I lost my faith in introspection

And you can too!

Gemini 3 Pro Image.

Reading Daniel Dennett’s Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, I came across the following demonstration:

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 … When you are finally able to identify the card, it’s almost directly in front of you.

Naturally I grabbed a deck of cards and went to a mirror to check it out. As the card entered my peripheral vision, I was disappointed. The card was obviously black. I couldn’t read the number, but that’s to be expected. I drew the card closer and closer to the center of my vision, hoping maybe I could see the illusion at some point, but I didn’t get anything. Sighing, and wondering how Dennett could print such shoddy information, I broke eye contact and my gaze flickered down to the card.

It was red.

I tried again. This time I felt that the card was red, but I was much more uncertain. It was black. And at that moment, illusionism just became a bit more plausible to me.

Why? Didn’t I write a whole post on disanalogies between other illusions, like the illusion of (libertarian) free will, and the supposed “illusion” of phenomenality? Haven’t I ever looked at an optical illusion before?

What surprised me, readers, is not that my visual field is imperfect or that I was unaware of this. It’s that my visual field, even now as I type, seems to be in full color, when it actually isn’t.

Let’s try to use the language of qualia to understand what I saw, and see how it gets perplexing. I’m staring into my own eyes. The red card enters my periphery. I confidently identify it as black; I remember that it seemed black to me. What qualia were associated with my visual experience of the card? I see two possibilities:

1. What I experienced was really a red quale, but I misidentified it as a black quale.

2. I experienced a black quale, the quale was just inaccurate to reality (like seeing a mirage).

I never liked perspectives like #1, even when I was a dualist/idealist. What does it even mean to say that the subjective quality of my experience is red, but it seems black to me? Imagine someone comes up to you and says “I’m going to inflict excruciating pain on you, but don’t worry—you won’t even notice.” If I don’t notice, it’s not pain, and if it’s pain, I notice! If you take #1 to be true, you are already casting serious doubt on introspective access to qualia; if you can misidentify your own color experience, what’s to say you aren’t misidentifying other things?

#2 always seemed like the most coherent picture to me. I can’t be wrong about what I am experiencing, it’s just that the character of the experience may be vague or inaccurate. But when I introspect now, fixating in one point after the card experience, my visual field really does seem to be in full color. While I can sort of identify where it starts to slip into fuzziness and imprecision, I really can’t spot a color difference. So it seems to me like my visual field is in full color. But then when I do the card experiment now, and start way out in my periphery, I can identify a point where I can see the card wiggling but I have no idea what color it is. The card doesn’t seem one way or the other to me. And yet, try as I might, I cannot dispell the sensation of full-color vision.

So: I repeat the experiment, and I pause just as I can identify the motion, I can identify the shape of the card, and I can see the marks on it but I cannot tell what color they are; they don’t seem one way or the other. What is the quale associated with the card? If the quale is red or black, then that conflicts with the way the card seems to me. If the quale does not have a defined color, that conflicts with the way my peripheral vision seems to be in full color. In either case, it seems I am deeply wrong, not just about what my eyes can physically process, but about the phenomenal contents of my experience.

I’ve begun reaching for ways out of this. Maybe I have two conflicting quales, one with phenomenal content equivalent to “your whole field of vision is in color” and one with phenomenal content equivalent to “this card does not have definitive color.” But then that means one quale is… incorrect about the contents of other qualia? So I still can’t trust introspection. Maybe the first quale is just the emotional, intellectual feeling behind my opinion that my visual field is in full color, whereas the second quale has actual color content. But my visual field really seems complete! If this level of seeming is just an emotional reaction or doxastic state, how can I be sure that all my other judgments aren’t? It means I can’t distinguish between types of qualia, so I still can’t trust my introspection.

I won’t say I’ve completely converted to illusionism. I still don’t understand how the “illusion” is compatible with my experience. But now I also don’t understand how introspective access to qualia is compatible with my experience. Even if qualia exist, I’m really unsure what we can know about them even from a first-person perspective. And that makes illusionism look like a much more attractive alternative.

I would encourage others who are on the fence about consciousness to try this experiment and share your accounts with me. I’m really curious!