of subjective experience is no surprise. It’s just like remembering that you liked a movie when, it turns out, you really didn’t (and, say, emailed someone to that effect).
It could even be a language error—dreams do not involve light and, in a sense, can’t be in color. As another commenter has pointed out, they don’t experience dreams like movies, but rather as concepts. I personally don’t experience faces in dreams—I know who people are as part of the narrative, but they often lack detailed faces (or fail to look like themselves). Dream perception is not that much like conscious perception—at least for many—so using life-describing words may lead to serious error, just like the circle/ellipse question with a coin is principally one of language. Dreams are complex and impossible to directly reflect on and perhaps did not evolve to be remembered, so pointing out that people have trouble describing them doesn’t really seem to be relevant.
My expectation is that you’ve been moving through different cultures at a rate comparable to the one at which you’ve been moving through different biologies.
Since my childhood I have encountered new technologies, most importantly computers and the internet, learned several foreign languages, changed my political opinions, moved to a different country and learned about cognitive biases, which strongly reshaped my thinking. If this doesn’t cause a change in dream colour, why a culture change, of magnitude comparable to changes in the Western culture during the last 80 years, should do? I acknowledge the prominence of black and white movies then, as pointed out by JoshuaZ, but should that effect be so strong? Do you have some other cultural mechanism in mind?
Overall, I probably don’t understand your point. Do you say that I can’t assume with reasonable certainty (95% or so) that the colour of dreams cannot be strongly culturally influenced? If so, I don’t disagree—I am willing to accept a 50% estimate on that, given that the black and white movie bit is a fair point. Or do you say that you are reasonably certain that colour of dreams can be culturally influenced? If so, what evidence supports that?
My point may seem trivial, but this remains a memory error, not an error of subjective experience. … It could even be a language error—dreams do not involve light and, in a sense, can’t be in color.
How does this not entail being mistaken about our experiences? A false belief about colour of one’s dreams doesn’t cease to be false when it is caused by memory failure. If there is actually no sense in speaking about color in dreams, it becomes rather “not even false”, but still remains an error. The original article did claim nothing more than that we can hold false beliefs about our experiences. Whether the mechanism behind those errors is a memory error, language confusion or something else is irrelevant.
How does this not entail being mistaken about our experiences?
Suppose I believe I had chicken for lunch yesterday, when in fact I had pork. That does not mean that, when I had lunch, I actually thought pork tasted like chicken (or, I subjectively experienced the taste of chicken when I actually subjectively experienced the taste of pork—this convolution is my issue with the concept). If the point is, “Sometimes our memory is incorrect,” it seems to be wholly uninteresting and hardly worthy of a top-level post—as it adds little insight to this established fact.
On your earlier point: have your dreams changed, qualitatively, since you were a child? How would you even know? Unless you kept rather detailed diaries, then compared them to a large sample of other people to control for age-related changes, it’d be impossible to tell. Moreover, however complex your cultural upbringing, you had one cultural upbringing (perhaps a multicultural one, but one upbringing). Populations do not experience muti-cultural upbringings, they experience different cultural upbringings.
My point is that attaching percentages to probabilities here is largely an exercise in futility. You are using a piece of evidence to fit into a large claim—we can be mistaken about our subjective experiences. Fact X isn’t either evidence for Y or not-Y; the vast majority of the time Fact X doesn’t really have much bearing one way or another. In short, it’s very weak evidence for a highly specific (and, as I’ve argued, incoherent) proposition. I’ll happily concede that some people may dream in color and not remember this (or vice versa), but
If 80% of people were systematically forgetting overnight what they had for lunch the day before, it would certainly be interesting and worthy of a top-level post.
True. But, if in a 1930 80% of people reported eating chicken at their last meal, and in 1990 80% said they had pork at their last meal, we would not assume that there was an error in their first-person experience without significant additional evidence. That’s precisely what is missing here.
I think Luke’s point is that people’s intuitions about the nature of their subjective experience / consciousness can sometimes be wrong. The human version of echolocation is admittedly very primitive, but you still experience changes in sound and sound patterns. People think that when they imagine something, they see it sort of like a photograph, but in fact they don’t (though some might do).
or that I feel I am not driving when I am
But you do, to a certain extent. When you’re absorbed in some conversation while driving to work, you could realize at some point that (almost?) none of your conscious attention is focused on the driving and is instead focused on the conversation. Your driving is automatic, without any need for much conscious input, unless something unusual happens.
“X is a subjective experience that is wrong.”
He isn’t saying that some subjective experience is wrong (I’m not even sure what that means), he’s saying that the way you (intuitively) think you’re experiencing something can be different from the way you actually experience it.
Edit: I think I do agree, though, with Yvain’s point that probably none of these examples would’ve changed Decartes’ mind.
I may simply be unclear on what it means to be “wrong about the subjective quality of your own conscious experience,” but it seems to me that this post is completely irrelevant to that question. All of the evidence shows flaws in our predictive ability, our memory, and our language. I don’t see any contradictions or wrongness; indeed, I’m still unsure what such would look like. I’ll go through it step by step.
Someone predicted that people couldn’t experience echolocation. He was wrong. No evidence was offered that he could experience echolocation. Moreover, comparing the ability of the untrained to notice the difference between a T-shirt and a mixing bowl, and the ability of a bat or dolphin to render rich detail is disingenuous. But disputing the detail is besides the point: his mistake was about his abilities, not his actual experience. It’s not like he experienced echolocation and didn’t know it, or failed to and thought he did.
Does a coin look circular? This seems to be purely semantic and, if anything, a product of language. No one is disputing my ability to see a coin or predict or understand its properties. The problem is mostly whether we’re describing the image on our retina or the translation our brain maps onto it. We see an elliptical image which we almost inseverably perceive as round because of the operations our brain does. I don’t see anyone making a mistake about what coins look like, or having some erroneous experience.
When you’re asked to imagine something, your brain does one thing. When you’re asked to reflect on your imagination, or recall your brain has trouble doing so. This doesn’t seem like someone being wrong about conscious experience so much as (at most) having difficulty consciously remembering a prior experience. Where’s the error?
Dreaming in color—I don’t even see where you’re going with this. Some people do, some don’t. It changes over time. Where’s the error? Are there people who think they dream in color but don’t, or vice versa? How is this relevant?
[ETA: Further discussion suggests the argument: there isn’t a real change in frequency of color in dreams, but there is one in reporting, therefore, people are making mistakes. To that, I think there are two responses:
This evidence is very weak. It’s entirely possible that there has been a change in dream color. Since we have no idea what causes it, it’s rather hasty to say, “More (or fewer) people must be making mistakes than did before.” It’s not impossible, it’s just weak evidence where we have no understanding of the mechanism.
This is likely a language error. For many people, dreams are unlike the waking world. This is rather like the circular/elliptical coin. It’s not information about the dreams. It’s not a problem with us experiencing our dreams.]
There are things that occur below our consciousness—this seems principally an issue of memory. Our brain doesn’t register (and certainly doesn’t record) certain things. There’s no error here. It’s not that I feel I have no feet when I do, or that I feel I am not driving when I am.
It’s possible I’ve simply misinterpreted the claim you’re making. But if it’s:
I really fail to see a single shred of evidence in everything you cite. You show that there are errors in our memory and our ability to predict, but you do not offer a single example of someone being wrong about the subjective quality of their own experience—it doesn’t even seem like you suggest what such error would look like.
Even if I am missing something, it still seems like your point is that “What constitutes your subjective experience is unclear” not “X is a subjective experience that is wrong.”
Dream in colour? With, like, pictures? I think I mostly dream in concepts. With occasional pictures included for effect now and again.
Can you describe a mostly concept dream?
I always have visuals in color going on in dreams. I’m not sure that I hear sounds. I get some kinesthesia. Sometimes I get concepts in the sense of “just knowing” the backstory for something in a dream. I only remember taste/smell happening once.
I’ve read that no one dreams of landing a real punch, which I assume means a plausible amount of tactile/kinesthetic input.
I read once in a book that you never eat anything in a dream. Shortly later I had a dream where I was eating my mother’s homemade pumpkin molasses muffins, and they tasted very good...and had texture in my mouth, and the satisfying solidness as I swallowed. In general, what distinguishes my dreams from reality is how the locations are similar-yet-different to real life. If I notice that “wait, this bus stop looks too similar to the one outside my rez to be a different place, but it’s not the same” then sometimes I can realize I’m in a dream. Also, my schedule gets mixed up; in a dream, I might be going to choir practice directly from class, even though I know I don’t have classes on Thursdays. All my senses are involved in dreams though, and usually fairly elaborate plots, like trying to get to class on time when things keep going wrong (buses not showing up, people coming to distract me) and I’m worried about something else.
I’ve found my dream senses work about as well as my imagination and memory do—which is, admittedly, certainly a bit fuzzier than reality, but I have all my senses.
Admittedly, upon being told I “can’t” do something in my dreams (dream in color, read in a dream, observe fine detail), I’ll usually have a dream within a week that contradicts that assertion. My subconscious is ornery like that. It’s also annoying having learned that if I pinch myself in a dream, it does in fact hurt, which lead to one dream where I was utterly convinced it wasn’t a dream until after I woke up >.>
(Inexplicably, light switches never work in my dreams. This is the sole “sign you’re dreaming” that has actually worked for me)
Mentioned in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucid_dream#Reality_testing , as well as the non-reliability of the pinch test.
Interesting, thank you! I don’t recall that information on the “pinch test” last time I read.
That said, the “look at ground” has never worked for me, and I realized “look at numbers/text” doesn’t work for me when I started doing comparison price shopping in my dreams. I’ll have to try the breath holding one, but, ahh, given it’s a very familiar sensation, I doubt that test will work for me either ^^;
One that worked for me was to check if I could see through my hands as if I had X-ray vision.
looking on Wikipedia I find this:
I heard, and then self-interrogated and found it plausible, that most of a dream is backstory. Suppose a dream lasts 5 minutes subjectively, then the dream would actually be 5 minutes of subjective backstory with a few seconds of visual images. In particular, the dream only lasts a few seconds. (I also understand that the visual images come first, perhaps semi-randomly, and then the brain overlays a story.) Also from the same Wikipedia page:
In one of Patricia Garfield’s books (either Pathway to Ecstacy or Creative Dreaming), she concludes after much introspection that dreams are stories built around bodily sensations.
Like playing a MUD or being absorbed in a good book. The story, scenario and actions are just there in the brain without necessary requiring an actual visual intermediary.
Note that for many people, reading books is a very visual experience. One of my friends is an eidetic imaginer. If she reads a book, she actually sees the events in almost the same vividness as if she was witnessing them for real. (I don’t know about MUDs, but I don’t see why they should be any different.) So “like playing a MUD or being absorbed in a good book” isn’t necessarily a very useful way of describing this.
Not very useful, merely the most useful way that is practical in a brief sentence. Not all inferential differences can be crossed in a few words. The second sentence comes closer, an essay would have gone further and a neuroscience textbook further still. But for those with particularly different default styles of thought actually grasping in detail the entirely different forms of experience would take extensive mental training—when possible at all. It is hard to explain to a blind guy what it is like to see when you are deaf and dumb yourself.
Actually, now I’m curious. I wonder if any blind guys have ever hooked up with deaf chicks (or vice versa or vice vice). If I were in one of the groups I would definitely set out to do it at least once, even if only briefly. The two major communication lines cut off but two brains there that would, I expect, learn to cross that chasm regardless.
The solution that came to mind was typing (with a text-to-speech or text-to-braille solution for the blind person). If the deaf person could read lips and speak understandable English (and some can), they could just talk.
That seems to be the obvious solution. The part that makes me intrigued, however is how the increased overhead of verbal communication would encourage a heavily intuitive physical language to emerge. Even more fascinating would be if the participants started their interacting as children. I would expect a full physically mediated grammar to evolve.
I distinctly remember typing ‘deaf and dumb’. I must have edited that out while making the phrasing fit.
Me to, but unless I’m paying attention my brain often tries to reinterpret and overwrite the memory with best-fit images (and sounds, and occasional sprinkling of other senses, in abaut the same proportions that memories of real events have) when I try to recall it awake. If I hadn’t realized what was going on I could have easily thought there were carefully rendered images the whole time, and I do suspect this could be the source of a lot of people thinking exactly this...
EDIT: never mind this. I just discovered that as I keep reading this thread the memories and introspections shift in big and contradictory ways without me noticing. My current best guess is that I only have a few damaged memory fragments and that 99% of what my brain reports as memories are guesses based from what I know of how dreams work in general.
Sounds about right. Waking memories aren’t that much better. :)
This is my experience—I think. I don’t remember dreams very well, so it’s possible that I simply don’t remember the images or their colours, just some vestigial concepts.
I think I do this too most of the time, but this post made me question it. I think I at least sometimes have pictures in dreams, especially when I was younger. I don’t remember my dreams very often, so I have very little data.
Thanks for taking the time to point out the problem with each example.
The key issue seems to be that “subjective experience” could refer to all subjective experiences, both past and present, or it could refer to one’s current, this-moment subjective experience. The OP draws people in because it sounds like it’s going to be talking about doubting the latter—which would be pretty shocking—but it ends up as a sort of bait-and-switch because it is really talking about doubting the former, more mundane and familiar sense, where one simply fails to accurately recall one’s past experience or fails to catch all aspects of one’s experiential phenomena as they whizz by.
Of course it’s logically possible that we could still be ‘right’ about our subjective experience but then have our model be immediately corrupted by memory and language, but given the above I see little reason to expect that.
But even if we are ‘right’ about our subjective experiences, but then our ability to think correctly about our subjective experience is immediately corrupted by memory and language, that still blocks our ability to use subjective experience for certain grounding in a foundationalist epistemology, for example.
It’s a bit more than a “logical possibility.” Consider these two options:
We actually dream in color, but we experience it as black and white, and remember it and report it correctly.
We actually dream in color, but we don’t remember it very well (particularly old dreams, and particularly because the memory centers of the brain do not function properly during dreaming), so our answers to questions about old dreams are inaccurate, possibly biased by television or our most recent memory or some other factor we’re unaware of.
It’s unclear to me that your position is logically possible, insofar as it is represented by 1. I don’t know what it means for a subjective experience to be something different from how it is experienced. I know exactly how things can be misremembered, I do it all the time. So it’s 2, which is not merely logically possible, but actually relies on a common and pretty unremarkable phenomenon, versus 1, which actually may not be logically possible because it doesn’t seem to actually mean anything.
As for your second point—didn’t say immediate, but I think you need to be a bit more specific than “certain grounding in a foundationalist epistemology.” I can’t disagree with you because I’m not entirely sure what you’re saying. If you can point to a specific epistemological problem that arises from any of the problems you’ve pointed out, well, that’d make this discussion a whole lot more useful.
Perhaps the post could be improved if it laid out the types of errors our intuitions can make (e.g. memory errors, language errors, etc.). Each type of error could then be analyzed in terms of how seriously it impacts prevalent theories of cognition (or common assumptions in mainstream philosophy). As it stands, the post seems like a rather random (though interesting!) sampling of cognitive errors that serve to support the somewhat unremarkable conclusion that yes, our seemingly infallible intuitions have glitches.
It surely seems improbable that most of people in the 1920s were dreaming black and white while today 80% dream in color. The perceptions can be culturally influenced in principle (I don’t assume a significant biological change happening during the 20th century), but it is far more probable that a substantial part of people report about their subjective experiences incorrectly. The probable reason is that people can’t remember what their dream was exactly like (or perhaps it even has no sense to speak about colors in dreams) and their report is contaminated by their expectations of what it should be, which are more easily subject to cultural influences. We may say that the flaw is in the memory and not in the experience itself, but that doesn’t contradict the point of the original post. Lukeprog hasn’t said that the experiences are wrong, but only that people can be wrong even about thier own experiences—and inconsistent reporting about the quality of dreams certainly requires being wrong about them.
If this study occurred in the US then it isn’t so improbable. In the 1920s the primary form of entertainment were black and white movies. This might have had enough influence that many of the people who would have had dreams in color had substantial parts of those dreams in “color” but the only relevant colors were black and white. (This notion is partially inspired by my own dreams- I dream in color, but occasionally cartoon characters show up, and when they do, they look like they would in the cartoon even as they interact with normal people, or something sort of like that. So it isn’t implausible to me that something similar could happen with black and white characters.)
That did occur to me, but I doubt the real influence of movies can be that big as to make all dreams of 80% of people black and white. What seems more likely to me is that the colour of dreams (or actually the whole visual quality of dreams) is hard to remember, a person familiar with b/w movies would be likely to assume that dreams are similar to movies, and therefore report that they were black and white. But the two theories seem very hard to distinguish empirically.
You could have people watch only black and white movies for a while and see if they were more likely to report dreams being in black and white. This would work since people today know that entertainment isn’t in black and white. Alternatively, one could take black and white media and project it in some strange color scheme (like say orange and blue) and see if people started dreaming in that.
That would distinguish the hypotheses
Watching lots of black and white movies directly causes dreams to lose colour.
Knowing that all movies are black and white corrupts one’s memories about one’s dreams.
But it will not decide between
Watching lots of black and white movies directly causes dreams to lose colour.
Watching lots of black and white movies directly corrupts one’s memories about one’s dreams.
I believe the primary form of entertainment for the last million years has had plenty of color.
How is that relevant? If the entertainment at any point (especially when there’s lots of entertainment) impacts what dreams are like then what entertainment our ancestors have had won’t be relevant.
Why? Do you know what causes people to dream in color? Is this change less probable than 50%+ of the population being incapable of remembering with any accuracy an event that happens several times a week?
I don’t know the cause, and I don’t know the relative odds. But if your claim is that people are systematically making a large and serious error, I think you need more than broad population comparisons with a complete absence of mechanism. There is not a sufficiently direct contradiction to infer that people are collectively mistaken; I’m assuming that’s why Lukeprog didn’t actually connect the dots—because the evidence doesn’t support dot-connecting.
I don’t know what causes colours in dreams, but my expectation is that the causes are mostly biological, rather than cultural. My experience: I haven’t noticed any significant change in perceptual qualities of my dreams in my life, although the contents of the dreams changed a lot. I suppose thus that while the topic of dreams may be strongly influenced by our daylight experiences (and the cultural environment in general), the low-level facts about dreams, such as their duration, colour and sound are rather biological. They may be influenced by diseases, drugs, perhaps meditation practices and such, but I am quite skeptical that watching black and white (or, on the other hand, coloured) movies could do that (this is the only mechanism I could think about now).
Also, I am not entirely sure whether my dreams are coloured (and whether they have sound, for that matter). I can remember having only one dream where colour was salient—it was a rather nightmarish dream perhaps 20 years ago about an asteroid coming to destroy the Earth, and the asteroid was red—and still I am not much sure whether it actually was red inside the dream, or whether the idea of its redness emerged by later thought. I haven’t noticed a particular colour-related fact in any other dream. On the other hand, when I wake up from dreams (and sometimes even inside the dream), I find the dream-world very strange and inconsistent, but never because of its colour. So my ability to distinguish between coloured and black and white dreams is pretty weak, which contributes to my estimate that it is fairly probable to misreport that, especially when answering a brief binary question of “do you have colour dreams”?
Finally, I attach a non-negligible probability to the possibility that the dream qualia are very different from the daylight ones, and that all colour perceptions are created after waking up after trying to remember the dream and describe it in terms of the daylight qualia (not sure whether this statement has some sense empirically, but that’s true for most of this discussion).
So it is true that lukeprog’s H1= “people misremember the subjective qualities of their dreams” isn’t the only explanation of the data, since there is H2= “the average subjective qualities of dreams change in time”, and I agree that I have little evidence to support my opinion that p(H2 ) < p(H1). But neither you have strong evidence to the contrary, and since the data strongly support H1 or H2, they support (less strongly) H1.
My expectation is that you’ve been moving through different cultures at a rate comparable to the one at which you’ve been moving through different biologies. This is a rather enormous problem with most “X must be biological” claims, particularly as applied to individual anecdotes.
Bigger picture, this all adds up to a memory error, assuming all claims in your favor. This is particularly unsurprising in the area of dreams where our memory isn’t really supposed to work—you dream several times per night, but most of these dreams are not stored in accessible memory. Your argument seems to be that people are actually experiencing dreams in color, but incorrectly remembering them as being non-color. My point may seem trivial, but this remains a memory error, not an error of subjective experience. Memory errors are extremely common, so that they occur in memories of subjective experience is no surprise. It’s just like remembering that you liked a movie when, it turns out, you really didn’t (and, say, emailed someone to that effect).
It could even be a language error—dreams do not involve light and, in a sense, can’t be in color. As another commenter has pointed out, they don’t experience dreams like movies, but rather as concepts. I personally don’t experience faces in dreams—I know who people are as part of the narrative, but they often lack detailed faces (or fail to look like themselves). Dream perception is not that much like conscious perception—at least for many—so using life-describing words may lead to serious error, just like the circle/ellipse question with a coin is principally one of language. Dreams are complex and impossible to directly reflect on and perhaps did not evolve to be remembered, so pointing out that people have trouble describing them doesn’t really seem to be relevant.
Since my childhood I have encountered new technologies, most importantly computers and the internet, learned several foreign languages, changed my political opinions, moved to a different country and learned about cognitive biases, which strongly reshaped my thinking. If this doesn’t cause a change in dream colour, why a culture change, of magnitude comparable to changes in the Western culture during the last 80 years, should do? I acknowledge the prominence of black and white movies then, as pointed out by JoshuaZ, but should that effect be so strong? Do you have some other cultural mechanism in mind?
Overall, I probably don’t understand your point. Do you say that I can’t assume with reasonable certainty (95% or so) that the colour of dreams cannot be strongly culturally influenced? If so, I don’t disagree—I am willing to accept a 50% estimate on that, given that the black and white movie bit is a fair point. Or do you say that you are reasonably certain that colour of dreams can be culturally influenced? If so, what evidence supports that?
How does this not entail being mistaken about our experiences? A false belief about colour of one’s dreams doesn’t cease to be false when it is caused by memory failure. If there is actually no sense in speaking about color in dreams, it becomes rather “not even false”, but still remains an error. The original article did claim nothing more than that we can hold false beliefs about our experiences. Whether the mechanism behind those errors is a memory error, language confusion or something else is irrelevant.
Suppose I believe I had chicken for lunch yesterday, when in fact I had pork. That does not mean that, when I had lunch, I actually thought pork tasted like chicken (or, I subjectively experienced the taste of chicken when I actually subjectively experienced the taste of pork—this convolution is my issue with the concept). If the point is, “Sometimes our memory is incorrect,” it seems to be wholly uninteresting and hardly worthy of a top-level post—as it adds little insight to this established fact.
On your earlier point: have your dreams changed, qualitatively, since you were a child? How would you even know? Unless you kept rather detailed diaries, then compared them to a large sample of other people to control for age-related changes, it’d be impossible to tell. Moreover, however complex your cultural upbringing, you had one cultural upbringing (perhaps a multicultural one, but one upbringing). Populations do not experience muti-cultural upbringings, they experience different cultural upbringings.
My point is that attaching percentages to probabilities here is largely an exercise in futility. You are using a piece of evidence to fit into a large claim—we can be mistaken about our subjective experiences. Fact X isn’t either evidence for Y or not-Y; the vast majority of the time Fact X doesn’t really have much bearing one way or another. In short, it’s very weak evidence for a highly specific (and, as I’ve argued, incoherent) proposition. I’ll happily concede that some people may dream in color and not remember this (or vice versa), but
If 80% of people were systematically forgetting overnight what they had for lunch the day before, it would certainly be interesting and worthy of a top-level post.
True. But, if in a 1930 80% of people reported eating chicken at their last meal, and in 1990 80% said they had pork at their last meal, we would not assume that there was an error in their first-person experience without significant additional evidence. That’s precisely what is missing here.
I think Luke’s point is that people’s intuitions about the nature of their subjective experience / consciousness can sometimes be wrong. The human version of echolocation is admittedly very primitive, but you still experience changes in sound and sound patterns. People think that when they imagine something, they see it sort of like a photograph, but in fact they don’t (though some might do).
But you do, to a certain extent. When you’re absorbed in some conversation while driving to work, you could realize at some point that (almost?) none of your conscious attention is focused on the driving and is instead focused on the conversation. Your driving is automatic, without any need for much conscious input, unless something unusual happens.
He isn’t saying that some subjective experience is wrong (I’m not even sure what that means), he’s saying that the way you (intuitively) think you’re experiencing something can be different from the way you actually experience it.
Edit: I think I do agree, though, with Yvain’s point that probably none of these examples would’ve changed Decartes’ mind.