The Spatial Location of Inner Speech (Utterly Useless Wonder)

Last night, my six-year-old daughter Kate told me she had a song "in her head". I asked her if it was really inside her head, as she said yes it was. I asked her how big it was. At first she said she didn't know, but when pressed she agreed that it was larger than a pea but smaller than a dog, and she spread her fingers a few centimeters apart.

Most of the people I've interviewed are willing to attribute a spatial location to their experience of inner speech and imagined tunes -- and that location is virtually always inside their heads, not in their tummies or their toes or out in the environment, unless it's a hallucination or a case in which they're not sure whether the origin is some subtle environmental sound. Why, I wonder, this uniformity of report?

You might say -- as my 13-year-old son Davy said later last night, when I interviewed him -- that it's experienced as in the head because its origin is in your brain, and your brain is in the head. But that argument can't work without some supplementation. Phantom-limb pain, for example, is experienced as spatially located outside the head, even if its origin is in the head (or in peripheral nerves closer to the center of the body). Visual experience is a product of the brain but not normally described as located in the head. Visual imagery, too, although often described as "in the head", is sometimes experienced as out in the environment. For example, I might imagine a demon crouching in the corner of my office as I now look into that very corner. Also -- somewhat surprisingly to me! -- when I interview people about their visual imagery experiences, about 25% describe their visual imagery as spatially located a few inches in front of the forehead. In contrast, I have never heard anyone describe their inner speech as transpiring a few inches in front of their forehead!

You might say that it's because the origin of our outwardly verbalized speech is our head, so we're used to locating our speech inside our heads. But that doesn't quite work either. When I speak, the spatial origin of the sound, it seems to me, is my mouth. Although that's part of my head, most people, when they locate their inner speech, locate it not in their mouths but in the interior of their cranium.

You might think that it makes sense that we would imagine music as transpiring in our cranium, since that's where it seems to be when you're listening with headphones. But that doesn't quite work either, I think, since people with limited exposure to headphones (like Kate), who hear most of their music from exterior sources, still report tunes as spatially interior. (I'd wager one finds this "inside the head" phenomenological positioning, too, if one looks at phenomenological reports in Anglophone culture pre-stereophonics, but I haven't done the search on that (yet).)

A more interesting possibility is this: Sometimes imagery is experienced as environmentally positioned -- like that demon in the corner of my office. We might imagine a representation like this {demon with properties a,b,c; egocentric location x,y,z}. But most of the time we don't visually imagine things as environmentally located, so the representation is just {demon with properties a,b,c}. Without an environmental position explicitly represented, we might default to representation at our subjective center -- either actually experiencing it as there or erroneously thinking we experience it as there. And maybe our subjective center is inside our cranium. But even if so, the view has problems accounting for visual imagery reported as in front of the forehead, and with reports of inner speech as moving around inside one's head (as some of Russ Hurlburt's interviewees report).

So I'm left still wondering....

Posted by Eric Schwitzgebel at 11:33 AM

Wonderment without any answers (or even any potential answers). Original post here. 

Innate Memories (You Can't Make This Stuff Up!)

Philosopher Berit Brogaard posits that memories may be innate over at New APPS:

Remembering Things From Before You Were Born: Can Memories Be Innate?

[cross-posted from our Psychology Today blog]

In the supernatural thriller Memory, written by Bennett Joshua Davlin, Dr. Taylor Briggs, who is the leading expert on memory, examines a patient found nearly dead in the Amazon. While checking on the patient, Taylor is accidentally exposed to a psychedelic drug that unlocks memories of a killer that committed murders many years before Taylor was born. The killer turns out to be his ancestor. Taylor’s memories, despite being of events Taylor never experienced, are very detailed. They contain the point-of-view of his ancestor and the full visual scenario experienced by the killer.
Though the movie is supernatural, it brings up an interesting question. Is it possible to inherit our ancestors’ memories? The answer is not black and white. It depends on what we mean by ‘memory’. The story of the movie is farfetched: there is no evidence or credible scientific theory suggesting that we can inherit specific episodic memories of events that our ancestors experienced. In other words, it’s highly unlikely that you will suddenly remember your great-great-grandfather’s wedding day or your great-great-grandmother’s struggle in childbirth.

But the idea of inherited, or genetic, memory of a different kind has some degree of plausibility. There are many different types of memory. Episodic memory is memory of specific events, such as your memory of your last birthday party. Semantic memory is memory of information that is presented as a fact, for example, the fact that Obama is the current president, that ‘ranarian’ means ‘frog-like’ or that 31 is a prime number. Finally, procedural memory is memory of how to do things, for example, my memory of how to swim or change a light bulb.
It is uncontroversial that procedural memory can be inherited. Babies know how to suck without being taught how to do it. This is a kind of procedural memory, and it is clearly genetic. The central, and much more controversial, question is whether episodic and semantic memory can be inherited.
Semantic memory seems to be the most likely candidate to be, at least partially, genetic. Prominent philosophers, psychologists and linguists throughout history have thought that semantic memory is not always acquired through learning. The great ancient philosopher Plato thought that souls that are instantiated in a human being are part of a Platonic heaven. In the Platonic heaven, the souls acquire Platonic universal ideas (for example, piety, justice, moral goodness). When a soul is instantiated in a newborn, the baby learns these universals by “looking behind” the veil of physical reality and finding the truths in her soul.

Carl Gustav Jung, a Swiss psychotherapist and psychiatrist and the founder of analytical psychology, is well known for his theory of the collective unconscious. The collective unconscious, unlike the personal unconscious, is a type of genetic memory that can be shared by individuals with a common ancestor or history. According to Jung, the collective unconscious consists of implicit beliefs and thoughts had by our ancestors. While we are not aware of the collective unconscious, it can influence how we act. To take a rather mundane example, if our ancestors had a belief that fire was dangerous, this belief can be part of our collective unconscious and influence how we behave when we are near fire.
Jung hit upon his theory of the collective unconscious during psychoanalysis of his patients’ dreams. He believed that the symbolism he found was prominent in his patients’ dreams often bore marks of a specific ancestral history. This type of symbolism is a type of dream event that is difficult to explain by anything in the dreamer's own life.
In modern times, Noam Chomsky, an influential American linguist, is famous for having put forward a theory that has an element of genetic semantic memory at its core. Chomsky argued that human beings are born with a capacity for language acquisition that puts certain constraints on what sorts of human languages are possible. The constraints that limit what sort of grammar a human language can have are also sometimes referred to as a ‘universal grammar’. The universal grammar can be understood as an inherited network of structures that is common to all of us.

How could genetic semantic memory be manifested in the brain? Memories are stored in the brain in the form of neural networks in the cerebral cortex, the brain’s outer layer. The brain deposits specific proteins along the neurons’ synapses that make it more likely for the neurons to communicate in the future. This is also known as ‘long-term potentiation’. While the proteins are normally deposited as a result of learning, it is possible that some of them could be coded for by the genetic code.
But if, indeed, there is such a thing as genetic semantic memory, which part of the human genome codes for it? We don’t really know. What we do know is that we haven’t yet discovered the purpose of many segments of the genetic code. Some of these segments may contain semantic memory information.
There is some evidence that people who are born without one of the senses still have the ability to form visual images that represent the lacking sensory information. For example, people who have been blind from birth sometimes report visual imagery. We cannot confirm that what they are reporting as “visual imagery” really is truly visual. To confirm this we should look at whether there is neural activity in visual areas of the brain in these subjects when they engage in visual imagery. But that will be a project for the future.

This is dreadful philosophy (if it is anything at all).

The Dumbest Idea for a Movie...Ever!

Philosophers the movie trailer here.

The Philosophy of Ghosts and Spirits

 This is an actual post from the blog Experimental Philosophy:

Phenomenal Consciousness Disembodied

Is an entity's physical constitution a central principle of folk psychology that guides judgments about phenomenal consciousness?  In a spooky new paper with Mark Phelan, we continue our examination of experiential state ascriptions by turning to the phantasmally disembodied—ghosts and spirits.

Lacking in any body whatsoever, spirits constitute the ultimate test of the basic embodiment view. If embodiment is a crucial cue for phenomenal state attribution, then we should expect important differences in ascription between human beings, on the one hand, and disembodied ghosts and spirits, on the other—just as we expect (given our prior work in this area) to find important differences in phenomenal state attribution for functional information (information about the goals, desires, etc, of an entity). However if functional information tends to cue mental state ascription independently of whether the entity has a physical body, then it undermines the embodiment hypothesis. This is what we set out to investigate, using spirits as our medium.

In five experiments, our results suggest that embodiment is not a central principle guiding ascriptions of phenomenal consciousness to these sorts of entities, while also continuing to support the important role of functional considerations in theory of mind judgments. We speculate that these findings may also at least begin to question the widespread nature of intuitions used to motivate absent qualia arguments against functionalism.

I notice there hasn't been much conversation on the blog lately, so some comments would really raise our spirits!

How does anyone objectively study the "disembodied"?