Kourken Michaelian is professor of philosophy at the Université Grenoble Alpes, where he directs the Centre for Philosophy of Memory. He is the author of Mental Time Travel: Episodic Memory and Our Knowledge of the Personal Past (MIT Press 2016), which defends the view that memory is a form of imagination.
This week at The Junkyard, we're hosting a symposium on Jim Davies’ recent book: Imagination: The Science of Your Mind's Greatest Power (Pegasus Books 2019). See here for an introduction from Jim. Commentaries and replies will appear on Wednesday and Thursday.
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Commentary from Kourken Michaelian.
Given that I work on memory and that my work has been inspired by psychological research on mental time travel, my attention, as I read Jim Davies’ stimulating book, was naturally drawn to chapter 2, on perception and memory, and chapter 3, on imagining the future.
Professor Davies’ discussion of false memory in chapter 2 is particularly insightful, nicely bringing out the fact that memory can be false in two distinct senses. On the one hand, it can be false in the way in which a false bottom is false. We say that a bottom is false when it appears to be but is not a real bottom. On the other hand, it can be false in the way in which a false alarm is false. We say that an alarm is false when it goes off in the absence of a threat: the alarm is perfectly real, but what it communicates—its content, so to speak—is inaccurate. An apparent memory, in other words, can be false both in the sense that it merely seems to be a memory and in the sense that, while it is indeed a memory, its content is inaccurate.
Despite its discussion of false memory, the book—which is, of course, about imagination rather than memory—does not, at first glance, seem to contain much discussion of false imagination. This is in line with the literature. When I perform a search on “false memory” using Google Scholar, for example, I obtain about 26,500 results, many of which refer to articles in psychology. When I perform a search on “false imagination”, in contrast, I obtain around 1000 results, few if any of which refer to articles in psychology. The concept of false imagination thus appears, at first glance, not to play much of a role in contemporary empirical research on the imagination. In light of the intimate relationship between memory and imagination, however, it is natural to ask whether imagination is capable of being false in the ways in which memory can be false. Can an apparent imagination be a merely apparent imagination? Can an imagination be inaccurate?
The difficulty here may be merely verbal: the concept of false imagination may play a role in empirical research while going by another name. Indeed, Professor Davies’ discussion, in chapter 3, of “mis-imagining the future”, suggests as much: if one can mis-imagine the future, then surely imaginations of future events must be capable of being false. Chapter 3 reviews research on mental time travel that suggests that episodic memory and episodic future thought are the two faces of a single coin, two processes that are carried out by a single system and that differ only with respect to their temporal orientation: what it is to remember a past event is to construct a representation of that event on the basis of stored information originating in a variety of sources; likewise, what it is to imagine a future event is to construct a representation of that event on the basis of stored information originating in a variety of sources. Of course, this description of the relationship between episodic memory and episodic future thought may be overly simple. One difference between these two forms of mental time travel that is overlooked by the description is that, in episodic memory, among the sources of information on which the construction process draws might be one’s experience of the represented event, whereas, in episodic future thought, that source is obviously not available. I have argued in my own work that this does not amount to an important difference between episodic memory and episodic future thought and will not rehash that argument here. Another potential difference is that, in episodic memory, one attempts to represent events as they actually happened, whereas, in episodic future thought, one does not necessarily attempt to represent events as they will happen. This difference is directly relevant to the question of false imagination.
On the face of it, it only makes sense to speak of mis-imagining the future if one is attempting to represent an event as it will actually happen. It is thus no coincidence that many of the forms of future-oriented mental time travel on which Professor Davies’ discussion focuses amount to attempts to predict the future. While it is natural to speak of false predictions, this sort of talk quickly leads into metaphysical territory, for to say that a prediction might be true or false seems to presuppose that the future is determinate. Since we do not (I assume), want the possibility of false episodic future thought to depend on the outcome of debates in the metaphysics of time, this is troubling.
I asked above whether imagination might be false in both of the senses in which memory can be false. We have seen that, in the case of episodic future thought, at least, it may be problematic to suppose that the content of an imagination can be false. Let us set this kind of falsity aside for the moment. Perhaps the other kind of falsity to which memory is sometimes subject can arise in imagination as well: perhaps an apparent episodic future thought can be a merely apparent episodic future thought. If so, this might provide us with an acceptable means of making sense of the idea of false imagination.
It will be helpful, in this connection, to consider future-oriented confabulation. As the empirical literature makes clear, subjects (e.g., amnesics) who confabulate with respect to the past also often confabulate with respect to the future: just as a confabulating patient might, when asked what he did yesterday, give an answer that bears little or no relationship to what he actually did, he might, when asked what he will do tomorrow, give an answer that bears little or no relationship to anything that he might do. The possibility of future-oriented confabulation suggests that the defining characteristic of confabulation should not be taken to be the falsity of its content. Dalla Barba (2002), for example, when speaking of confabulation in episodic memory, defines the phenomenon in terms of falsity but, when speaking of confabulation in episodic future thought, tends to shy away from talk of falsity. Hirstein’s (2006) definition of confabulation in terms of unjustifiedness or ill-groundedness fares better when it comes to future-oriented confabulation: if a patient confined to an institution announces that he will go to work tomorrow at a job that he has not held for years, it is just as natural to refer to his claim as unjustified as it is to refer to his claim as unjustified if he says that yesterday he went to work at that job. The most natural way of cashing out talk of unjustifiedness in this context is in terms of reliability. This suggests a way of making sense of the idea that an apparent episodic future thought can be false in the sense that it is a merely apparent episodic future thought. Ordinary episodic future thought is reliable. When what superficially looks like episodic future thought turns out to be unreliable, we can conclude that it is not in fact episodic future thought: just as unreliability marks the difference between genuine episodic memory and past-oriented confabulation, unreliability marks the difference between genuine episodic future thought and future-oriented confabulation.
Though this strategy is tempting, it does not work. Reliability is defined as a tendency to produce true representations, unreliability as a tendency to produce false representations. That an episodic future thought might be false in the first (false bottom) sense thus seems to presuppose that it might be false in the second (false alarm) sense. We are thus back where we started: if we can legitimately refer to mis-imagining the future, it seems that we must be able to legitimately refer to the truth or falsity of representations of future events, which seems to presuppose that the future is determinate. Though I have chosen to interpret unjustifiedness in terms of reliability, this problem will arise given any truth-linked understanding of justification. It seems that it is but a short step from the notion of mis-imagining the future to thorny questions in the metaphysics of time.
References:
Dalla Barba, G. (2002). Memory, Consciousness, and Temporality. Springer.
Hirstein, W. (2006). Brain Fiction: Self-Deception and the Riddle of Confabulation. MIT Press.
Response from Jim Davies: False Imagination
Kourken Michaelian’s commentary brings up the question of whether (or how) the products of an imagination process (which I will call imaginings) might be false. If an imagining were to be false in his first sense--like that of a false nose--then it would appear to be an imagining when in fact it was not. For example, an experience might be feel like or be interpreted as imagination, when in reality the experience is generated in some other way.
Are there any human experiences in which we believe we are engaged in imagination but in fact we are engaging in perception? I can think of a few. Although it is not common, sometimes people can suspect that they are dreaming when they are not. As someone who has made half-hearted attempts to learn to be a lucid dreamer (one who can regularly recognize dream states and take some control in them), I have gotten into the habit of questioning reality. If something strange happens, or I can’t find a bathroom, I do a reality check (such as reading text twice to see if it changes) to see if I’m dreaming. To the extent that I suspect that I might be dreaming is the extent to which I am misclassifying normal perception for dreaming.
This is more serious in episodes of the disorder known as derealization, where people believe that the world around them isn’t real--their perception is distorted, and patients describe their experience of reality like they are watching it on television, with reduced vividness and emotional reactions. This disorder can affect up to 16% of people, and is much more common during a traumatic event (Hunter, Sierra, & David, 2004).
Merely feeling that the world isn’t real does not necessarily mean that they are interpreting it as imagination, however. This would be an additional conclusion. If the world isn’t real then what is the source of the experience? Each individual might come up with a different idea, or none at all: maybe it’s a virtual reality they are trapped in, as depicted in The Matrix or eXistenZ, or perhaps they are dreaming, or hallucinating. If people interpret the situation as dreaming or hallucinating, then we have a decent candidate for a false imagining in the first sense of the term, or, more specifically, false dreaming or false hallucination.
I recall once I surprised my mother with a visit. I showed up in her hallway and she told me later that she first suspected that she’d been hallucinating. Although my mother doesn’t have any disorder with symptoms of hallucination, those who do and who gain insight into their condition might also, at times, interpret run-of-the-mill perceptions as hallucinations, perhaps if what they are perceiving is very unusual or resembles their hallucinations in some way. I don’t know how often this happens in practice, but it’s theoretically possible.
Take a look at the following optical illusion:
Optical Illusion by Bradley Dilger, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr
As your gaze moves around the image, black dots seem to appear and disappear. Now that you know about the illusion, when you see it you know that the black dots you experience are not real. Although I personally wouldn’t classify these dots as products of imagination, as they don’t come from memory, they are something like mild hallucinations. Now, suppose someone makes an animated GIF that looks like this but actually has dots blinking on and off. If someone familiar with this illusion were to look at that, they might interpret the black dots as being hallucinations or imaginings, when in fact they are really there! In this hypothetical example, we would have a false hallucination or imagination.
So it seems pretty clear that we can have false hallucinations and dreams (in the first sense of “false”), and if we include dreams and hallucinations as kinds of imagination (which is problematic) then we seem to be able to have false imaginations. But suppose we believe that dreams and hallucinations are not in the class of imagination. Are there still false imaginings?
Suppose someone knows that they are paranoid. That is, they have paranoid tendencies and they know that they are like this. When they feel paranoia, they might wonder sometimes about whether any particular episode of paranoia is merely their paranoid tendency acting up or someone actually means them harm. This person in one case might perceive that someone gave them a dirty look, but dismiss it as “probably just my imagination,” when in reality the person did give them a dirty look. This would be a false imagination in the first sense.
In the cases I’ve discussed here, a person might have a normal perceptual experience and think it’s imagination, or a dream, or a hallucination. As such, it would be a false imagination, dream, or hallucination depending on what they thought it was.
When we speak of a “false nose” or a “false bottom” it’s when something does not appear to be what it actually is. This implies that there is some deceptive appearance. Suppose we have a theater set, and on one of the flats is painted a door made of marble. But this door is of course painted on wood. There are two senses in which it is false—it looks like a door, but it’s not, and it looks like it’s made of marble, but it’s not. If someone notices that it looks like a door, we might consider it, in that moment, a false door. If they notice that the faux marble finishing looks like marble, then it’s false marble. That is, we might want to say that whether something in false (in the first sense) depends on what someone might perceive it to be. This brings to mind the staple of armchair philosophy about a tree falling in the forest: if there is nobody around to misperceive a false bottom, is it still a false bottom?