{"id":866,"date":"2026-07-09T01:22:33","date_gmt":"2026-07-09T01:22:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/?p=866"},"modified":"2026-07-10T09:17:58","modified_gmt":"2026-07-10T09:17:58","slug":"illusions-of-cognition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/2026\/07\/09\/illusions-of-cognition\/","title":{"rendered":"Three Illusions of Consciousness"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\"><strong>No inner monologue<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/JoshWalkos\/status\/1767745681375015076\/\">Here<\/a><span style=\"color: #000000;\">&#8216;s an interesting (short!) interview with a girl who says she has no internal monologue. The interviewer is trying to comprehend what that could be like and how it could be possible.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">I think a good way to start thinking about it is to realise that there\u00a0<em>is<\/em>\u00a0no actual little voice in\u00a0<em>anyone&#8217;s\u00a0<\/em>head, so what&#8217;s happening when we think that there is?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\"><strong>No inner imagery<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.eurekalert.org\/news-releases\/1134646\">Here<\/a><span style=\"color: #000000;\">\u2019s a news release reporting on a study involving people who report that they can form no mental images. The report talks about how this is devastating for philosophers of mind (citing such contemporary analysts as David Hume) and indicating that it upends our ideas of abstraction formation.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">I think a good way to start thinking about it is to realise (as philosophers have done for centuries) that there\u00a0<em>is<\/em>\u00a0no actual little image in\u00a0<em>anyone&#8217;s\u00a0<\/em>head, so what&#8217;s happening when we think that there is?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\"><strong>No inner reasoning<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Usually cited as an argument against Free Will, the<\/span> <a href=\"https:\/\/scienceinsights.org\/what-the-libet-experiment-reveals-about-free-will\/\">Libet experiment<\/a> <span style=\"color: #000000;\">equally indicates that consciousness of a decision is not simultaneous with the neurological indicator that a decision has been made, thus conscious reasoning is not what produces the decision.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">But consciousness is not where the work is done, any more than a committee\u2019s report is where <em>it\u2019s<\/em> work is done.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>No inner monologue Here&#8216;s an interesting (short!) interview with a girl who says she has no internal monologue. The interviewer is trying to comprehend what that could be like and how it could be possible.\u00a0 I think a good way to start thinking about it is to realise that there\u00a0is\u00a0no actual little voice in\u00a0anyone&#8217;s\u00a0head, so [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-866","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cogsci","category-philosophy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/866","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=866"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/866\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":871,"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/866\/revisions\/871"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}