by pessimizer | 2025-10-30 18:42:26+00:00
I simply do not buy any aspect of this. It is absolutely untestable. It's not just that I don't think people who can't see mental images exist, I don't think that you can prove that anyone does see mental images. It's pure introspection and self-reporting, and half of the scientists named had very odd, old-timey standards of evidence that led them to many very wrong conclusions in their fields.

I couldn't say whether I, myself, have any mental images. I wouldn't even know what it meant to see without eyes. Does that mean that I don't have mental images, or does that mean that I have them so easily that they pass without notice? Or does it mean that this is horseshit, and the consequences of it very much not profound or even detectable?

People's self-reported subjective experiences, about any subject, are almost worthless. You are even an unreliable narrator to yourself. The burden of proof lies on the people who would claim these mind ghosts, not the people that deny them. These descriptions are all so much poetry, so literary.

Eric Schwitzgebel has done a lot of work on introspection, and reminds us of things like how we thought we all dreamed in black and white before the invention of the color television, and we thought that dreaming in color was a sign of mental illness; and how blind people who experienced "blindsight" had no idea that they were reflexively echolocating until you covered their ears and tested them again.

People can have entire, sound chains of reasoning that they are only aware of the conclusions of (and unaware of the process even existing.) We are not aware of all of what we're thinking or how. Our self-perception relies as much or more on our self-images than actual recall of our experiences.

Also, going through severe trauma and saying you see the world differently afterwards is not evidence of anything. If it was brain trauma, it'd be surprising if you didn't have a different understanding of the world during and after your recovery.

I understand this will be downvoted by people who have their self-image tied up in this, or synesthesia, or any number of untestable hypothetical mental states that are painted as mysterious superpowers. I do think it helps to remind ourselves in these times how far just babbling the most likely thing can get us, now that we're in the age of LLMs. There doesn't have to be anything inside.

edit: I've been paid as an artist at times in my life, and very much like to draw, and I still have no idea if I have any mental imagery. It's just not a concept I can attach any meaning to.

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edit2: I entirely forgot that there's a specific essay on this subject by Schwitzgebel.

How Well Do We Know Our Own Conscious Experience? The Case of Visual Imagery

> Philosophers tend to assume that we have excellent knowledge of our own current conscious experience or "phenomenology". I argue that our knowledge of one aspect of our experience, the experience of visual imagery, is actually rather poor. Precedent for this position is found among the introspective psychologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Two main arguments are advanced toward the conclusion that our knowledge of our own imagery is poor. First, the reader is asked to form a visual image, and it is expected that answering questions about certain basic features of that experience will be difficult. If so, it seems reasonable to suppose that people could be mistaken about those basic features of their own imagery. Second, it is observed that although people give widely variable reports about their own experiences of visual imagery, differences in report do not systematically correlate with differences on tests of skills that psychologists have often supposed to require visual imagery, such as mental rotation, visual creativity, and visual memory.

https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/Imagery.htm

other links:

Why Did We Think We Dreamed in Black and White? https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/DreamB&W.htm

How Well Do We Know Our Own Conscious Experience? The Case of Human Echolocation https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/Echo.htm

The Unreliability of Naive Introspection https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/Naive.htm