Can We Know Our Own Minds?

[@alicequintanilla3718]

i cannot doubt the phenomenology of leaving a comment

[@bohdannonduality]

I'm reminded of The Opacity of Mind by Peter Carruthers. The basic idea is that the mindreading system the brain uses to infer another person's mental states is the same system used to infer our own mental states. This mindreading is fallible in both cases because it doesn't have direct access to its target.

[@jacob73124]

This is a frivolous example at first blush, but the black/blue vs. white/gold dress image seems extremely relevant to the visual phenomena and introspection discussion

[@IntegralDeLinha]

Some time ago I started meditating and then I tried to concentrate on my belief that 2+2=4. I wanted to grasp the specific mental representation of the belief. But I couldn't find it. All I can perceive are visual and sound representations of 2+2=4, no beliefs, just visions and sounds. If I supress my visual imagination trying to picture "2+2=4" and the voice in my mind trying to narrate "2+2=4", there's nothing left to perceive. It seems we cannot perceive our beliefs, only infer them. But here's the problem: we also cannot perceive our inferences, we can only infer that we inferred them. If you can't perceive what you know, it seems plausible that you can't know what you know. Very interesting video and choice of topic, btw.

[@omrb132]

What 😫

[@СергейМакеев-ж2н]

So what you're saying is, the only way for you to access the "database of beliefs" in your head, is to "send a query" - by, for example, mentally narrating "2+2=" and waiting for your mind to autocomplete the sentence. And the "processing" of this query (i.e. inference) does give a *hint* of how it's calculated, but definitely not a complete picture.

[@MatthewKelley-mq4ce]

I will add that there is a sense of knowing that is symbolic without being tied to a specific sensory symbolic representation (sound, sight, etc). Often referred to as non-symbolic but that's not quite it. Anyway. Good comment.

[@IntegralDeLinha]

@@СергейМакеев-ж2н you will access your beliefs if you desire to do so. But desires are also beyond the reach of our perception. We only infer them, too. When your attention starts focusing a lot on things related to icecream and imagining yourself eating icecream gives you pleasure while imagining yourself not being able to eat it gives you disappointment, you infer that you desire icecream. But desires don't have specific mental representation either. Desires and beliefs seem to be merely dispositional states, constituted of causal structure, not qualia. At least this is how things seem to me at the moment.

[@IntegralDeLinha]

@@MatthewKelley-mq4ce thank you. What constitutes a symbol in the absence of sensory representation?

[@andreasplosky8516]

"Can We Know Our Own Minds?" I don't even know what that phrase is supposed to mean.

[@mikebaker2436]

In several different eastern philosophies, awareness of direct phenomenalogical experience and the phenomonological experience itself are not the same thing (ex: "Experiencing sadness" and "Awareness of being one who is experiencing sadness" are two different states... one being a step removed from the other.) Once you are aware of yourself experiencing something you are somewhat out of the direct experience... so your experience has shifted. Under this model, there can be no awareness of having a pure internal experience, but only second-hand external examination of that experience in the field of awareness by a totally seperated observing thought that does not have the same point of view or access that the direct experience has.

[@Carbon_Crow]

I was talking about this to my dad who’s a psychiatrist (and regularly attends conferences to stay up to date on the newest research) and he said it’s entirely possible to make someone, for example, hold the belief “I am seeing red” while actually seeing blue, by forcibly triggering the ‘confirmation circuit’ of the brain.

[@luszczi]

Just to add to the perplexity, we can note that many of these arguments rest on deeply rooted lockean assumptions. Is the experience of redness "raw data" that is used to inform beliefs or is it itself a kind of involuntary, automatically formed judgement? By the same token, why assume that there is a difference between "seeing" a shape and "inferring" a shape in the peripheral vision? Maybe all experience is a result of implicit inference, with varying degrees of incontrovertibility? Not only can you doubt your introspection, you can doubt the way you conceptualize its contents.

[@tristanm8250]

There are famous cases of neurological impairment where people without functioning eyesight believe that they can see, and where people with functioning eyesight believe that they cannot see. So clearly having an experience and being aware of having an experience are two different things.

[@kappaprimus]

I don't even know what I want for breakfast

[@text1016]

Well, the answer is food

[@kappaprimus]

@@text1016 well, what do you know, that's exactly what I ended up having!

[@James-ll3jb]

But you know your mind knows...😊

[@kappaprimus]

@@James-ll3jb you mean I know my mind doesn't know 😮

[@James-ll3jb]

@@kappaprimus no i mean your mind knows you better than you do

[@whycantiremainanonymous8091]

33:45: That conclusion, that half of the people are mistaken, by no means follows. You're tacitly assuming all people are the same in this respect. In fact, it's fully possible that people actually do have different experiences. It is also possible that the disagreement is really about the applicaton of terms (what counts as experiencing vs. inferring). Edit: Okay, you get to that later. Obviously people may differ. They may, and do, differ in brain "wiring", which affects how much,e.g., short-term memory plays into sensory perception. They may also differ in local circumstances: I briefly glanced at the glass seconds ago; you didn't.

[@poketoscoparentesesloparen7648]

I did the card thing but i accidently guessed it on an angle of like 80 degrees to the direction i was looking at... because of introspection i know it was only a guess but i found it kinda funny...

[@DeadEndFrog]

Amazing video as always

[@KommentarSpaltenKrieger]

two lines of attack: if something seems to be the case to me, this seeming might be indubitable: it seems to me as if i am experiencing something red. i might not have this experience but i cannot doubt that it seems that way. moreover, even if prepositions and sensory experiences are indeed distinct (seems true), i'd argue that at least the prepositions should be mental states of which i can be certain that i have/hold them. I think I just formulated the same point two times. At any rate, I think, the claim that at least some mental states are very, very hard to doubt stands the test.

[@mikebaker2436]

The experience of confusion and indecision seems to cast doubt on the infallibility of much of what we consider to be introspection. "I can be certain of my preference for the left sock." ...but what about all the times I can't be certain of my preference? It seems like a kind of sampling bias to only use the tiny minority of certain internal states when the overwhelming majority are not clear or certain or permenant.

[@JackPullen-Paradox]

Strange: In general, there is no such thing as a left sock, unless it is on someone's left foot. Or if it has at some time in the past been on someone's left foot. On the other hand, if a sock has been worn on the left foot for a sufficient period, it will take on certain characteristics of the left foot which can be identified. Thereafter, if the sock were worn on the right foot, someone could correctly refer to it as a left sock. So, if I prefer the left sock, what might I be preferring? Its fit on the left foot? Its style when seen from a particular angle? How it fits the left foot after being broken in, given that I never wear a sock on my right foot? I suppose the point is, one prefers something because of some very specific reasons. One might think there is a cosmic confluence of reasons, but in reality there will be found a handful. We think in particulars, and draw conclusions like we had thought in great abstractions. This is a possible failing of introspection and internal argumentation designed to find the truth. Fortunately, there are paper and pen, and, of course, written language to help us stay grounded.

[@sachamm]

Instead of looking at your computer screen and seeing the glass in your periphery, try looking at the glass and reading the computer screen out of your peripheral vision. You'll see very quickly how poor our peripheral vision is.

[@duckpotat9818]

There’s also the fact that the external and the internal are inextricably linked. People blind from birth do not introspect, dream or even hallucinate visual qualia, it’s the same for people deaf from their birth. Language seems necessary for complex introspection and can only be required externally. So if you experience nothing from birth, you might not introspect anything. So if you have been fed false but apparently true experiences, something like the Truman Show , 1984 or Brave New World perhaps, how could you trust your introspection?

[@gabri41200]

Exactly

[@philosophicalmixedmedia]

The optic nerve appears to be the primary conduit for visual information used to construct 3D images in the frontal cortex. However, a healthy frontal cortex may be capable of constructing 3D images without direct input from the optic nerve, suggesting that certain brain regions possess innate simulation abilities.

[@JackPullen-Paradox]

I must ask how we know that.

[@JackPullen-Paradox]

If one experiences redness without any extraneous influences, certain electrochemical events must have occurred. There may be other electrochemical events that could also produce this effect. Certainly, there are only finitely many. If an evil demon tricks me into experiencing redness without a proper stimulus, the demon must have modified a process not in the set of redness-producing events, or somehow substituted a redness event for a non-redness event. Or the demon has modified or created a memory that supplants an original memory of a particular expanse of time. If one were passing perceptions and memories through an introspective filter, one might be able to detect an inconsistency between one portion of the chronological sequence and another in the case of memory manipulation. The demon could modify larger segments of memory to make this more difficult. But the demon must make the chronological narrative consistent over a humancentric interval of time. However, the process of introspection produces another narrative, and the process of polling or probing memories cause memories to modify. Now, affecting perception is more difficult and more limited than modifying memory. To modify perception, the demon must add or subtract specific amounts electrochemical stuff in order to produce the redness effect. At the same time, does one ever perceive the moment. or does one only perceive the memory of the moment? If it is the memory of the moment, is this memory if the same character as a run of the mill memory? Are short-term memories like the donut core in the old computers-made to be probed, so that the memories are not affected by the effort to poll? Then would it be easier to detect inconsistencies because the memories are stabile? Even so, we know that these memories are plastic or malleable. It seem that we must deal with memory to answer the questions about the reliability of introspection. And it seems that there are many reasons to question the reliability of memory. Therefore, there are many reasons to question the reliability of introspection.

[@bendaniels1235]

“A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he don't want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It ain't the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.” - Cormac Mccarthy, Blood Meridian

[@jocr1971]

epistemically, internal states have the same grounding as external happenings. both are experiential and therefore external to that which experiences. if it's possible, which it is, to have indeterminate internal states i.e. a vague feeling not interpretable as elation, fear, anxiety, or whatever, the determinacy of all our other states must be questioned as well.

[@PanLamda]

Well, radical versions of scepticism about one's mind can lead to radical version of epistemic scepticism, and finally defying this very youtube lecture that i just saw with its contents about introspection....so..... its self defeating after a certain point and leads to a vast epistemic and metaphysical paradox. Milder versions are fine though, sure, we cant always trust our minds.

[@Everywhere4]

Depends on one’s theory of justification. If you start with a first person view of justification, then you could run into problems. But one can also view justification as a good reason, which is just a value judgement, a reason is good if you think people ought to reason that way. Problem with this axiological view is that it doesn’t seem to be truth oriented, so it seems to not really even try to track down its target. Maybe a reliability account is better, for which justification is simply any reason based on a process of believe formation that is statistically more likely to hit truth then wild guessing. The reliability itself doesn’t need to be proven, demanding that would be a first-person justification which is exactly what we want to avoid. But it is a valid step to simply use a reliable process, to justify the reliability of the same process, but only if the process actually is reliable, seems counter intuitive but it is a necessary byproduct of this view.

[@PanLamda]

@@Everywhere4 Well, isn;t reliability based on assumptions (or meta-assumptions) about some systematic correspondence between the content of the mental states and the structure of the world?

[@Everywhere4]

@@PanLamda A descriptive proposition is true if it succeeds to refer to a state of affairs, if it fails to refer then it is false. What it aims to refer to has more to do with the regular usage of the word then with the structure of the mind. I think I would tend more towards a semantic externalism rather then the internalist vision that your statement about the relation of mind and world would suggest. In my view two speakers can be in the same mental state while still referring to completely different states of affairs.

[@gabri41200]

People think they have images in their heads, but if i see a tree, close my eyes, and picture the tree i just saw in my head, i can't tell any details about it. I can't count the number of branches of that tree using my mental picture, i can't count how many fruits there are in the tree using in my mental picture. All i have is some vague impression of the tree, which is constantly changing based on my experience of the tree.

[@JackPullen-Paradox]

Then the evil demon can read my mind. Therefore my inner thoughts have reality. Therefore, if there is an evil demon deceiving me, my consciousness is real; and if there is no evil demon trying to deceive me then my consciousness should be treated as real barring some pretty strong evidence against it.

[@СергейМакеев-ж2н]

An interesting related topic is the proposal that those "basing errors" actually exist - they're called *dreams.* The thought is, maybe your dreams aren't actually as detailed as you remember them - in most cases, you're just getting a false belief "this experience is detailed and vivid", which is "directly induced" by random processes in the brain.

[@africandawahrevival]

Our minds asks too many questions, chill out bro 😂

[@thecastaways2]

Finally, some good f--ing food.

[@MrAdamo]

Yes

[@josebolivar4364]

What if I am the evil demon but have convinced myself that I am not the evil demon and now I no longer remember that I am the evil demon?

[@tristanm8250]

Even if the nature of our experiences can be doubted, how can the existence of experience itself be doubted?

[@JackPullen-Paradox]

If we got past the first part, yes, somebody would manage to cast doubt on it! Say we believed in panpsychism. Then the agent doing the experiencing may not exist even though the experience does. So, the experience itself isn't doubted, but the notion that a sentient being experienced it is. That something is experienced could be doubted in the sense that a false memory might have been planted. But that there is no experience at all...One would have a difficult time pulling that off, I think.

[@smdb5874]

I liked this video

[@furkanekkiz7611]

I don't know whether or not I don't know...

[@JackPullen-Paradox]

But you do have an inkling. Hence, you might put a probability on it.

[@HerrEinzige]

My mind is telling me to like and comment so clearly I do know my own mind, mr. Philosopher (if that even is your real name). Good try.

[@EdgarQer]

Phenomenal Skepticism

[@Bolaniullen]

just because you can't introspect into 100% of your mind does not mean introspection does not work. the unconscious is pretty well established but your mind it not 100% opaque to you you know you are in pain...when you feel it if you doubt that, you have ''reasoned'' yourself into a mental disorder

[@rafaelgonzalez4175]

Can we know our own minds No. As people that think feel and learn we change our minds. Silly silly silly. I wonder where these questions come from. Hasn't anyone ever heard the phrase. I changed my mind?

[@samuelmelton8353]

Can we? Never heard of her to be honest mate

[@text1016]

I know that my mind knows my mind

[@bigol7169]

If you learn to meditate, yes

[@dadsonworldwide3238]

We are born knowing things about the universe if only in waves feilds frequency something like this that gives us intuition of how things work if only generalized. My most fundamental is limited and can't be articulated within as much as I've witnessed it in some infants that can't control or make free will actions. They're in a jail but i detect them intune with mom's frequency,possibly entropic measures or likley other tranfers of data going on.lol This can be conditioned and even intervene fast as light when my reflex or thoughts can't .lol Drugs do not give me more access or grant something I'd correlate with this Entropic inertia .😮😮😊 As a matter of fact I'd associate hulucengenic getting in the way or pronouncing my more conscious sensory systems

[@MatthewKelley-mq4ce]

Yes and no.

[@yyzzyysszznn]

introspection isnt a form of perception 🤦

[@chickencikchicklet599]

But all introspection is based off of perceptions, if someone where born with absolutely no senses what would they think about.

[@yyzzyysszznn]

@@chickencikchicklet599 Still doesn't make it a form of perception, thus you can't find any empirical facts using it

[@chickencikchicklet599]

@@yyzzyysszznn You can technically argue that introspection is indeed a form of perception, because what is introspection if not one perceiving their own internal process for example emotions .

[@yyzzyysszznn]

@@chickencikchicklet599 Just reflection on one's thoughts and memories etc, interpretation.

[@chickencikchicklet599]

@@yyzzyysszznn Perception is an interpretation of the physical world

[@Nontradicath]

Can I tag @FaithBecauseofReason here? Lets see if that works...

[@l.holbach5696]

What about the cogito? There is a refutation of the cogito?

[@chickencikchicklet599]

Yes there is an argument all though I don’t find it particularly convincing. People say the cogito provides no particular claim that there is any specific agent doing the thinking. So “I think therefore I am” Really only states I think therefore there is some thinking occurring.

[@l.holbach5696]

@@chickencikchicklet599 thanks. Yes, it doesn't sound very convincing.