In those examples, it seems to me they were mistaken about how they perceived something rather than what they perceive, the ‘implementation detail’ of the experience, rather than its content.
Most of the time we just experience things, and we don’t think about via which modality we do so. This is not surprising, as unless when explicitly called for most of the time such knowledge would be quite useless. When you are blind, it’s likely there comes a time you wonder, or were asked, how you managed to navigate as well as you do. Here you will apply some lousy introspection and your brain will serve up some lousy post-hoc ‘explanation’. Thereafter, that hypothesis will just become an additional belief you have about what is going on with your perception.
Of course, modality seems quite intrinsic to various qualia. ‘Red’ is obviously a visual thing. ‘Birds chirping’ obviously an auditory thing. But the understanding of ‘red’ as visual is a meta cognitive process separate from the visual experience of ‘red’ itself. For example you expect ‘red’ to be amenable to being painted on the surface of an object, when the same is not possible for ‘chirping’. So no, the modality is not part of the content of the subjective experience.
I would put it this way: You can be wrong about what your experience is referring to out there in the world or elsewhere in your body or mind. But you cannot be wrong about the contents of your immediate experience.
Most of the article seems to be about missing what is there in direct sensory experience and not noticing what’s missing in imagined experience.
I’m not sure where this is heading, though my snap reaction is “Why are you worried about living in a simulation when you’re already living in a low-rez simulation?”
One clue pointing in these directions is what people are willing to accept as immersive art. Why can people call a video on a screen plus stereo “virtual reality”? How can reading fiction be so engrossing that everything else gets forgotten?
And one more small fact on the sensory front—The Dance of Becoming by Stuart Heller has a little experiment of observing one’s reactions to horizontal and vertical lines. My results were, as predicted, gung V qerj zlfrys hc va erfcbafr gb n urnil iregvpny yvar, naq qvqa’g (V’z abg fher jung, vs nalguvat, V qvq qb) va erfcbafr gb n urnil ubevmbagny yvar.
You can be wrong about what your experience is referring to out there in the world or elsewhere in your body or mind. But you cannot be wrong about the contents of your immediate experience.
Well, yes, but this feels to me to be about as trivial as saying “You can be wrong about the correct answer to a maths question, but you can’t be wrong about what answer you’re giving”.
Perhaps it’s simply my lack of experience with philosophy, but I fail to see any qualitative distinction between common perceptual failures like optical illusions, versus those examples given by lukeprog in the OP. I’m sure lukeprog is setting this up to do some work in one of his later posts in the series. But at this point given no particular reason to draw a boundary anywhere except at the tautology, I draw it at the tautology.
IMO you can be wrong about all of those things, just like you can be wrong about anything else. Your apparent belief that you can’t seems to indicate that you define the contents of those beliefs in a self-referential way which seems weird to me. The only beliefs I’d even consider as candidates for being impossible to be wrong about in that way would be unambiguously tautological ones.
I am far closer to your position than sark’s, I must admit. Lukeprog provided examples of how we can be wrong about our subjective experience, and commenters reached for more abstract subjective experiences; some of which we can also be wrong about (ie Alicorn’s peripheral vision card experiment, the story about blind echolocation believed to be “forehead touch”) and some of which are defined self-referentially so that we can’t be wrong about it, purely by the virtue of the answer we give being the answer required. The self-referential subjective experiences (such as “I experience myself giving the answer 5 to the question 2+2=?”) aren’t useful; they’re tautological. When it comes to subjective experiences that actually do work, we can be wrong. The only work that tautological subjective experiences do is contradict lukeprog’s claim.
I would put it this way: You can be wrong about what your experience is referring to out there in the world or elsewhere in your body or mind. But you cannot be wrong about the contents of your immediate experience.
That almost sounds like a challenge. People can be wrong about a lot. Especially when it comes down to their experiences.
In those examples, it seems to me they were mistaken about how they perceived something rather than what they perceive, the ‘implementation detail’ of the experience, rather than its content.
Most of the time we just experience things, and we don’t think about via which modality we do so. This is not surprising, as unless when explicitly called for most of the time such knowledge would be quite useless. When you are blind, it’s likely there comes a time you wonder, or were asked, how you managed to navigate as well as you do. Here you will apply some lousy introspection and your brain will serve up some lousy post-hoc ‘explanation’. Thereafter, that hypothesis will just become an additional belief you have about what is going on with your perception.
Of course, modality seems quite intrinsic to various qualia. ‘Red’ is obviously a visual thing. ‘Birds chirping’ obviously an auditory thing. But the understanding of ‘red’ as visual is a meta cognitive process separate from the visual experience of ‘red’ itself. For example you expect ‘red’ to be amenable to being painted on the surface of an object, when the same is not possible for ‘chirping’. So no, the modality is not part of the content of the subjective experience.
I would put it this way: You can be wrong about what your experience is referring to out there in the world or elsewhere in your body or mind. But you cannot be wrong about the contents of your immediate experience.
Most of the article seems to be about missing what is there in direct sensory experience and not noticing what’s missing in imagined experience.
I’m not sure where this is heading, though my snap reaction is “Why are you worried about living in a simulation when you’re already living in a low-rez simulation?”
One clue pointing in these directions is what people are willing to accept as immersive art. Why can people call a video on a screen plus stereo “virtual reality”? How can reading fiction be so engrossing that everything else gets forgotten?
And one more small fact on the sensory front—The Dance of Becoming by Stuart Heller has a little experiment of observing one’s reactions to horizontal and vertical lines. My results were, as predicted, gung V qerj zlfrys hc va erfcbafr gb n urnil iregvpny yvar, naq qvqa’g (V’z abg fher jung, vs nalguvat, V qvq qb) va erfcbafr gb n urnil ubevmbagny yvar.
Well, yes, but this feels to me to be about as trivial as saying “You can be wrong about the correct answer to a maths question, but you can’t be wrong about what answer you’re giving”.
It’s certainly possible to say one thing while thinking you’re saying another, though!
Perhaps it’s simply my lack of experience with philosophy, but I fail to see any qualitative distinction between common perceptual failures like optical illusions, versus those examples given by lukeprog in the OP. I’m sure lukeprog is setting this up to do some work in one of his later posts in the series. But at this point given no particular reason to draw a boundary anywhere except at the tautology, I draw it at the tautology.
IMO you can be wrong about all of those things, just like you can be wrong about anything else. Your apparent belief that you can’t seems to indicate that you define the contents of those beliefs in a self-referential way which seems weird to me. The only beliefs I’d even consider as candidates for being impossible to be wrong about in that way would be unambiguously tautological ones.
I am far closer to your position than sark’s, I must admit. Lukeprog provided examples of how we can be wrong about our subjective experience, and commenters reached for more abstract subjective experiences; some of which we can also be wrong about (ie Alicorn’s peripheral vision card experiment, the story about blind echolocation believed to be “forehead touch”) and some of which are defined self-referentially so that we can’t be wrong about it, purely by the virtue of the answer we give being the answer required. The self-referential subjective experiences (such as “I experience myself giving the answer 5 to the question 2+2=?”) aren’t useful; they’re tautological. When it comes to subjective experiences that actually do work, we can be wrong. The only work that tautological subjective experiences do is contradict lukeprog’s claim.
That almost sounds like a challenge. People can be wrong about a lot. Especially when it comes down to their experiences.