This is because I feel compelled to believe that we do experience something; - further, that what we experience is something complex; - further again, that the complexity of what we experience when we imagine something is in some sort of way like the complexity we experience when we perceive it: when we see/hear/taste/smell/touch, and so on. And this 'in some way like' seems to me best understood as what we experience resembles what we experience when we see, etc.
So, being less abstract, I feel compelled to believe that what we experience on imagining a ghost resembles what we would experience when we see a ghost.
This gives a reason why what we might call 'powerful' imaginings - hallucinations, particular fantasies, affecting dreams - seem to us to be actual perceptions.
But doing this raises all sorts of challenges, the sorts of challenges I've been looking at:
- If we believe that there are only physical things, i.e., only what occupies some physical space exists, then whatever we experience when we hallucinate has to occupy physical space.
- However, if it is true that we experience something blue when we see a little blue skittle 'meep' man (if I can call it that; see the first season of '30 Rock') and
- If it is true that what we experience on hallucinating a blue man is the same as what we experience on seeing a blue man,
- We must experience something blue on hallucinating a blue man.
That's been the problem so far.
Disjunctivism
But maybe there is another way of approaching hallucinations.
The philosophical position of disjunctivism is that hallucinations are not anything like perceptions. A visual hallucination of a blue man is not at all like seeing a blue man. We experience something when we see the man but we don't necessarily experience something, or experience at least anything like a man, when we hallucinate one. So, forget about it.
This answer is like the answer to what happens when we imagine (last post).
But, like there, we have this problem: whoever hallucinates a little blue man will say that it's like seeing a little blue man. So why do they do it.
- One answer is this: the issue is with their beliefs about what's going on - that's where it goes wrong.
- Or, maybe, we're not sure if it was like actually seeing it - but it's the only way we can describe it. We are, to use a phrase Wittgenstein is famous for, 'tempted to say' that visual hallucinations are like seeing,etc...
Projectivism
In 2005, the Sydney-based philosopher Philip Chaurd argued that this is just what happens when we believe we see, hear, etc., i.e., we perceive, the temporal order of things, e.g., hearing one note after another, a C followed by a G. That we seem to hear this change in notes gives rise to the doctrine of the specious present, the most contemporary understanding of which is that we see, hear, etc. a duration because we see, hear, etc., a temporally ordered change (I discuss this in depth in in my doctoral thesis). But this idea of the 'specious present' has raised all sorts of issues over the ages, issue that seem to require metaphysical thought. And some philosophers deny that we do perceive a duration or an ordered change. But then why do we think perceive this sort of thing?
Chuard's answer, if I understand it right, is that, from our belief that (i) what we perceive, which is not change ,and (ii) beliefs that our perceptions have changed,
We 'project' to the belief that (iii) we have perceived a change.
I think. I'm not sure. I don't know what 'projections' from beliefs are exactly, or what they are supposed to do in theories of perceptions, or what they save us from in the discussion (this Wikipedia entry is the most collated entry on projectivism I can find). If they are projections as Hume describes them...they suggest a 'beaming out', like a film projector, of something from the mind onto things in the physical world - which, taken
- - Literally, is weird. However, weirdness should be no barrier to philosophy; the world seems to be weird if you think enough about it. The problem here is that it is not helpful to think of it as a literal projection: the 'something' and its properties still exist, e.g., if I project a little blue man-like thing into the world from my beliefs - there is a...well...a little blue man-like thing in the world. This is like projecting an image onto a cinema screen. What is projected onto the screen is, in an important way, actually on the screen. Sure, a thirty-foot Liv Tyler's face isn't there in the cinema, on the screen, but blue, pink and brown colours, and two-dimensional shapes are up there. And these - the properties of the image of Tyler's face - are what is projected.
- - Metaphorically, is no help either. What is the metaphrand (a term from Julian Jaynes) of the projection metaphor. That is, what is it that we are describing metaphorically as a projection? It's a 'belief' doesn't, I think, answer this question at all.
Anyhow, we might be able to say this sort of thing with hallucinations, dreams, etc. But we might say of all these trauma-induced memory hallucinations, and those caused by drugs, and maybe those suffering from conditions such as a schizophrenia, or dreams, etc., that they don't see, hear, etc. anything. People are just delusional here - they think they saw something under the influence of drugs but they saw nothing; they did not see. All is good.
And, anyway, how imagining seems is very different to hallucinating, dreaming, etc.
With hallucinating, dreams, etc., what we experience seems to be real. But with imagining, is this true? Couldn't we say that what we experience doesn't seem real?
This is something Julia Jansen has raised with me.
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