Perplexities of Consciousness

by Eric Schwitzgebel

Do you dream in color? If you answer Yes, how can you be sure? Before you recountyour vivid memory of a dream featuring all the colors of the rainbow, consider that in the 1950sresearchers found that most people reported dreaming in black and white. In the 1960s, when mostmovies were in color and more people had color television sets, the vast majority of reported dreamscontained color. The most likely explanation for this, according to the philosopher EricSchwitzgebel, is not that exposure to black-and-white media made people misremember their dreams. Itis that we simply don't know whether or not we dream in color. In Perplexities ofConsciousness , Schwitzgebel examines various aspects of inner life (dreams, mentalimagery, emotions, and other subjective phenomena) and argues that we know very little about ourstream of conscious experience. Drawing broadly from historical and recentphilosophy and psychology to examine such topics as visual perspective, and the unreliability ofintrospection, Schwitzgebel finds us singularly inept in our judgments about consciousexperience.

Genres: Philosophy, Psychology, Nonfiction, Science, 21st Century, Neuroscience

248 pages, Hardcover

First published March 18, 2011

About the author

Eric Schwitzgebel is an American philosopher and professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. His main interests include connections between empirical psychology and philosophy of mind and the nature of belief.[1][2] he received his PhD from University of California, Berkeley under the supervision of Elisabeth A. Lloyd, Alison Gopnik, and John Searle.

Reviews

[Nat]

Schwitzgebel overturns the Cartesian idea that we have better epistemic access to the contents of our own minds than we do to the external world with an entertaining variety of skeptical arguments. He convincingly demonstrates that there is reason to be skeptical about how well we know all of the following mental phenomena:

-whether we dream in color or in black and white, or neither;
-whether round objects look round or look elliptical when viewed from an oblique angle;
-the nature of our own mental images;
-whether conscious experience depends on attention or not;
and weirdest of all,
-what we see when we close our eyes.

I recommend the chapter on what we see when we close our eyes most of all--it is an example of how to extract a fascinating philosophical study out of a seemingly banal and almost completely overlooked (in philosophy at least) topic. It's worth closing your eyes and attempting to describe what it is you experience--it's quickly apparent that either we don't really know what's going on, or our language isn't developed enough to begin to characterize what we experience, or there is wide divergence between what individuals experience when they close their eyes, or some combination of all three. For example, Schwitzgebel cites the wonderful description given by the 19th century Czech physiologist Purkinje:

"When I fixate the darkness of an eye, well protected from all external light, sooner or later weakly emerging fine, hazy patterns begin to move. At first they are unsteady and shapeless, later they assume more definite shapes. The common feature is that they generate broad, more or less curved bands, with interpolated black intervals. These either move as concentric circles toward the center of the visual field, and disappear there, or break down and fracture as variable curvatures, or as curved radii circle around it" (p.142).

The description is accompanied with Purkinje's drawings of the "curved bands".

It's hard to overstate how much more enjoyable reading Schwitzgebel's skepticism about our knowledge of these conscious phenomena is than reading run of the mill discussions of consciousness in philosophy of mind.

[Petr Špecián · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excelent. An amuzing and illuminating book for those who have doubts about the reliability of phenomenological descriptions and especially for those who don't. If you don't have much time, read just Chapter 7 that sums up the basic arguments nicely.

[Alina · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is extraordinary in not only its main thesis but also in Schwitzgebel's beautiful, witty, and highly readable writing style. Schwitzgebel convinces the reader that what we believe are our most unshakable, certain knowledge of immediate conscious experiences (e.g. seeing a color, thinking an idea, feeling one's feet in one's shoes) is in fact extremely indeterminate and uncertain. Our convictions about the phenomenological contents of experiences vary vastly across different people, as well as across a single person's beliefs. Schwitzgebel makes a well-defended case that this extreme variation is due to contingent conditions such as the cultural metaphors available for us to use to describe and think about our experiences, personal background knowledge, or other judgement or knowledge related factors. It seems that the world as we know it in itself experientially is vastly indeterminate or empty, and we fill it in by using our conceptual schemes, expectations, and the like to piece together indeterminate fragments of perceptual phenomenology into coherent and seemingly concrete experiences.

However, Schwitzgebel, as a good-intentioned skeptic, does not endorse any definite conclusions about the nature or contents of phenomenological experience and instead leaves the reader hanging with many more questions than they would've initially imagined. Some questions I was left with is whether immediate perceptual experience is genuinely extremely indeterminate for everyone, and our certainty about what goes on depends solely on downstream judgement or cognitive processes - or experience is determinate for each person in a unique way and is enacted by her corresponding idiosyncratic knowledge systems and influenced by personal history. Also, Schwitzgebel mainly discusses issues pertaining to the degree of indeterminacy for classical sensory modal perception (e.g. vision, hearing), and I was left wondering about the degree of variety of kinds of meanings that could be involved in perception, in addition to these classical modalities. Can emotions be perceived? Can all the feelings and narrative within a particular relationship be perceived in items that are associated with this person? I believe Schwitzgebel's thesis gives support for the idea that there are very diverse kinds of meanings found in immediate perception, given how he shows that perception is so indeterminate and volatile depending on background knowledge.

I would recommend this book to any reader interested in skepticism, epistemology of perception, phenomenology, and cognitive sciences in general. I believe Schwitzgebel's thesis is crucial for anyone who seriously wants to understand the nature of mind, experienced world, and perception. I found it useful to first read the introduction, chapter 7 (which contains the main thesis and is more theoretical with fewer detailed examples), chapter 5 (which is also more theoretical), and lastly the other chapters (which are more focused on detailed examples).

[Jon Gauthier · Rating 4 out of 5]

Think hard about your ability to peer into your own experience. Can we actually answer questions about our experience reliably? For example: Do I perceive the world in two or three dimensions? What do I see when my eyes are closed?
Schwitzgebel, witty and original as ever, provokes these questions in Perpelexities of Consciousness. This book doesn't provide answers — that's not Schwitzgebel's style. But it shows us that much of what we take for granted about access to our own phenomenology could be wrong.

(This was a bedtime book — I didn't read it as a philosopher. Planning to read again someday with a more serious eye. In any case, this was really fun!)

[Avery C. M. · Rating 5 out of 5]

While I don't always side with Schwitzgebel in his indeterminate assessments, they are undoubtedly useful and broadening. Definitely worth reading, and I had a lot of fun going through the chapters of this book.

[Assaf Weksler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Writing style is great: lively, informally and personal. The author uses empirical methods in a convincing way (usually I'm skeptical about the prospects of empirical methods in philosophy). He is trying - and I think succeeding - in being a "Hume of introspection", in making us feel very uncertain about introspection, plus he feels despair at the end. The book contains a lot of discussions about phenomenal character, which are illuminating regardless of their skeptical conclusion. Lastly, the author discusses at length the (now dead) tradition of introspective psychology. To me, it was very interesting to see what these people were up to, what phenomena they studied, and which methods they used. Many philosophy students, I think, are not familiar at all with that tradition. Introductory books in analytic philosophy of mind tend to begin with behaviorism, which is usually described as arising (among other things) from the failure of introspective psychology, but actual introspective psychologists are never discussed in such books. Some philosophy students begin with Husserl, whose work is also contrasted with that of introspective psychology (since he is portrayed as practicing something else entirely, namely "phenomenology"), but no actual work of introspective psychology is discussed. Schwitzgebel discusses that tradition in an illuminating and respecting way. He even attempts to replicate some of their experiments, and he takes seriously their idea that one can be trained into being a better introspector.

[Liz · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book should be subtitled "Thinking yourself into a box in 8 easy chapters".
It's not that I didn't enjoy it; this book tends rather towards the repetitive and while one chapter about how difficult it is to accurately and reliably describe our own introspective experience (what does the world look like to us? Do we dream in color? Do we notice what we perceive when we're not paying attention to it?) is fascinating, eight begin to feel like the author is running around asking :How do we brain? Nobody knows..."
Which is, perhaps, another way of saying that I want more direction in my science books. I want more speculation, rather than just somewhat blasé suggestions at the end, about how we can get past this problem.
I also want a bit more "get over it and move on" - yes, we're lousy phenomenologists. But Schwitzgebel seems almost devastated by that state of affairs and I suppose I find myself wondering why. The history of psychology has been a long story of people showing us how we don't know what we think we know. Is this SO very different?
The most intriguing part, by far, was the way that he ends by turning around and arguing for a study of the world as such rather than our experience for it. That was well done. Still, the bits in between had a tendency to put me to sleep.

[Josh Trapani · Rating 2 out of 5]

It really takes a lot for me to read about a subject - any subject, no matter how esoteric - and think to myself: who gives a rat's ass? But this book accomplished that. The larger and fascinating question of how much (or little) we truly understand our own conscious experience remains, but the minutiae addressed here have to be extrapolated well beyond the scope of this book to be of general interest. I think my real frustration: it was worth being exposed to this, but a 10-page paper could have done just as good a job.

[Holcombea · Rating 4 out of 5]

Schwitzgebel is an excellent writer, and here he reports many reasons to doubt our reports of what we consciously experience. Important for consciousness researchers. Includes empirical studies he did himself.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting exploration of the limits of introspection. I liked his writing style a lot.