Consciousness Live! with Bence Nanay (S8 E1)

0:00 We are live. At least I think we are. Um, for the most part, it's hard to tell sometimes. But joining me today, as always, a very special guest. Um, Ben, I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about yourself, who you are, and what you do for those who might not know you.

0:32 kind of things for more than a decade. Is that right?

1:40 don't know how provoked I'll be um or or rather in agreement with you. Um hold on. I'm trying to adjust something. Maybe just a setting here real fast. Um

2:43 terminological circle debates that don't go anywhere. Um, so, so I do really appreciate your approach to philosophy generally where you try to to connect it to the sciences in a two-way manner, which I think is important. So, your work is not only just like, hey, I'm a philosopher who wants to borrow your cool science stuff, but but you're also someone who thinks that, hey, science, you should borrow some of our cool philosophy stuff, and there should be a two-way interchange. So, I really find that approach to be um, well, most congenial to way I I think about things.

3:17 I mean I mean I I I say that in grant applications because that's what they birectional interaction.

3:50 little bit about what the center for what's it called? First of all, it's called

4:22 positions.

4:53 obviously tremendous service for those people who have the opportunity to come and get together and talk about these issues.

5:28 various political things in the US.

6:02 origins. I think

6:34 Imagery. I guess you published that in 2023. Is that is it been two years already since that came out? Um, it it's a great book. I I really enjoyed it. I was one of those people who got to the appendix and found you talking to me and saying, "Hey, did you start wondering what wasn't mental imagery by the end of this book?" I was like, "Haha, yes, I did actually." So, I I found it's a it's an amazing achievement. It's like very readable, obviously, because you intended it for a general audience, it seems. Um, but so not for a general audience, but for a

7:07 non for a non-expert audience. Um, but maybe maybe the maybe there are some people in the audience that have not read the book. So, for them, it's it might be worth uh adding that I and your panics. I'm saying that well it must it must be really I mean it's really annoying to read this book because I go through various phenomena and I say that's mental imagery that's also mental imagery that's also mental so then you wonder oh okay is there anything that's not mental so that's what you're referring to

7:40 super cool and I want to talk about a lot of that stuff because I found m much much of it very illuminating and super interesting um and and and and some of that stuff towards the end about like action and knowledge and stuff. I found it extremely fascinating. So, it's just a really cool book. I would

8:13 philosophy. So, there's a lot to recommend it. Yeah, I had I I worked really hard on especially the empirical side because it's just so much especially with the new research on aphantasia which I'm sure you're going to ask me about.

8:47 Just out of curiosity,

9:21 that that all these big questions about perception there's all these big questions about cognition all these big questions about action

10:28 it's just right after finishing the dissertation, I just couldn't imagine doing more of that stuff. So I so I switched to I switched to something else and they asked me um so it's Syracuse University. Sorry. Um I uh and they and I had to do a graduate seminar and they asked me what I want to do it on and I said well I want to do it on imagination. So uh so I did that and then that's how I uh just kind of switched this off

11:00 completely.

11:33 this book and you see the amount of stuff that's in there, you're like, "Okay, I hope this guy didn't come within a year and a half or something to learn on this right now."

12:08 that I organized which sadly is defunct but I might someday go back to organizing it. I I only stopped organizing it really because like I sort of felt there was a lot of other online stuff going on but um and also like LaGuardia where I worked they didn't care and told me basically really yeah though they said like you've done enough of that maybe like more college contributions subtly hinted to me would be important. So anyway um

13:15 papers and then I got submissions and then I was like I don't know anything about this area so I went to field papers and I was like who wrote on this and then I would email them and be like hey will you comment on this paper or read it for me or whatever. So I got to like find I used field papers early on um like uh before it was like a thing. So it really helped actually knowing about people who I wouldn't have otherwise known about. Um and and many people had kind of told me like including some famous people that online conferences wouldn't succeed and I was wasting my time. Um so not only was I sort of LaGuardia was telling me this

13:47 was not a great idea but other like senior people

14:20 in the 200 whenever that was 2009 2010 but uh that was the idea and also I connected to the publications which other online conferences didn't do I tried to make a special journal issue or a book out of every conference that I organized um

14:55 you know the NYU Center for Brain Mind and Consciousness. Someone like that should come to me and say hey we'll sponsor it and but no one did. So you know

15:28 they seem like ancient history.

16:01 Anyway, so yes, that's I really appreciate you mentioning that. That's nice. But as cool as I am, we are here to talk about you. So this book of yours is very uh to get back to the mental imagery um debate.

17:08 about how to you know he he said that we should so we we wrote it up together and it's it was not that it was not that long in the making. Uh I mean when I say I don't like consciousness I don't yeah this you know this is stupid provocative statement. Uh what I really mean is that I feel that there are more interesting questions to explain about the mind and about how consciousness works and conscious that is a very interesting question is it seems like that's what gets all the attention.

18:11 very committed to thinking of the non-concious part of the mind and uh part of what I'm doing in the imagery book is to try to argue that um mental imagery can be unconscious.

18:46 I got that RL right. Hopefully in the ballpark.

19:20 chat, ask Bena what his favorite what is his favorite book. Okay. Um Oops. I hope he can't hear me if I'm annoying him if he's talking to us. Uh let me mute myself until he comes back.

19:54 if they mean philosophy book or just book generally. You do quote a lot of literature in your book, so I know you like to read.

20:25 unconsciously, which I think is

20:59 processing that are going towards the perceptual representation. So it's a forming of a perceptual representation on the base of the stimulus. So it's perceptual representation that's directly triggered by sensory input. sensory input is you know light rays hidden hitting my retina and on the basis of that all kinds of crap is going on and then I form a perceptual representation of your face. Now mental imagery is that if I still form a perceptual representation of your face but in a way that's not directly triggered by the by the percept by the sensory stimulation. So there's a I and

21:34 that's part of the whole point of writing my my whole idea of writing book is that there's this parallel between mental imagery and perceptual and perception. Both of them are perceptual representation just one of them is directly triggered by the sensory input and the other one is not directly triggered by the sensory input.

22:10 sometimes in different words sometimes they will talk about consciousness and stuff like that but

23:16 representation directly triggered by sensory input that can be conscious or unconscious. So if you're talking about perceptual representation that's triggered indirectly by sensory input, why wouldn't that be conscious or unconscious?

23:50 setup here, which I think might be the more controversial part, is if you take like mental imagery in the visual case, um and you think of it as like a imagistic state or something like that, then often people will say things like a part of it represents a part of the stimulus in a kind of way that these more cognitive representations don't. So if I think, you know, there's a red ball, um there's no part of that that represents a part of the red ball in a way that a picture of the red ball, a small slice of it would represent that

24:23 small slice of the red ball or something like that. So there's this kind of like I don't know. So this difference in Yeah. format or and you were saying sort of that it's not like that. Um, so, so I'm that was what was making me wonder if your definition was slightly uh, you know, that you had to argue for it because it would be like not the way that people would come to the debate thinking of it.

24:57 about mental imagery because uh for mental imagery must have the same format as perceptual representation because both are perceptual representations.

25:30 a lot of interesting question one of them is what makes perceptual representations different from other kinds of representations and we can talk about that and their format might be an interesting I mean I my my money would be on something like a format difference uh but And the other question which is much more um that's closer to the the main topic of this book is about what's the difference between kind of online perceptual representation and an offline perceptual

26:04 know as you can imagine I had a lot of conversation with philosophers who think about imagery about these things and I think that uh at the end of the day what whatever they think about mental imagery is not substantially different from from what I from what I'm pushing here. Okay.

26:38 about, which is where is the do you care about the Ned Block project of trying to distinguish a joint in nature between perception and cognition in such a way that they are maybe joint systems that work together but distinct things? Um, or is that not something that you really care about how it works out uh one way or the other given your views about these things?

27:43 and there's some very nice principled way of making a distinction between them. It would also be compatible with a way of thinking about the relationship between perception and cognition where there's a bit of a gray zone in between.

28:16 difference between perceptual and non-perceptual representation is we're good.

28:49 be perception is going to be cognition you know some empirical people would would think of it as non-perceptual some others would think of it as perceptual right who am who am I to tell so when it come at the end of the day I really wanted to focus on early cortical processing because that's the perceptual for sure. Mhm.

29:20 something like that right but

29:54 processing that's triggered indirectly by the stimulus is cognitive um according to some definition that someone might have of that. So then it would turn out that mental imagery could be cognitive in a sense on your view or in a gray zone where it was like and it sounds like you are saying that actually that you're that you would allow that maybe you wouldn't want to call it cognitive because it's mental imagery but it would fall in this zone of like well you could call it cognitive or has elements of cognition at least. So for example, one one example that Block uses a lot is the way imagistic representations might be taken up into

30:26 working memory and then he will say things like they are wrapped in a cognitive envelope and you go hm I wonder what that means but it really just means broadcast into the global workspace or something like that. So that you have these imagistic representations which are broadcast into working memory and but that doesn't make them cognitive according to to Ned. That makes them perceptual representations which are wrapped in a cognitive envelope. Um and and that's a very important distinction for him. But basically you're saying you don't you it could go either way. You could call that state and and this also kind of comes up

30:59 with this these other these dual content theories and these other things that you do talk about in various places. So some of this is going to be like it depends on like how you type psychological states generally speaking and that's sort of not really known how we should do it. So so that to me seems to be what the is so why I'm interested. So you could have many reasons to be interested in this question and you know not to knock B Ned's project it may or may not be the main topic but it's important in my opinion because this is what we're interested in like how do we type psychological states if we're trying to

31:31 be serious about like getting a theory of the mind and you want to type them one way someone else might want to type them another way. Um, so if we move past early cortical processing at all, then what do you think is going to be the way to resolve these kinds of debates or do you do you think we're just going to get bored of h asking these questions eventually?

32:04 early cortical. or early cortical processing that's not directly triggered by sensory stimulation. So uh I don't really need to think about I mean in some sense I don't in order to make the argument of the book I don't need to be committed to what those you know borderline cases whether they're going to count as imagery or not then it's uh you know the mind is messy I mean you know have you seen a brain it's messy it's very unlikely there's going to be this kind of oh right all right perception until here and then cognition from here so um

32:39 explanatory um vague vaguess there. I don't know. Um

33:13 processes or

33:45 trying to put my hands on, my finger on uh plays a role in all these uh exciting mental phenomena.

34:20 some ways. I think I'm not sure maybe what that means by that but uh then then there's going to be various u cross commmunication across any kind of divide in uh in the in the mind. Um

34:56 this distinction, um uh sometimes people like it, sometimes they don't. The basic idea is that there are these um you can present a stimulus and then a 100 milliseconds uh maybe some people can say up to 4 seconds under the right circumstances. After that there's a a a mental visual representation of the stimulus. So that seems to me like it would be mental imagery on your view. This kind of iconic memory um because it's uh indirectly caused by its perseverance is well may well that's

35:31 maybe my question is is is it directly or indirectly caused according to your view? So does it count as perceptual or um imagery

36:08 on the on the issue of um the the timing. So, all right. So here's maybe maybe I'm going to go from a from kind of a distance uh to talk about this one way in which so I the way I formulated the um the difference between perception and mental imagery is that in the case of uh mental imagery you have a perceptual representation that is not directly triggered by the sensory input. Now that's a negative definition, right? Uh and I don't tell you what it is directly triggered by. Whereas in the case of

36:41 perception, it's directly triggered by the sensory input. Um here is one way which can we can have a like a nice intuitive sense of what's going on. In the case of um um perceptual representation, there's a there's a kind of there's a causal link and there's a causal link that's also accompanied by some form of correspondence. Right? So there's a when I'm looking at you there's um certain kind of structural features of my retinal of my ret of the activation of my retina

37:12 structural features of what's going on in my prim visual cortex and there's a beautiful spatial correspondence between the two right

37:45 really assessing how how long it uh it's supposed to last there is going to be early cortical uh stimulation

38:22 within the range of normal perceptual activation spreading that uh then that would not be the imagery that would just be just normal perception direct like you know uh online perception but if it's if there's a delay then that would be temporal mental imagery

38:54 perceptual processing, which it is in some sense, but obviously the stimulus is gone. So, it's not stimulus driven, but um what is the reason for thinking that the delay should move it into a separate category? Uh well, I mean, if you're if you think about it as a like if I have an episodic memory of something that I did this morning, that would be temporal mental imagery of some of of a certain kind. And uh that sounds like me mental imagery, right? I mean,

39:29 that seems like a very widely accepted claim that mental imagery is a you know, that episodic memory is a form of mental imagery.

40:05 close your eyes and visualize a u a unicorn that would not be temporal mental imagery right uh if you're u you know aodal completion is not you know which for mental imagery uh would not be temporal mental imagery it would just be spatial imagery but it's a really interesting question that I didn't really go into about how the

40:37 it is before I start nitpicking about this particular?

41:12 oluded parts of perceived objects

42:18 questions I have One, is it on your view that this stimulation which the processing which is caused indirectly is the same as which would have been caused had the tip of the finger been visible. So is the state that's activated the same on your view? That's one question. And the second question that uh so uh well ideally

42:50 a, you know, there's your office. Presumably that's not an artificial background and uh and uh I can see that there's a kind of a side of a computer screen. So I Yeah, exactly. There you go. So So I my visual system aodly completes that. Um but I might be it might be completely wrong because obviously the visual system is trying to go with a model that is close that's the closest approximation of what visual visual system can expect on the basis of all kinds of things that we've seen before. Right?

43:54 like one extremely long horse. So on your view then the sense that it's an extremely long horse is accounted for by the fact that the visual system in early processing is the is is producing the state which would have occurred had the horse been visually that long. That's the question that I'm asking like does the uh so the horse seems extra long and if I had seen a horse that long then my visual processing would have been driven

44:26 in a certain way. Is the way that that actually long horse stimulus would have driven my visual system similar or the same on your view as the kind of processing that's produced indirectly in this mental imagery case?

45:02 the the the second thing that I was going to ask is in the mental imagery case when that processing is indirectly triggered it can be triggered by many things. as one assumes top down and all sorts of things. But in the case of aodal completion, is it indirectly triggered by the processing which is produced by the stimulus that I'm seeing or is it produced by some top- down expectation because I don't think I have top down expectations about long horses and things like that.

46:08 of completion. So it's both both can both can happen but neither of those are going to be direct. Uh neither of those are would be would constitute an example of perceptual representation that is directly triggered by the sensor input. Both of them would be indirect. Right?

46:40 normal spreading of activity in the visual system.

47:13 But it but it's interesting to think about because when I was reading that chapter I was thinking wait a minute isn't like so okay so um now uh in some cases though you might think there are these sorts of things that do happen and probably is compatible with your view but the sort of thing I'm I'm I'm talking about the like post-diction effects whereby something happens afterwards that affects what you saw before. Um so so where where you know uh um you have uh the I don't know if you

47:48 know the work following Matus's Michelle's work lately but he has a a paper on these kind of uh effects um and how they might pose a problem for first order representationalism and theories of consciousness or whatever. So that's a different a different sort of issue. But but the the question that I was kind of wondering about for you was if these effects are so if you present the stimulus and then 300 milliseconds later present something that affects how they

48:20 then um then you're sort of I was thinking on your view then what we're going to end up saying is that there's like there's perceptual processing which triggers the mental imagery and the mental imagery then changes the perceptual processing or like how is that is that something that's allowable on your view? So if I if there's kind of one claim that I want people to remember from this is that what we uh from the book is that if that what we naively take to be perception

48:54 stimulation driven perception and mental imagery

49:27 uh um span or something. So um

50:02 everything like that what comes uh after and what came before that's kind of filled in by mental imagery and the further away you get from the middle point of the cellback the more the the the more you know the more important role mental imagery plays temporal mental telemetry plays and the less important role the sensory stimulation plays

50:36 there is or the you know less information is being brought in and and our visual system is trying to somehow make up stuff that sounds like the the most likely uh way of filling in those details. So in the same way that would be the equivalent of that in the temporal case.

51:11 that. Yeah.

51:43 about. He talked he he cared about the experience in the conscious.

52:51 even wrong to think of that there is one of the object um and which is the one that the visual system cares about because if I'm like having some effect on my perceptual system that happened after the event was perceived then the mental imagery you're saying that a lot of what we take as our perceptual thing is like a mix of those two but I'm asking does it change does that does that mental imagery feedback

53:24 on or affect the early perceptual processing in a way that would bring the early perceptual processing into a different state or correct some details or bring it more in alignment with or or what? So, in other words, like what do you think the relation back and forth is cause and effect wise?

53:58 skull

54:31 perceptual object that you that your visual system comes up with is, you know, it's a collaboration between u sensory stimulation driven processes and mental imagery. And mental imag is very important there. And mental image what what's happening in this kind of mental imagery processing. So pro processing that's not directly uh triggered by the sensory input can and does impact the sensory stimulation driven stuff.

55:04 illusion or something like that and you sort of think about how people perceive the faces being like uh convex when it's concave, but yet if you ask them to like flick the tip of the nose or touch it or something like that, they sort of reach into the to the the mask where the nose is actually located indicating that the perceptual system did correctly figure out where the where the surfaces were at least. But that's not some there's also another perceptual representation somewhere which is related to the the the way the face is perceived consciously. So whether it's conscious or not, I don't really care because that

55:35 might occur unconsciously too. But there clearly are these two different representations, right, that are both driven by the stimulus and evolve imagery. And so so how do we how do we make sense of of those kinds of phenomenon on this view? I know I'm switching topics all of a sudden, but I I think it's a a segue to what I'm trying to get at. No, that's that's also very close to my heart this uh this topic although I I'm uh I'm not sure it's about imagery frankly. Uh so it's about how and that's that's a topic that I worked on um a while ago

56:09 and it's about the dorsal representation and the venture representation they um they can come apart.

56:42 illusions mill liar

57:16 question in um in in psychology and I guess in in some branches of of philosophy is about is how how does that work? How is that possible for your for your visual system to represent these two things at the same time?

57:49 scene

58:23 on your view right so I'm just trying to think through like how how on your view this is going to work uh so you have a you have

58:55 obviously most of the discussion is about vententral u stuff but so I I want to say that um yeah imagery plays a role in in all forms of perception including dorsal and vententral but I uh just your initial question or example about the holo phase I don't think we need any kind of imagery in order to understand what's going on there.

59:28 imagery, but you will need motor imagery, right? Or something in order to reach out and touch the uh the uh the nose where it really is or something like that. So that's kind of what I'm aiming towards is like where do these connect in this process of explaining how I perceive it differently than how I act. Um uh because they they both depend on this perceptual stream. So part of the answer is that there's these different streams. They branch. Um but so as we follow the stream out then what was imagery is now you know the signal is is going up through the you know up

1:00:01 through the process as it as it's coming up here to the parietal lobe and and you know the synapses are sending information whatever's happening then that process is not imagery on your view although it's it's causing you know representations in my semataensory cortex motor cortez, etc. to be produced at that point, right? That's got to be part of the explanation for why I act the way I do when they say reach out and touch the nose. So, at that point, some kind of unconscious imagery or

1:00:34 something like that is being but motor imagery is being activated. But does it also activate a kind of visual imagery? Because I'm also thinking that you have these passages where you say you reach for the cup and there's there's like visual imagery of the cup involved in that. Um, so, so I'm just wondering like you say it doesn't play a role in this case, but I'm thinking doesn't it on your view like in in these two instances at least come into account when you explain how it is that a person can act in this way and that's not even accounting for like how they perceive the thing consciously but

1:01:07 just like why they touched the nose correctly.

1:01:42 it if it were oluded by a curtain or something like that I could I would you know I would know how to do that and I can also to touch the camera if I close my eye. So that would be imagery. If I close my eyes and I touch the camera. Did I do this? Yeah, I did this.

1:02:17 where uh where it's um which is not guided by um perceptually guided but it's not guided by the actual stimulus but it's guided by a uh imagery the perceptual representation it's an imagery

1:02:50 acting on imagery then it's going to be a little less reliable. Uh and again I could uh just you know look at it where it is close my eyes and then I do it like this. But you can also guide my uh my pointing movement uh by just somehow telling me that uh you know the camera is uh I don't know at the upper right corner of my visual field and then I'm going to to try to reach that and that would be very much a pragmatic mental imagery. an act a perceptually guided action

1:03:22 that's guided not by a like a straightforward like online perceptual representation but an offline perceptual representation.

1:03:55 account for like these. So one is accurately representing where the nose is and the other isn't basically is what you're uh what you're saying.

1:04:27 different but apparently there's a lot of interactions between them uh early on and uh sometimes difficult to separate them huge

1:05:35 things so the way the way to think about it is so here's a like a very simplified version of simplified way of thinking about sensor imagery so what I call mental imagery so sensory imagery is the kind of the first stop after the input in in your mental pro in your perceptual processing uh that is not directly triggered by the input and then go to the other side the output side motor imagery is the last stop in the in the kind of production of the output that does not directly produce the output

1:07:15 know to direct muscle commands but that what's doing the commanding so to speak are these these output motor images but I'm now seeing that I was importing my some other mystical view that's not yours to your point.

1:07:48 initiation but having motor imagery highly improves the probability of motor of action initiation

1:08:20 because it results in the action precisely. Um but I I wonder if they're so when the people are surprised that they touch the nose correctly.

1:08:52 have touched where the nose seemed to be or there does seem to be some sort of background thing that's violated. Um, and I was wondering if that that other now that I know this is in the dorsal stream or that other component of this hollow face illusion if that might involve some sort of like illusion of that could be related to motor imagery in this way.

1:09:25 specific branch it falls under I don't know but uh yeah I wonder what you thought about that

1:09:58 visualizing something. Right.

1:10:31 You do something that goes against your vententral representation which is the conscious one. You do it and my god that's not what uh I ex my conscious part of my my mind expected on based of the ventral representation.

1:11:04 cognitive things which you argue are based that importantly involve mental imagery.

1:11:40 We were unjustly annoyed. You've been wronged.

1:12:13 think is very interesting. Um and you know this is an area where where where this this theory of cognitive dissonance has been around for a long time. the ideas behind it, you know, go go go way back to the 60s possibly um maybe 70s, but 60s depending on who you talk to, you know, these ideas. I guess what Leoo was telling me that they were influenced by the theory of cognitive dissonance when they were doing the split uh brain research back in the old days with um anyway, so it's been around for a long time and as the name suggests, people think it's cognitive. So that suggests that maybe there's a conflict in my

1:12:45 beliefs, you know, so that if I in the example you discussed, you know, I try to join a a group, I have to be shocked in order to join it. And the more I'm shocked, the more severe the shock, the more loyal or the more higher I rate the group as being important to be a member of or something like that. So um there seems to be this this, you know, the classic explanation is like I just can't hold these two beliefs that the group is unimportant and that I suffered so much to be a part of it. So I I have to adjust my beliefs that the group is important um in order to fit maybe with

1:13:19 core beliefs if you want to you know take the the mound bound and uh quilty done route. Okay. So you know all this stuff but so you have you think that there's kind of first something wrong with this approach that it doesn't really explain what it's supposed to or work in the way it's supposed to. And then you have a mental imagery alternative. So having set all that up could you tell us like where did I get the setup right? If not, how did I mess up? And if I did, then what's wrong with it on your view? What's the argument against it?

1:13:54 um might be a kind of a take-home from reading the book. People I've talked too much about cognitive states in trying to describe the human mind about beliefs. Uh I'm a little allergic to belief. I feel that they, you know, we often postulate beliefs only because that's kind of a mental state type that we're comfortable in using and there's no real reason why we would want to postulate beliefs and we

1:14:26 should instead we should postulate something much simpler like imagistic representations.

1:14:58 background they knew all about propositions they just kind of imported that whole way of thinking about uh representations to to the mind

1:15:31 the punctive dissonance literature is a is a very nice illustration of that. There's no real reason why we should think that it's all about beliefs. Why why why should we why should it be about beliefs? Why why are beliefs such important mental states?

1:16:05 think information processing is an important component of cognitive science and therefore maybe belief like states are going to be somehow fundamental. So you could work yourself into thinking a simple unified theory of the mind would just pause it saying I agree with that but I just wonder like is that an So is is it just wrong to think that we could ever have a an account of the mind in terms of one kind of mental state or is that you know

1:16:40 in for one kind of state or go in for one kind of un

1:17:13 interesting things going on in the perception and there's action emotional status why would it be the same thing

1:17:46 mind in those terms. Mhm.

1:18:19 to try try to somehow uh liken everything that's going on in the in the human mind to uh I don't know solving solving logic pro puzzles, right? Because that's not what the human mind is really good at,

1:18:54 of two beliefs. Um, and and here I'm thinking of like your objection to the mango biome quilty done syllogism. Um, so I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about set up that that problem and why you think it doesn't succeed or doesn't work as an explanation.

1:19:59 it wasn't worth something or something. Yeah.

1:21:03 alternative. In this kind of new work I present another alternative. I still think that there's issues with the original view

1:21:37 of ties into what we talked about earlier. There's a fairly good evidence that there there's cognitive dissonance in animals.

1:22:41 you to think of an to search for an alternative view or some set of results or something that

1:23:15 to ourselves that's not mediated by this like very explicit beliefs, but some kind of

1:23:53 cognitive dissonance thing, I'll let that slide. Um I am curious about the the Stroop effect. Uh so I I think this is another area where you have interesting things to say that imagery pops up where you where you wouldn't have uh expected it. Um at least not obviously. So so the traditional view here is you know what Stroop effect is. You see the red uh it says green but it's red ink and then they ask you to name the color of the ink and you go green red and it takes you a little bit longer. Um so so that's a reliable effect. This might be the most studied thing in in psychophysics. I don't know

1:24:25 if it is, but it's very well studied. So, so usually that's people say that um if I understand the traditional textbook answer for what's going on, it's that you see the word and there's semantic processing of the word um which happens very fast and unconsciously. So that seeing the letters G R E E N triggers the concept in my mind green. So that it that cognitive state interferes with my visual perceptual state which is representing it as red. So that when I

1:24:58 try to say what color it is, the cognitive state somehow interjects or supersedes or gets in first or something like that. Um, so and you want to say no, this is there's a better explanation that involves mental imagery. Um, which is I guess that the word activates the mental image of green. Is that how this is going to go? Um, and if so, then what happened to this semantic activation of the processing, the so-called deep

1:25:29 unconscious processing of the meaning of the term? Do you object to that or does that not matter in the way they think it does or just how does this all fit together is what I'm asking.

1:26:02 the word now, what I'm saying is that um no, you're so and you're slower not because the the perceptual processing is slower, but because you know the perceptual processing gives you whatever it is, and then it's like these two things kind of fighting with each other. Oh, I should say green. who I should say red, why I should say green, and that's what slows it down. So, because what we're trying to explain is why the why it's slower, right?

1:26:36 that the perceptual processing is slower. And the perception processing is slower because you're looking at something red whereas you have a green visual mental imagery because you're reading the word green gre and that's where that's kind of big interference there in the perceptual case. So there's so there's not just an action interference but also or sometimes even more importantly a perceptual interference. I don't really want to say that it's like ooh the stroop effect has nothing to do with

1:27:07 control. It's just that um you know there's a very important element there. There's already a conflict already an interference in the perceptual processing.

1:27:40 there's you do say right sometimes but um

1:28:12 the neural state for green is activated or something like that. Um

1:28:45 perceptual processing and the speed of perceptual processing accuracy of perceptual processing. Mhm.

1:30:54 and trying to explore like what we would expect and what the explanations should look like and things of that nature. and and this is just one book like you've written many many books by the way too many someone might think um and you're currently writing more so you know you might want to stop someday let us catch up

1:31:26 kind of wrote your book that was very Um, you know, you really feel this with a Fantasia when Aphantasia really kind of started to take off when I published the book and it's just uh even from the copy edited version to the proofs there,

1:32:01 didn't know that people were like serious about mental like images until I got to grad school and we were talking about the problem of the speckled hen and they were saying like you know imagine the speckled hen like how many spots does it have in the mental image and I was like what the [ __ ] are you talking about? like how how many is what and there were people around me being like no I can tell there's 14 or what about the other side and they were talking about they're asking these questions I was just like wait are you guys seriously like talking about an like a picture of a h a chicken in your mind

1:33:10 or or you were saying you generate them maybe you didn't say that maybe I just proved that they could by doing it but you were saying that the image could be unconscious and you know so when I closed my And I was like, "Okay, so where's the coffee cup?" And I was like, "All right, so I know I know where it is. I I remember where I put it." And I reach out in my mind is just complete blackness. Like what I'm seeing is literally just empty black nothingness, but I still grab the coffee cup. I still successfully like my fingers were in the right position. I hooked the little thing um and and it worked perfectly. So I I perfectly accept that that probably

1:33:47 it could be that there's an image that was generated which was guiding my action without me being aware of it because from my point of view I will swear up and down there was no image. There was you know nothing. It's like a

1:34:19 you're a dream skeptic you know I don't know maybe maybe I don't and didn't just wake up and kind of fill in the details but it certainly see like I I let's put it this way I was convinced by Daycart's argument from dreaming before I ever knew about aphantasia or that I had it in any way at all. So that seems to me to suggest that I had dreams and I have maybe auditory imagery. Um and I'm a musician so maybe that explains or quote quote

1:34:54 um that might Yeah. So, I do uh think someone once they said to me like I I I said I can't tell sometimes if like when I'm trying to picture a song in my head whether I'm hearing the song or I'm hearing like myself humming it in my own mental voice like is it the guitar I'm hearing or me kind of going or whatever you know uh in my head but in a weird way.

1:35:25 can hear chords, I think." Um but anyway, and and I've gotten better since I've been learning how to play piano and really practicing triads and altered chords and things like that. It's really changed the the way I hear. Like I can I can pick out an altered ninth chord now. I I I I can spot it. I couldn't before. Um so, uh that's cool. And that so that was what you know and then I read that maybe aphantasics don't hallucinate when they take LSD and stuff and I was like but I took all those mushrooms in the 90s and I swear to God I was hallucinating. So I

1:36:30 visual imagery. You do have visual imagery. Uh which is conscious. Um so you're I I mean

1:37:03 white into blue into red into purple." It blew my mind. And then I found out that's kind of a normal thing in meditation. But I thought as an aphantasic there would be no way that I could. Um and then I read your paper

1:37:37 almost got hit by a car and then you later

1:38:10 new and interesting thing but people treat it as though it's a uniform thing when really we should just come to grips with the fact that there's like different kinds it can be triggered in different ways it may be it may show up as a result of different things have gone wrong or whatever in the normal stream of perception. So what you're saying is for like someone like me who can dream but can't picture an apple in their head that there's a control issue that I can that I just that I can generate imagery but I can't voluntarily generate the image or consciously generate it.

1:39:14 counted to 10 and then I tried to picture the cup. I saw blackness and then I reached out and successfully grabbed the cup.

1:39:46 aphantasia in terms of unconscious mental imagery that's uh I believe that that was my I was the first person who came up with that.

1:40:54 terms of mental health issues. And I love reading too. And some and when I first started telling people that I so in this philosophy of perception class that I'm talking about way back in the early this was like 2001 or something like that. Um long time ago. So in that class when I suddenly realized like these guys were serious about seeing something mental in like currently and I was like what the hell are you guys talking about? in that class where this came out, they were very surprised that I as surprised as I was that they were seriously saying that they had some

1:41:26 mental image. They were as surprised that I was saying I had no mental image and we were both like all of us sitting there being like what? So it was a very eye-opening moment where it really in a way I want to spin this for what we're talking about now is that there is this assumption in the philosophy of perception psychology etc that there's a uniformity here and that you know that perception is a natural kind or something like that um and I don't know if if it really should be thought of that way because there are all these variances that we're kind of sweeping under the rug um where where you know

1:41:59 that clearly don't make a behavioral difference because I drive a car just as well as everyone else And everyone says, "I have a great imagination and I love reading and all this stuff." And and then they go, "Well, you like reading? Like, what do you do when you read?" And I'm like,

1:42:32 interesting Exactly like what what you would expect from from unconscious mental imagery that you have you form some kind of an unconscious representation and then there's the the way to know that you had an unconscious representation is that if you see something that you you would have thought is the same you surprise because that's not actually the same. So surprise that that's not how I imagined it. That's that's a surprising look. It wouldn't be a surprising look if you had not read no visual representation of it. So

1:43:07 remember when I first kind of came to New York as a philosopher, grad student, um, and and Ned seemed to be arguing against people like David Rosenthal, high order theorist, who were suggesting that there might be unconscious imagistic representations. And it seemed like people like Ned were saying, "No, if it's imagistic, it has to be conscious in some sense." And that the whole idea of like images that are not conscious doesn't make sense in some conceptual way. And I was just like, "I don't know. It seems like obvious to me, but but maybe that's because I have this kind of uh already I can lean on things

1:43:42 which you know, yeah, I was just already convinced that there could be imagistic things that I was unaware of in my own mind in a way. Um,

1:44:15 there's more and more really cool results about how things that we thought is like this this one way of working visual working memory

1:44:51 your aphantasia is probably less impacting of your life than some um than some other people. So for example, you do amal completion, right?

1:45:23 aphantasia uh that do

1:45:56 doesn't dream none of that stuff

1:46:29 is that everyone is somewhere here and I'm I'm I'm fairly close to the hyperfantasia thing and I and I a lot of problems with that and uh

1:47:03 reading is different as well and so on. So like a giant like much of what we care about is going to work very differently depending on where we are in this spectrum on in the part of the spectrum that you would want to describe as normal. So,

1:47:36 going to fall to the side as a result of this.

1:48:08 consciousness, uh I do kind of want to bring things around to talking about this intentionalism paper that you have that's come out and and maybe this is a good place to kind of

1:48:39 else is doing which I don't think has been done but that's a se separate topic so but anyway my point is that I like representationalism

1:49:12 intentionalism, other people call them representationism. It's very we should agree on one terminology or the other and I just go go with that.

1:50:16 supervenes on the

1:50:50 anything. Um, which would metaphysically distinguish it from dualism, property dualism, epiphenomenalism, etc. So, so I wonder like, you know, do you guys say that just because you try to you're trying to be, you know, get everybody? Um, or do you really think that something is important about supervenience? I mean, um,

1:51:22 supervenience was older age.

1:53:01 from there on. Uh and uh that's the aim, that's the dream. But uh I want to have the other people on board as well because you know more people think about the question the better the chances are that you're going to be able to come up with something.

1:53:35 the the way the most convincing way of thinking about intentionalism or what you would call representationism is that it's not that uh phenomenal character perceptual phenomenology it supervenes on the content of this one representation but it super on the sum of the content of a bunch of perceptual representations and all kinds of modalities and all kinds of levels of processing. Um, and that's that's the view and I feel that everyone should agree with that.

1:54:08 like going to be like

1:54:40 not taking an issue with that. Yeah, I see what you're saying and and so in put that way I could agree. Um okay, cool. So what you guys are trying to argue against is what you call onetoone intentionalism. So basically the idea would be that I have this conscious phenomenology um and that then that would supervene or correlate with one particular representation. Uh which when you put it that way it sounds super sus. It it sounds very suspicious. Um but but lots of people

1:55:12 have this view and you give all the quotes like you guys say we're not making this up. Like people go around saying this

1:55:45 pressed towards this idea that it's got to be somehow distributed over all these or the I didn't quite get the sum idea. Uh so but that somehow it's the summation of all these representational properties. That's the bas you can see how that's a kind of a very different very similar picture like very like big picture view of the mind as what I'm going for the with the mental imagery. It's uh you know in the mental imagery project this is the perceptual representation, mental imagery, various method the temporal imagery, various spatial imagery representation and then on base of that

1:56:18 you get what you naively think of as perception and here as well you get all these kinds of different representation across the visual stream across the auditory stream and then altogether they come together and they they kind of create the the conscious feel that you have. So, so the most obvious and immediate question that jumps out from me after reading all of this stuff juxtaposed and having this discussion

1:56:52 those unconscious ones uh one assumes are not in the supervenient space of the uh perceptual experience that I have right or are they so that's the question ultimately that I have

1:57:26 have an impact or on the content or or the very final character

1:58:00 can possibly influence conscious our consciousness are only like other conscious states. Is that the idea? That's something

1:58:35 And so what I'm asking is do they supervene also on the unconscious ones? Because you might have thought that no you could change those without changing my experience unless you change causally something in the state which is you know the experience. So, how could it causally change something? Unless you're saying it's not physical, but you're saying you're a naturalist or you want to reduce it to So, I I'm really confused about how all this these two and maybe you didn't mean for them to fit together because they're separate projects, but I'm just I was trying to fit these two

1:59:07 together. Um, the idea that there's unconscious mental images and also the idea that my conscious experience superven on many different representations. So, how do we tell them apart or are they all in there or like Yeah. So, how is it all fitting together ultimately? So I mean substation is that you can't change the supervenient stuff without there being a change in the subvenient one. Right.

1:59:40 representations in the supervenience base. Uh, and the way I think about it is that all right, so here's like a really dumb um parallel.

2:00:13 think that's not going to be an easy explanatory gap to um to bridge.

2:00:50 answer the question what makes the unconscious ones conscious besides simply saying there's a supervenience relationship like there's got to be some explanation for the difference between the two and it doesn't seem like an intentionalism is usually supposed to be the answer to that question. there's a kind of representational content that supervenes only. So, but you can't say that.

2:01:23 consciousness. Okay.

2:02:30 one representation that this thing supervenes on and it's a higher order one which then would answer all these objections that you give because you're kind of assuming that representationalists or intentionalists sorry have to be first order theorists um in the argument that you guys are presenting in this paper but you could be a higher order intentionalist um and think that it supervenes on a higher order representation like my horror theory does and then you would you know you would have a one so you could have a one to one on the other hand it's also important to recognize I think that you could have a higher order many to one and I do in my some of my say that maybe

2:03:05 in the prefrontal cortex what you have is like a distributed higher order network. So you have the frontal pole and the dorsal lateral prefrontal cord and a medial and you have this all these and maybe like you know the higher order representation I am seeing red has I am seeing red. It might be distributed these representations all over the place

2:03:38 distinction even though you were making this assumption in in your work that that it should

2:04:13 theories of consciousness as the summary representation, right? The summary representation would be something that kind of that uh that is the only thing that the phenomena the character super beings on. Right.

2:04:47 actually just it's not maybe maybe we didn't think enough about the higher higher order theory.

2:05:21 Many people find it implausible, which in my opinion makes it the best kind of theory to empirically test because if something's implausible, then that's the kind of stuff we would love to go and look at. Um, so to me, it just seems like it opens up a bunch of empirically interesting questions. Um, which is why I like thinking about higher order theories. It's not so much that I'm like super convinced that they're they're on the right track. I am sort of intuitively attracted to that, but I'm more interested in the empirical issues that thinking through this stuff brings up, which is why I think a lot we have a lot in common with that.

2:06:26 discussion, but uh sorry about that, guys. Um anyway, thanks again very much for your uh patience with my endless questions and uh we'll schedule hopefully