Aphantasia: On Eliminating the Imagination

Aphantasia (oil and clay) 

by Rachel L. Clarke

artphantasia.com

 

 

I. 

 

According to some, imagination is the foundation of material reality. That is to say, nothing actually exists before it has first been seen in the mind's eye. Such people have no evidence for this and so either quote poets or Plato for support, or fall back on good old common sense [1]. 

 

Isn't it obvious, they ask, that dreams, desires, and imaginative ideas encapsulate the true and essential nature of things and precede substantial forms. Think about it, they say, man like God creates by first imagining things and then willing them into physical existence.  

 

Well, I have thought about it and this mixture of idealism and folk psychology seems to me nonsense. I agree with D. H. Lawrence here; no mind - not even Jordan Peterson's - could have imagined a lobster "dozing in the under-deeps, then reaching out a savage and iron claw!" [2] 

 

Ultimately, I would suggest, we can only imagine things that already exist and that it is not the imagination that determines reality, but reality that shapes the imagination. To quote Lawrence once more: 

 

"Even the mind of God can only imagine 

those things that have become themselves: 

bodies and presences, here and now, creatures with a foothold in creation 

even if it is only a lobster on tip-toe." [3]

 

  

II.

In an essay on eliminative materialism, Paul Churchland argues that "our common sense conception of psychological phenomena constitutes a radically false theory, a theory so fundamentally defective that both the principles and the ontology of that theory will eventually be displaced, rather than smoothly reduced, by completed neuroscience" [4].

 

One of the problems with folk psychology is that when evaluated with regard to its coherence and continuity in relation to more recent work in evolutionary biology and neuroscience, it soon becomes increasingly suspect and would, argues Churchland, evoke open skepticism were it not one of our oldest and most cherished theories.

 

The fact is, that even the faculty of creative imagination, for example, is something that remains almost wholly mysterious within the framework provided by folk psychology. The latter believes its truths to not only be self-evident, but universally and eternally true and so is little prone to self-criticism or to change; perfect theories have no need to evolve in the light of new evidence or knowledge. 

 

Ultimately, folk psychology has become a form of faith or dogma, proud of its own conceptual inertia. At best, says Churchland, it provides a "partial and unpenetrating gloss on a deeper and more complex reality" [5] - one that is wholly material (rather than imaginary) in nature and not cluttered up with a lot of second-hand representations and hoary old archetypes [6].

 

         

Notes

 

[1] There's a very good reason why those who belong to a post-Romantic literary and/or post-Kantian philosophical tradition often return to a conceptual framework for mental phenomena based upon a remarkably conservative theory of common sense (or as they sometimes call it intuitive wisdom). For as Paul Churchland points out, it very conveniently provides "a simple and unifying organization to most of the major topics in the philosophy of mind, including the explanation and prediction of behavior, the semantics of mental predicates, action theory, the other-minds problem, the intentionality of mental states, the nature of introspection, and the mind-body problem". 

      Unfortunately, explanatory and predictive success does not necessarily make a theory true and those who subscribe to folk psychology might at least consider the possibility that its principles are radically false and its ontology is an illusion.

      See Churchland's essay 'Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes', in The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 78, No. 2, (Feb 1981), pp. 67-90. Lines quoted are on p. 68. I will return to this essay in part two of this post.   

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'Demiurge', The Poems, Vol. I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 603. 

      Lawrence's opposition to the imagination as the ability to make pictures of the world and oneself in the mind without any external sensory input, is revealed in his review of The Social Basis of Consciousness (1927) by Trigant Burrow. Lawrence argues, for example, that mental images are a substitute for life. As soon as man falls into self-consciousness, he makes pictures of himself - that is to say, he imagines himself ideally - and then he tries to live according to the picture. The imagination is thus a form of imprisonment; we become trapped within a world of representation. If only, he says, we could understand and admit to ourselves that we and the world are not the same as the images we make, then we might be able to live and think and create in an entirely fresh (non-ideal) manner. Ultimately, says Lawrence, the imagination is not real: "It is a horrible compulsion set over us [...] The true self is not aware that it is a self. A bird as it sings sings itself. But not according to a picture. It has no idea of itself." Those who call themselves psychoanalysts, if they really cared about their patients, would liberate them from their own imaginations and get them back into touch with the world as it exists outside them (i.e. mind-independently): they must shatter the great image-producing machine that reflects nothing but their own human conceit. 

      See 'Review of The Social Basis of Consciousness, by Trigant Burrow', in D. H. Lawrence, Introductiond and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp, 329-336. Lines quoted are on pp. 334 and 336.

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Demiurge', The Poems, Vol. I., op. cit., p. 603. 

 

[4] Paul Churchland,  'Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes' ... op. cit., p. 67.

[5] Ibid., p. 74.

[6] Even some philosophers in the European tradition eventually grew tired of post-Kantian models of the imagination; Gilles Deleuze, for example, refused to think of it as something innate or natural, but, rather, something that has been constructed and authorised by the governing determinations of the good, the true, and the beautiful. 

 

 

Readers interested in knowing more about aphantasia - the inability to create mental images in one's mind - should visit the Aphantasia Network: click here. 

On Intuition

Intuition Card, by Linnea Vedder Shults (2009)

Last night, in discussion with an old musician and a young neuroscientist, the question arose of intuition.

Intuition, of course, is the favourite faculty of those who like to denigrate reason and act in accordance with what they believe to be an unmediated and direct perception of reality. For such people, knowledge is non-inferential and is mysteriously circulated in the blood, or located in the gut. They speak of inner wisdom and the unconscious. Sometimes they speak also of hearing voices and exercising psychic abilities. 

The young neuroscientist, Ms Camargo, whilst not wanting to abandon the idea of intuition as an untenable piece of folk psychology, was nevertheless far more comfortable speaking about the brain and physiological processes rather than soul, spirit, or other spooky stuff.

The old musician, however, Mr Van Hooke, was a convinced believer in spiritual powers and spoke not only of intuition, but also inspiration, originality, and creative genius for good measure. Indeed, such was his conviction that he seemed genuinely shocked and outraged when I mildly suggested that such notions might at the very least be open to interrogation. 

As, unfortunately, I didn't get the opportunity to explain to him my concerns with the superstitious notion of intuition on the night, I'd like to do so now.

  

For me, the common understanding of the mind is profoundly mistaken and once we develop a more accurate and non-metaphysical account, then popular notions like intuition and desire will prove to be as untenable as belief in the promptings of demons. At best, intuition is simply the retrieval of a memory.

Of course, I appreciate that we feel certain things strongly and that introspective or experiential evidence can seem very convincing. But can we trust it or assume it to be true? If it turns out to be as determined by society and culture as we now know our perception of the world to be, then it's likely that what we naturally intuit or instinctively feel to be the case is largely determined by doxa (i.e. received opinion expressed in a language based on agreed rules of grammar, syntax, and stereotype). 

Thus it's not coincidental that we understand what our inner voice tells us, because it conveniently speaks in sentences with a linguistic compositional structure that we recognise. However, as Patricia Churchland argues, it's extremely unlikely we're going to find anything that even remotely resembles the alphabet inside the structure of actual brains.

Mr Van Hooke, like many other people, passionately wants to defend the folk psychology with which he is so familiar and comfortable. And, to be fair, it has provided a very successful model of mental processes. But, as a philosopher, I'm aware that the success of a theory is no guarantee that it legitimately represents reality. Even attractive theories - of vitalism, for example - have to be laid to rest at some point in the name of intellectual integrity.

Eliminative materialism has unsettling consequences and I'm not pretending otherwise; not just for our conception of the mind, but for many other aspects of human activity. As Jerry Fodor once famously declared: "If commonsense psychology were to collapse, that would be, beyond comparison, the greatest intellectual catastrophe in the history of our species ..."

True, but so what? This doesn't constitute an argument against the naturalization of the mind, a task which demands and deserves to be accomplished, whatever the consequences. And who knows, perhaps out of such a catastrophe something good will come - that's my hunch anyway.