I know that I cannot literally, experientially imagine myself being dead, because when I am dead the functioning consciousness that I have now will no longer exist. However, I do have a non-experiential sense of my death based on my knowledge that every night during dreamless sleep my consciousness disappears. I assume the same will be the same when I die: lack of consciousness or any kind of experience. And that is not any scarier to me than dreamless sleep. In fact, the complete absence of physical pain and psychological discomfort strikes me as a blessing. Not that I am in any hurry to get there, because I am currently enjoying life, but I am fine with dying, which to me is nothing like scary darkness, silence, numbness, paralysis, or FOMO.
Maybe it's not Death we are even capable of imagining, but rather those last few days, hours, seconds we can; the lights are going out and we don't really know what's next - if anything - other than ceasing to exist. But what if...?
Not so much as a failure to imagine death but the prelude to death as a condition of sever, painful illness with a negative prognosis. Aging can involve falling to chronic illnesses, routine pain, decreasing mental acuity, handicaps to our mobility every day, isolation from normal society. These I believe are the fears that may accompany dying, and only to develop a feeling of fearfulness!!
After each magnificent article, I think "Surely he is done. There are no more shibboleths to skewer." Yet here we are again more hilarious and trenchant insights about our sad species. So grateful for these, David - they are as comforting as Epictetus, especially these days. Big fan here. Thank you.
Okay - now you're just baiting us! Once we know that we are shitty at getting a gut feel for a certain statistical problem, we can learn the salient math and explore the problem area. After a time, we will get a gut feel for that kind of statistic.
The only shortcomings here are how limited our time is and how limited our minds are. We don't have enough time in our limited lives to learn everything and develop a gut feel for everything. Without that gut feel we imagine unreal things. But an unreal thing can become a real thing if we decide to built it/write it/code it/paint it/sculpt it. The thing may not match our imagination, but sometimes it can exceed it!
Yea, what you’re talking about would seem to match the surgeon example. Imagination works fine if it has lots of practical experience to draw from. But it is too often applied to areas where the problem is ill-defined and there is no practical experience to draw from.
I thought of a counter point to my contention. In creative endeavors, fiction, whatnot, not knowing can be an advantage. That way, the most interesting things can be tried and tweaked back to plausibility.
Though it is worth mentioning - trying to imagine the internal state of another person is probably a more difficult problem than trying to imagine something in the physical world. Living in a worldview is one way to do it. Going undercover so to speak.
We can make our own experience. We might need a little help from our friends, but still, we can learn to be good with our imagination. We can get a gut gut feel to guide things. Like anything else, we'll need to suffer the effort first.
I was dead for more than 13 billion years. This is a fact. Eventually I will (as far as we know) be dead for much longer. I can imagine a world in which I don't exist. Trying to imagine *yourself* being dead is naturally impossible. This is because your frame of reference would be something that doesn't exist. Perhaps the problem is in the word 'be' because it présupposes you *being* something. Is this more of a semantic than cognition problem, really?
"We cannot imagine how our subjective experience could just be nerve cells and chemicals."
Sure, it's easy to believe that all our conscious thoughts depend on nerve cells and chemicals. No need to believe in an unbridgeable gap between 2 kinds of things. But consciousness is a way of knowing, of experiencing. It is in one sense the ONLY way of knowing. But no one has any idea how nerve cells and chemicals can give rise to a sense of "seemingness". Every sort of appeal to how consciousness has evolved because it has some advantage doesn't make sense to me. For every world with conscious experience in it, there is one without it that has all the same advantages of one that does. That makes it a hard problem, though perhaps not one worth spending much time on because ideas for solutions seem so scant. By the same token we experience free will. It does not actually exist, but there's no explanation of how we experience it. I have trouble imagining :-) how anyone could live without the experience of making decisions. If there was no "seemingness" would we have any justification for thinking there is suffering? We construct a world in which other beings have conscious thought that is sort of like ours and that's why we think it's bad to make them suffer (if we like them). But without consciousness we could be similarly wired to construct data representations of other beings and be wired by evolution to believe that certain aspects of those data representations should not be changed in certain ways. I'd welcome alternate views on this.
We know that certain problems are undecidable (no algorithm can call them true or false) and that they show up in nature (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature16059). If we consider two situations: one in which everyone is conscious and one in which everyone is a p-zombie for whom consciousness is an illusion, is there any way to tell the two situations apart? Perhaps consciousness is also undecidable.
Our notion of reality is something we actively construct based on imperfect inference from imperfect data, and it seems there is no end of possible ways we could be deceived (optical illusions a basic starting point). For each of us as an individual, though, conscious experience seems fundamental. I don't know how an illusion of consciousness within an individual for the individual himself could be distinguished from true consciousness. "Consciousness" seems like a more fundamental reality than the concept of "illusion". Readers who disagree are all p-zombies. :-)
"Illusion" implies a difference between reality and something else. And the something else has to be conscious experience, or it's not illusion but just "mistaken inference"?
I agree with your view on consciousness qualia being a hard problem. In contrast, the lack of freewill is much easier to understand. The most convincing explanation of the illusion of freewill is that it is simply ignorance about our own future actions. This ignorance about our own decision mechanisms gives us the feeling of making choices even if our selection is predetermined
That may be, but it gives no explanation for why our conscious experience includes making choices. What's the benefit? What's the point of the conscious experience of making a choice when our actions could just be guided by whatever physical processes determine them? If we imagine some explanation as to why we have conscious experience at all, we would need another one to explain why we aren't just aware of life as a movie and we just experience it all as it happens without choice.
You seem to be suggesting that the BS arises where we fill in the gaps and limitations in our imagination with convenient beliefs and/or delusions, without noticing the difference. But is wishful thinking (as in the happiness example) quite the same as imagination? It's true that we use "I imagine that" informally to also designate beliefs, but technically it's a simulation or mental representation of scenarios and experiences, not a propositional commitment. Is your point more that we mistake what we are imagining for the belief itself, or that we mistake what we can't imagine for something we can imagine, and then this leads us to a related belief that is BS?
In other words, I'm wondering whether it's important to distinguish more sharply between 1) what we are really imagining (totally valid), 2) what we think we're imagining that we're actually failing to imagine (error), and 3) what we think we believe based on that mistaken attribution of what we are imagining (BS).
It’s that we draw invalid inferences from the fact that we can’t imagine something. We either mistakenly think “I cannot imagine how x could be true; therefore, x is false” or “I cannot imagine x; therefore, I will stupidly substitute this unrelated thing, y, that I can imagine.” Either the way, the failure of imagination leads to confusion.
I see, thanks for clarifying. Your focus on the negative case of under-imagining/non-imagining is important, since typically I would say we hear more about problems of outright over-imagining (letting flights of fancy run wild, rather than substituting for the unimaginable). When someone is anxious or phobic and imagines all kinds of awful scenarios that aren't realistic, or fantasizes about the person they're in love with, this can lead to invalid inferences based on the sheer vividness of what's being imagined and anticipated. This seems different from substitution for something incomprehensible; more like getting carried away. (I'm also not sure avoiding inconvenient truths is really the same thing as failing to imagine, but that's a different discussion).
Humans are fear-based biological machines, and fear of death is one of the most fundamental ones. Turn it off, and humanity will extinct because they won't care much about safety, food, shelter, deseases, and reproduction. It's simply the way how humans are wired.
Imagination is just a conscious simulation of reality. How accurate it is depends on how strong your world model is. For the death, in particular, we rely on the things we have in the model - aging, pain, mourning for the passed loved ones... And yes, it's quite scary.
But in essence all of that is based on the idea that a human gets born, lives and dies, and the world moves on, without them. Imagine for a second that this is not how it works - that the world exists only as long as you are alive, and as soon as you die, it ceases from existence. No mourning relavites, no sad friends, no unfinished business - just nothing.
It is hard to imagine, but not impossible. And in this light, fear of death doesn't make sense, indeed.
Hurrying up to it doesn't make it either, btw, because those who welcome death (unless to stop physical or mental suffering) assume that there is something behind the door: another worls, next level, hell or heavens, you name it. Which is bullshit.
Imagination can be seen as crappy bullshit if you expect to to accurately reflect reality all the time. But if you see imagination as the source of new hypotheses, of possibilities that can be tested, or of new art, music, etc., then imagination is far from bullshit. Imagine a world in which there were no new hypotheses to test and therefore no scientific progress or no new stories, plays, movies, paintings, music, and other art forms. I think I prefer a world with imagination.
Imagine if you had no imagination. Like imagining death, for example, it’s impossible to imagine.
Without imagination you’d have no intuition and feel no fear or inspiration. Without imagination you wouldn’t feel any sense of certainty about anything, because certainty requires imagination - and so does intuition. Without intuition there would be no intuitive knowledge, no deductions, and no scientific discoveries. Imagine that! Wait…
In the infamous words of Einstein, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.”
I respectfully disagree that imagination is bullshit. But the title did get my attention. It poked my curiosity. Wait… doesn’t curiosity require imagination too?
Not saying we’d be better off without imagination. I’m saying we often overestimate its utility and misapply it where it doesn’t belong. I don’t think surgeons should abandon their imaginations, as I say in the piece.
I know that I cannot literally, experientially imagine myself being dead, because when I am dead the functioning consciousness that I have now will no longer exist. However, I do have a non-experiential sense of my death based on my knowledge that every night during dreamless sleep my consciousness disappears. I assume the same will be the same when I die: lack of consciousness or any kind of experience. And that is not any scarier to me than dreamless sleep. In fact, the complete absence of physical pain and psychological discomfort strikes me as a blessing. Not that I am in any hurry to get there, because I am currently enjoying life, but I am fine with dying, which to me is nothing like scary darkness, silence, numbness, paralysis, or FOMO.
I feel the same way, which is always why I’ve been befuddled by people who say they’re afraid of death.
Maybe it's not Death we are even capable of imagining, but rather those last few days, hours, seconds we can; the lights are going out and we don't really know what's next - if anything - other than ceasing to exist. But what if...?
Not so much as a failure to imagine death but the prelude to death as a condition of sever, painful illness with a negative prognosis. Aging can involve falling to chronic illnesses, routine pain, decreasing mental acuity, handicaps to our mobility every day, isolation from normal society. These I believe are the fears that may accompany dying, and only to develop a feeling of fearfulness!!
After each magnificent article, I think "Surely he is done. There are no more shibboleths to skewer." Yet here we are again more hilarious and trenchant insights about our sad species. So grateful for these, David - they are as comforting as Epictetus, especially these days. Big fan here. Thank you.
🙏
Okay - now you're just baiting us! Once we know that we are shitty at getting a gut feel for a certain statistical problem, we can learn the salient math and explore the problem area. After a time, we will get a gut feel for that kind of statistic.
The only shortcomings here are how limited our time is and how limited our minds are. We don't have enough time in our limited lives to learn everything and develop a gut feel for everything. Without that gut feel we imagine unreal things. But an unreal thing can become a real thing if we decide to built it/write it/code it/paint it/sculpt it. The thing may not match our imagination, but sometimes it can exceed it!
Yea, what you’re talking about would seem to match the surgeon example. Imagination works fine if it has lots of practical experience to draw from. But it is too often applied to areas where the problem is ill-defined and there is no practical experience to draw from.
I thought of a counter point to my contention. In creative endeavors, fiction, whatnot, not knowing can be an advantage. That way, the most interesting things can be tried and tweaked back to plausibility.
Though it is worth mentioning - trying to imagine the internal state of another person is probably a more difficult problem than trying to imagine something in the physical world. Living in a worldview is one way to do it. Going undercover so to speak.
We can make our own experience. We might need a little help from our friends, but still, we can learn to be good with our imagination. We can get a gut gut feel to guide things. Like anything else, we'll need to suffer the effort first.
I was dead for more than 13 billion years. This is a fact. Eventually I will (as far as we know) be dead for much longer. I can imagine a world in which I don't exist. Trying to imagine *yourself* being dead is naturally impossible. This is because your frame of reference would be something that doesn't exist. Perhaps the problem is in the word 'be' because it présupposes you *being* something. Is this more of a semantic than cognition problem, really?
Most of this is actually comforting. And by most, I mean those things I can comprehend.
Consciousness seems different from the others.
"We cannot imagine how our subjective experience could just be nerve cells and chemicals."
Sure, it's easy to believe that all our conscious thoughts depend on nerve cells and chemicals. No need to believe in an unbridgeable gap between 2 kinds of things. But consciousness is a way of knowing, of experiencing. It is in one sense the ONLY way of knowing. But no one has any idea how nerve cells and chemicals can give rise to a sense of "seemingness". Every sort of appeal to how consciousness has evolved because it has some advantage doesn't make sense to me. For every world with conscious experience in it, there is one without it that has all the same advantages of one that does. That makes it a hard problem, though perhaps not one worth spending much time on because ideas for solutions seem so scant. By the same token we experience free will. It does not actually exist, but there's no explanation of how we experience it. I have trouble imagining :-) how anyone could live without the experience of making decisions. If there was no "seemingness" would we have any justification for thinking there is suffering? We construct a world in which other beings have conscious thought that is sort of like ours and that's why we think it's bad to make them suffer (if we like them). But without consciousness we could be similarly wired to construct data representations of other beings and be wired by evolution to believe that certain aspects of those data representations should not be changed in certain ways. I'd welcome alternate views on this.
We know that certain problems are undecidable (no algorithm can call them true or false) and that they show up in nature (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature16059). If we consider two situations: one in which everyone is conscious and one in which everyone is a p-zombie for whom consciousness is an illusion, is there any way to tell the two situations apart? Perhaps consciousness is also undecidable.
Our notion of reality is something we actively construct based on imperfect inference from imperfect data, and it seems there is no end of possible ways we could be deceived (optical illusions a basic starting point). For each of us as an individual, though, conscious experience seems fundamental. I don't know how an illusion of consciousness within an individual for the individual himself could be distinguished from true consciousness. "Consciousness" seems like a more fundamental reality than the concept of "illusion". Readers who disagree are all p-zombies. :-)
"Illusion" implies a difference between reality and something else. And the something else has to be conscious experience, or it's not illusion but just "mistaken inference"?
let's go from crackpot to crackhead crackpot: could this have something to do with the nature of the soul as expressed by mystics the world over?
I agree with your view on consciousness qualia being a hard problem. In contrast, the lack of freewill is much easier to understand. The most convincing explanation of the illusion of freewill is that it is simply ignorance about our own future actions. This ignorance about our own decision mechanisms gives us the feeling of making choices even if our selection is predetermined
That may be, but it gives no explanation for why our conscious experience includes making choices. What's the benefit? What's the point of the conscious experience of making a choice when our actions could just be guided by whatever physical processes determine them? If we imagine some explanation as to why we have conscious experience at all, we would need another one to explain why we aren't just aware of life as a movie and we just experience it all as it happens without choice.
You seem to be suggesting that the BS arises where we fill in the gaps and limitations in our imagination with convenient beliefs and/or delusions, without noticing the difference. But is wishful thinking (as in the happiness example) quite the same as imagination? It's true that we use "I imagine that" informally to also designate beliefs, but technically it's a simulation or mental representation of scenarios and experiences, not a propositional commitment. Is your point more that we mistake what we are imagining for the belief itself, or that we mistake what we can't imagine for something we can imagine, and then this leads us to a related belief that is BS?
In other words, I'm wondering whether it's important to distinguish more sharply between 1) what we are really imagining (totally valid), 2) what we think we're imagining that we're actually failing to imagine (error), and 3) what we think we believe based on that mistaken attribution of what we are imagining (BS).
It’s that we draw invalid inferences from the fact that we can’t imagine something. We either mistakenly think “I cannot imagine how x could be true; therefore, x is false” or “I cannot imagine x; therefore, I will stupidly substitute this unrelated thing, y, that I can imagine.” Either the way, the failure of imagination leads to confusion.
I see, thanks for clarifying. Your focus on the negative case of under-imagining/non-imagining is important, since typically I would say we hear more about problems of outright over-imagining (letting flights of fancy run wild, rather than substituting for the unimaginable). When someone is anxious or phobic and imagines all kinds of awful scenarios that aren't realistic, or fantasizes about the person they're in love with, this can lead to invalid inferences based on the sheer vividness of what's being imagined and anticipated. This seems different from substitution for something incomprehensible; more like getting carried away. (I'm also not sure avoiding inconvenient truths is really the same thing as failing to imagine, but that's a different discussion).
Humans are fear-based biological machines, and fear of death is one of the most fundamental ones. Turn it off, and humanity will extinct because they won't care much about safety, food, shelter, deseases, and reproduction. It's simply the way how humans are wired.
Imagination is just a conscious simulation of reality. How accurate it is depends on how strong your world model is. For the death, in particular, we rely on the things we have in the model - aging, pain, mourning for the passed loved ones... And yes, it's quite scary.
But in essence all of that is based on the idea that a human gets born, lives and dies, and the world moves on, without them. Imagine for a second that this is not how it works - that the world exists only as long as you are alive, and as soon as you die, it ceases from existence. No mourning relavites, no sad friends, no unfinished business - just nothing.
It is hard to imagine, but not impossible. And in this light, fear of death doesn't make sense, indeed.
Hurrying up to it doesn't make it either, btw, because those who welcome death (unless to stop physical or mental suffering) assume that there is something behind the door: another worls, next level, hell or heavens, you name it. Which is bullshit.
The concept of promethean gap, coined by Günther Anders (?)
when I clicked on the article I thought it said "immigration is bullshit".
Imagine a world without sophistry.
Imagination can be seen as crappy bullshit if you expect to to accurately reflect reality all the time. But if you see imagination as the source of new hypotheses, of possibilities that can be tested, or of new art, music, etc., then imagination is far from bullshit. Imagine a world in which there were no new hypotheses to test and therefore no scientific progress or no new stories, plays, movies, paintings, music, and other art forms. I think I prefer a world with imagination.
Agreed! Just saying it’s often overrated, misused, misapplied, flawed, and limited, with its limitations and flaws hidden from us.
Imagine if you had no imagination. Like imagining death, for example, it’s impossible to imagine.
Without imagination you’d have no intuition and feel no fear or inspiration. Without imagination you wouldn’t feel any sense of certainty about anything, because certainty requires imagination - and so does intuition. Without intuition there would be no intuitive knowledge, no deductions, and no scientific discoveries. Imagine that! Wait…
In the infamous words of Einstein, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.”
I respectfully disagree that imagination is bullshit. But the title did get my attention. It poked my curiosity. Wait… doesn’t curiosity require imagination too?
Not saying we’d be better off without imagination. I’m saying we often overestimate its utility and misapply it where it doesn’t belong. I don’t think surgeons should abandon their imaginations, as I say in the piece.
Truth is often hard to see.