Introspection Illusion

A besetting problem for the scientific study of consciousness has been the fact that everybody is an expert! Not really, of course, but just about everybody who has reflected for more than a few minutes on the topic seems to think the deliverances of those reflections are as authoritative as the results of any high-tech experiment or any mountain of statistics. It can be downright comical to hear them during the question-and-answer sessions at scientific conferences firmly correcting the mistakes they have just detected in the presenter's work, by citing a recent experience they (think they) had. If we were, as these people typically think, infallible judges of the nature of our own personal experiences, they would be right!

But you can misremember, misinterpret, misdescribe your own most intimate experiences, covertly driven by some persuasive but unreliable bit of ideology. Here is a simple demonstration you can perform at home that may surprise you. Sit in front of a mirror so you can monitor your own compliance with the directions, which are to stare intently into your own eyes, fixating on them as a target instead of letting your eyes get attracted to peripheral goings-on. Now, without looking, take a card from the middle of a well-shuffled deck of cards and hold it, face-side toward you, at arm's length just outside the boundaries of your peripheral vision. Wiggle the card. You will know you are doing it, but you won't see it, of course. Start moving the card into your field of view, wiggling it as you do so. First you can see motion (the wiggling) but no color! You can't tell whether it's a red card or a black card or a face card, and you certainly can't identify its number. As you move it more and more centrally, you will be amazed at how close to straight ahead it has to be for you to identify its color, or the fact that it is a face card or not. As the card gets closer and closer to your fixation point, you must concentrate on not cheating, stealing a glance at the card as it moves in. When you are finally able to identify the card, it is almost directly in front of you. Surprising? I don't know anybody who wasn't surprised the first time they experienced this. Here you've thought all along that your vision was roughly equally detailed and colored "all the way out to the periphery," and now you learn that although that seems to "stand to reason," and seems confirmed by casual introspection, it is simply not true. This is just one dimension, one phenomenon among many, in which the apparently rich, continuous, detailed presentation of the world in our (visual) consciousness is an illusion. The moral is unmistakable: don't think you understand the phenomena of consciousness until you examine what experimental research has discovered about it. The armchair theories of philosophers who ignore this moral are negligible at best and more often deeply confused and confusing. What you "learn" about your consciousness "through introspection" is a minor but powerfully misleading portion of what we can learn about your consciousness by adopting the heterophenomenological framework and studying consciousness systematically.

There are still difficulties aplenty in need of resolution, hard problems that are not the Hard Problem. If when we have solved all these "easy" problems there is still a deeply mysterious residue, it will then be time to reconsider our starting point and cast about for some radical departure from current assumptions about biology, physics, and even logic. In the meantime, let's see how far we can get with business-as-usual science, the science that has brought us our current understanding of everything from asteroids and plate tectonics to reproduction, growth, repair, and metabolism in living things.

Introspection and free will

The chasm between the manifest image and the scientific image is at its most treacherous when the topic is free will. Like the questions of what color is, what it really is, and what dollars are, really, when you get right down to it the question of whether free will is an illusion or something we actually have invites us to use the scientific image to investigate this issue, which is posed in the traditional terms of the manifest image. And the invitation has been enthusiastically accepted in recent years. There has been quite a chorus of eminent scientists saying, point blank, that free will is an illusion: neuroscientists Wolf Singer, Chris Frith, and Patrick Haggard; psychologists Paul Bloom and Daniel Wegner; and a few rather well-regarded physicists, Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein. Could so many brilliant scientists be wrong? Many—not all, and maybe not most—philosophers say yes. They say this is a job for philosophy! Are they right? I think so.

The scientists have typically been making a rookie mistake: confusing the manifest image with what we might call the folk ideology of the manifest image. The folk ideology of color is, let's face it, bonkers; color just isn't what most people think it is, but that doesn't mean that the manifest world doesn't really have any colors; it means that colors—real colors—are quite different from what most folks think they are. The folk ideology of consciousness is also bonkers—resolutely dualistic and mysterian; if that were what consciousness had to be, then Wright would be right (see p. 313): we'd have to say that consciousness doesn't exist. But we don't have to treat consciousness as "real magic"—the kind that doesn't exist, made of wonder tissue; we can recognize the reality of consciousness as a phenomenon by acknowledging that folks don't yet have a sound ideology about it. Similarly, free will isn't what some of the folk ideology of the manifest image proclaims it to be, a sort of magical isolation from causation. I've compared free will in this sense to levitation, and one of the philosophical defenders of this bonkers vision has frankly announced that a free choice is a "little miracle." I wholeheartedly agree with the scientific chorus that that sort of free will is an illusion, but that doesn't mean that free will is an illusion in any morally important sense. It is as real as colors, as real as dollars.

Unfortunately, some of the scientists who now declare that science has shown that free will is an illusion go on to say that this "discovery" matters, in a morally important sense. They think it has major implications for morality and the law: nobody is ever really responsible, for instance, so nobody ever deserves to be either punished or praised. They are making the mistake people make when they say that nothing is ever solid, not really. They are using an unreconstructed popular concept of free will, when they should be adjusting it first, the way they do with color and consciousness (and space and time and solidity and all the other things that the ideology of the manifest image gets wrong).

Thought experiments can help us examine a practical concept of free will: the capacity to make decisions and act responsibly in the world we experience. They work rather like crowbars, jimmying us out of familiar assumptions. The following example asks why our beliefs about that capacity matter.

[65. A TRULY NEFARIOUS NEUROSURGEON]

A study by neuropsychiatrist Damiaan Denys and his colleagues (2010) in Amsterdam reported effects of deep brain stimulation by implanted electrodes in treating obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). That is fact, but this is fiction: One day a brilliant neurosurgeon said to a patient on whom she had just performed an implantation procedure in her shiny high-tech operating theater:

The device I've implanted doesn't just control your OCD; it controls your every decision, thanks to our master control system, which maintains radio contact with your microchip twenty-four hours a day. In other words, I've disabled your conscious will; your sense of free will henceforth will be an illusion.

In fact she had done no such thing; this was simply a lie she decided to tell her patient to see what would happen. It worked; the poor fellow went out into the world convinced that he was not a responsible agent, but rather a mere puppet, and his behavior began to show it: he became irresponsible, aggressive, and negligent, indulging his worst whims until he got caught and put on trial. Testifying in his own defense, he passionately protested his non-responsibility because of the implant in his brain, and the neuroscientist, when called to testify, admitted what she had said, and added, "But I was just messing with his head—a practical joke, that's all. I never thought he'd believe me!"

It really doesn't matter whether the court believed his testimony or hers, whether it sentenced him or her; either way she ruined his life with her ill-considered assertion, robbing him of his integrity and crippling his power to make decisions. In fact, her false "debriefing" of her patient actually accomplished nonsurgically much of what she claimed to accomplish surgically: she disabled him. But if she is responsible for this dire consequence, the neuroscientists currently filling the media with talk about how their science shows that free will is an illusion are risking mass-production of the same harm to all the people who take them at their word. Neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers need to take seriously their moral obligation to think through the presuppositions and implications of their public pronouncements on these issues with the same care that is demanded of people who hold forth on global warming or impending asteroid strikes. Social critic Tom Wolfe (2000 p. 100) is cited as an example of someone examining the message people outside the laboratory take from these neuroscientists’ pronouncements.