Here’s a tempting way to categorize our experiences, at least at first. On the one hand, let’s call some aspects of our experience “objective.” They’re “objective” because they can get it objectively right or wrong about the physical world outside of our minds, which they represent. Suppose I see a straw in a glass of water as bent, in an optical illusion. The straw is not really bent, so my experience gets that wrong. But the straw is immersed in water, so my experience gets that right. Being bent and being immersed in water are physical, structural properties of the world. They have to do with how things are arranged in space independently of me. There is nothing essentially qualitative about how the straw or the glass really are, in themselves, which my experience has to get right or wrong.
There are essentially qualitative aspects of my experience, though. Let’s call these “subjective”, because they have entirely to do with how things seem to me. They might seem different to you. Perhaps I am colorblind and you are not, or we simply view the straw from different angles or in different lighting, so the straw appears one shade of blue to you but a different shade of blue to me. But it is not as though I am wrong and you are right. Subjective experience can’t be right or wrong, because it isn’t about anything else. It is purely phenomenological.
On this way of carving up our experiences, presenting a representation of something else—the ability to get it right or get it wrong—is identified with not having any essential, intrinsic qualities. On the other hand, the purely qualitative aspects of experience are often considered non-representational.
There are ways to challenge this division, though. The physical world may have intrinsic qualities. Maybe the purely qualitative features of our experience still represent physical properties, just very subtle ones from a particular point of view. Both would be surprising, but not implausible.
My goal is to present a different challenge for this division, on which the “subjective” aspects of an experience seem to clearly represent something else, and to be capable of getting it right or wrong about it. What I have in mind is a very familiar kind of experience, where the experience represents another experience: a past one. The case I want to focus on is vivid memory.
Flashbulb Memories
Take a moment to compare two different memories of your own experiences. They could be two ways of remembering the same event, or memories of two different events. Still, both should be memories of what happened in the past (“episodic” memories), not merely of factual information. For the first memory, remember what happened and how it happened, but in a duller and removed way, without immersing yourself in it: you remember it, but it is not like it is happening now. The memory is a bit washed out and dull. For the second memory, fully immerse yourself in the memory, to the point that you are almost reliving the experience all over again: perhaps you can smell the smells, see the details of your surroundings, recognize your own perspective in the room, and possibly feel how you felt at the time. It is more like then is now.
Now, if you don’t experience visual imagery in memory, or if you can’t make sense of my instructions here, I respect you, but you might have to sit this thought experiment out. I must ask you to accept the testimony of those of us who do experience these different ways of remembering events, one dull and one vivid. The vivid memories are typically associated with emotionally significant events. For instance, I can immerse myself in the memory of the birth of my first child, or my first kiss, or my most embarrassing moments, in a way that I can’t immerse myself in other memories.
Psychologists call these vivid memories “Flashbulb” memories, and they study them by focusing on events that tend to be significant for many people at once, like where you were when you first learned about the collapse of the World Trade Center, or the moment you first felt genuinely afraid about COVID-19. They’ve found something surprising about them. On the one hand, people are inclined to rate their “Flashbulb” memories as far more reliable and accurate than their ordinary, “dull” episodic memories. On the other hand, when it comes to factual information, “Flashbulb” memories are not inherently any more reliable or accurate than “dull” episodic memories: they degrade and become incoherent and riddled with mistakes at the same rate over time. While we overestimate the trustworthiness of all of our memories, we especially overestimate the trustworthiness of vivid memories.
Reinterpretation
Here is a slightly more charitable interpretation of the intuition that vivid memories are more reliable than dull memories. Perhaps it’s not that these memories are more accurate about factual, “objective” information about what precisely happened in the physical world around us, like about which of the twin towers fell first—the sort of questions that a research study can test. Perhaps it’s that these memories present themselves more accurate “subjectively,” about what it was like for us at the time. The increased vividness of a memory presents itself as increasingly qualitatively resembling the original qualitative features of our first-person experience. When I remember something dimly, there’s no representation made that the experience of remembering itself is actually like what the original experience was like for me: it’s representing what happened to me, but not how it seemed to me. When I remember something through a kind of re-immersion in the moment, the vividness represents not just what happened to me, but how it all seemed to me at the time.
Now, when I present this idea at talks, many in the audience point out that this intuition about memory could be mistaken and illusory. There are many good reasons to think that, in fact, vivid memories are less accurate about what it was like than dull memories. First, the immersive experience of vivid memory involves a greater reliance on our imaginative capacities, but then there’s no way to distinguish imagination “filling in the gaps” from genuine memory. Second, vivid memories are more personal events and thus more likely to be rehearsed, but some psychologists argue that memories are more vulnerable to inaccuracy the more frequently they are rehearsed, as new errors are “rewritten” each time, including in the case of “Flashbulb” memories. Third, the laws of probability dictate that the more information there is, the higher the probability that there is a mistake in the information: vivid memories are about more, and so they’re more likely to be inaccurate than dull memories, which are about less. I find this third point especially persuasive.
What’s interesting, though, is that this appears to be a meaningful debate. That is, either vivid memories are more qualitatively accurate about what the original experience was like, or dull memories are (surprisingly) more qualitatively accurate. Either way, it looks like we can make perfect sense of the idea that the vividness of a memory can “get it right” or “get it wrong” about the phenomenology.
So, either way, that means that the division we started with—that the “subjective” qualities of experience never represent anything else and can’t be right or wrong about it—can’t be right. Some of our subjective experiences represent other subjective experiences, and there are facts about how closely our experiences resemble one another.
Consequences
I’m also interested in the consequences of this idea for the metaphysics of mind. In particular, it seems that it requires there to be objective, genuine relationships of qualitative similarity between different experiences. I imagine those relationships form a “pattern,” a kind of multi-dimensional web of relative similarity and dissimilarity. Our conscious experiences clearly depend in some way upon underlying physical, neurological structures or brain states. That means that for every phenomenological relation of similarity or strand in the “web,” there’s a corresponding physical strand in a physical web. But I find it hard to believe that there are any natural “patterns” among the relations in neurobiology or fundamental physics that are going to map one-to-one onto the patterns of qualitative similarity and dissimilarity between experiences. I think, looking at both webs, the phenomenological web is going to seem more natural and more fundamental than the physical web. And this leads me to doubt that the natures of our qualitative experiences can be fully grounded in the natures of the neurobiological states on which they depend. I don’t have enough space to develop those ideas here, though.
But what I am confident about is that the categorization we started with, between the “objective” and the “subjective,” was too simplistic. Whether our intuitions about vivid memory are correct or illusory, their correctness or illusoriness equally entails that there are objective facts about subjective experience, and that some subjective experiences can be objectively right or wrong about other subjective experiences.
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