Episode 301: Believing is Seeing?

[00:00:00] Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and psychologist Dave Pizarro, having an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics. Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say, and knowing my dad, some very inappropriate jokes. We're Americans! We don't quit just because we're wrong, we just keep doing the wrong thing until it turns out right!

[00:01:12] Welcome to Very Bad Wizards, I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston. Dave, Donald Trump, your boy, officially became president again yesterday, and Elon gave what looked suspiciously, weirdly like a SIG Heil salute at the inauguration. Are you back in on the Department of Dogecoins now? Jason – You're just seeing a SIG Heil because you want to see it? You know? That's completely normal.

[00:01:41] Jason – That's an awkward gesture as the great non-hypocrites at the ADL said. Jason – Oh, they said that? They put out a statement? Jason – Yeah, saying it was not an anti-Semitic. It was an awkward gesture. Jason – I feel like we need like an action theorist in philosophy to like tell us what was going on. Because it really looks like you can't do that by mistake. Identical. Isn't that incredible?

[00:02:09] I mean, I don't want to get into the whole ADL thing being just like the entire mass comes down. Oh, this was never about anti-Semitism. It was just about supporting Israel. But like that someone actually does that and they're just like, okay, everyone calm down. You know, it's not like somebody said free Palestine or anything. It's just a Hitler salute. That's it.

[00:02:37] It's such like Dr. Strange love vibes. Yes, mein Fuhrer. I mean, Mr. President. It's like if that gesture comes so easily to you, it's like white people who say the N-word by mistake. It's kind of their top of mind. I don't even understand the thing that it was by accident, but he should have known or something like that. It's like this has already happened. People already kind of think this about him.

[00:03:07] Why would you then do it if you didn't mean to? And I know it's because he's on the spectrum and he has Asperger's. He did it twice, though. Did you see the clip? Like he does it twice. Almost as if to say if you thought that first one was an awkward gesture. Let me do it again. Yeah. No, it is. It's almost like people are underreacting to it based on how I thought they would react to it. Like it's just a guy at the inauguration giving. Yeah. So, you know, dark places, I guess.

[00:03:36] Very dark. I saw someone posted, can you give a Pulitzer just for a headline? And the headline was, I always knew that obscenely rich people would burn down the world someday. I just didn't expect them to be such losers. Mark Zuckerberg wearing his gold chain with his like cherry curls.

[00:04:04] Melania Trump looking like Christopher Lloyd from Roger Rabbit. Yeah. That's totally doomed. Remember me. Eddie, the tune that killed your brother. Yeah, that's a really good movie, actually. It's so good. It's really, really good. Yeah. I recently listened to the audiobook of the book it was based on, which is also weirdly good. I didn't know it was even based on it. Yeah, I know. That's great. Yeah. It's like a noir, you know?

[00:04:33] But like the guy is like, I'm going to do a noir, but with fucking cartoons that live in the real world. It's one of those like weird things where like it did something pretty much new, like in a feature film to integrate cartoon animation and real life. And like it just kind of finished it like nobody has ever tried to really top it. Yeah. There was like a space jam maybe. Yeah, I guess. But it's just like that wasn't more like they didn't do that aspect of it better.

[00:05:03] Better. Not at all. The technology was just kind of perfect. Plus they had rights to all the characters. Incredible. That will never happen again. Yeah. That will just never happen. You know, Donald Duck and Daffy Duck playing the piano next to each other. You remember when people used to ask us to do something that we could do without swearing, like a non-explicit version? That would be a good candidate. Oh, yeah. That would be fun. Very Bad Wizards Jr. Totally holds up too. Oh, yeah. A couple of years ago.

[00:05:33] Like it's great. Yeah, same here. Bob Hoskins, really, really good. Does that kind of noir Chinatown thing really well. And what's her name? Who's the voice of Jessica Rabbit? Kathleen Turner. Yeah. Yeah. So in the second segment, we're going to talk about, this is the first psychology entry into the Back to Basics series, right? Yeah.

[00:05:59] So it's an age-old question now on the nature of perception. Is it the case that what you believe, desire, or motivated to do high-level knowledge, does that stuff work its way down into like really low-level perceptual stuff? Like does it change what you see if you want to see it? Yeah. Excited to talk about it, have some mixed feelings about all the stuff that you gave me. But that should be fun.

[00:06:27] First, yeah, another terrible thing that happened last week and actually one that moved me emotionally in a way that doesn't happen to me normally when, actually never happened to me when someone famous dies as David Lynch died. Yeah. And so I guess you suggested we talk about David Lynch and why he meant so much to so many people, including me. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:06:55] So when I saw it happen, as with many of your friends and some of our listeners, we immediately thought, oh shit, I got to reach out to Tamler. And so I just wanted to hear you talk about him because although I'm a David Lynch fan, nobody I know is a fan like you are.

[00:07:13] I have publicly and have been for a very long time been his, not his number one fan because he actually has like incredibly devoted and interesting fans and people who write about him. But I think, you know, the thing that made him special for me, if I had to pick one person that just reoriented and enriched my way of approaching film and art, it's David Lynch.

[00:07:42] And we always talk about this, right? When we talk about like a Borges story or just like a Kafka, like the trial or the metamorphosis or just most of the movies we cover, like to see these things not as something to figure out or get to the bottom of what they're trying to say,

[00:08:02] but as more of like a living thing and an ongoing conversation between the viewer or reader and the work and also the people and other people, right? Like the viewer and other for movies, the viewer and other viewers, like nobody gives that sense of aliveness, that sense of mystery and kind of general unsolvability of the world better than Lynch for me anyway.

[00:08:29] And like, it just kind of opened the door to seeing art and the world in a different way and in a really entertaining way and in a kind of mainstream way. Like this, there'll never be anybody like him. Like he actually had big crossover appeal in a way that's hard to imagine that happening now with someone with such a unique and strange artistic sensibility. It just, yeah, like he's really, he's really something.

[00:08:59] He's his own thing. Why is that? So like, just to agree with you about the widespread, clearly widespread influence and like large and diverse fan base. I feel like somebody who made Lynchian movies now and started would be kind of an art housey director. It seems that you can easily alienate the audience when you go weird.

[00:09:25] But David Lynch went weird in a way that I don't feel very many people do or can. I'm trying to think. Maybe Donald Glover goes a little bit like that in Atlanta. There's a crossover appeal to that. But I still think some of his more weird episodes are maybe loved by critics, but not. Yeah, no, I think Atlanta generally, you know, like the difference between Atlanta.

[00:09:46] Now, it's a different time, but the difference between Atlanta and something like Twin Peaks is like the difference between the Super Bowl and some early season WNBA game or something like that. You know, like in terms of just how many people are watching that now, a lot of that is just it's a different time. Yeah. Controlling for the fact that nobody watches anything. Yeah. No, like not a lot of people watch anything except sports.

[00:10:08] But like I do think he if if I had to put my finger on it, it's number one, there's always kind of mystery in his movies and people like mysteries. And then number two, it's this thing that he could do just kind of like he could tap into emotions that you knew were important, but didn't fully understand into fears, into like joys, into like stuff about the world that you see now, but you didn't see before.

[00:10:36] And he never gave you closure. And so, like, there's so much to talk about, you know. Yeah. I always quote that line. I'm sure I've said this like on eight different episodes. Someone says, you know, why? How come you don't give a sense of closure? And I think they were talking about Twin Peaks and he's like closure. I keep hearing that word. As soon as you get closure or a sense of closure, it's just an excuse to forget you saw the damn thing. Yeah.

[00:11:01] And I think that's why, like, you know, he has, well, A, just such a devoted kind of cult fan community. And, you know, when The Return was released, there were like 10 different podcasts that were all brilliant and hilarious and like really insightful going on while it was released. It's because there's so much to talk about with him. Yeah. But he combined it with just like the humor and the violence and the mystery.

[00:11:26] I think the mystery can't be overstated how much we like a good mystery as, you know, imbibers of art. And he understood that and he gave us mysteries that we would never understand or get to the bottom of fully, but we would always want to just get drawn into it until it like swallowed us up, which it did, you know? Yeah. Yeah.

[00:11:50] When I think of what he's doing, you said something about this when we were talking about Wizard of Oz, that it's something that gets at your unconscious. Like it gets at you at some deep level. And I always feel like he knew how to like poke your soul kind of like just poke at it with a single scene. You just be like, why is that? Yeah. Why is that getting it? Why is that so powerful?

[00:12:11] Like, for example, the diner scene in Mulholland Drive, you know, these two people that we almost never see again in the whole movie, just having a conversation in the diner and then going outside. And you were terrified and like it's just burned on your psyche after you see that scene. Yeah. I always feel like watching his movies or thinking about his movies is just giving me this feeling that like I'm not sure if I'm awake or asleep, but like I have one foot in the dream world.

[00:12:40] But it's like, but somehow it's truer than. Yeah. Yes. Totally. This is the thing. I remember biking to school one day and it was through this area, kind of funky little area of Houston. And I just saw something inexplicable. And I don't even remember what it was because I'm alert to this now. So now I kind of see this all the time. But I remember at the time just thinking that could easily be in a Lynch movie, like what I just saw.

[00:13:06] And then that's when I like it hit me that actually the world is kind of Lynchian and this would relate to our second segment maybe. But I feel like we filter out the weirdness of the world. But once you don't do that, you see crazy shit all the time. And it's like he alerts you to that. Even when you don't even realize that he does, he does. And his movies are just like this is what the world is when you remove your filter.

[00:13:34] You know, obviously it's not an identical representation of that. But like I think he just like he alerts you to this kind of fundamental strangeness of our actual lives and experiences. Yeah. And I know it's maybe obvious, but like he didn't have to do it with anything like that. Like there's no it's not like he's special effects guru who's like figuring out how to like create these images. But there is one thing that I just I've been wanting to talk to you about this because I want to know whether you feel the same way.

[00:14:03] There is something about Lynch to me, even though his movies are sometimes dark and real fucked up like twin. I mean, you know, the Twin Peaks plot line is dark and fucked up. Yeah. Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me is one of the most horrifying and like darkest stories you could tell. But there is a sincerity to Lynch. He's not cynical. He's not like I don't know. There's just something in his like in his characters.

[00:14:31] He's not mocking the people who are happy go lucky. He's not mocking the nice things. I mean, I think it's really hard to be dark in that kind of way without being just kind of like nasty about life and existence. Yeah. No, that's that's the other thing. I think you put your finger on it. Exactly. He has like a combination of like this genuinely sincere hokiness, like aw shucksness.

[00:14:58] This guy from Montana to the point of corniness, which he really is. And he combines that with this like, yeah, at times horrifying violence and like depravity and this dream logic and like this much more absurdist comic sensibility, which is way different than the sincere hokiness. And there's just nothing like it because of how genuinely sincere he is about all of it.

[00:15:23] You know, like I do think like a lot of the surrealist filmmakers, you know, after him and maybe before him, that's the thing that separates him from them is that they don't have that just a guy from Montana who likes to eat at Bob's Big Boys. And, you know, he can be weird and the transcendental meditation, which he was, you know, like he's a big part of all that, you know, like quite spiritual and pretty specific in terms of how he the met.

[00:15:52] But then he just also just has this side of him. That's just a guy from the Midwest who loves hamburgers and teenage love affairs. This is part of what people loved about him. If it was just the darkness and the weirdness. But like, like I think he that he was genuinely a sincere person who was full of wonder about the world and full of love for all sorts of things and his casts.

[00:16:18] Like if you want to cry, listen to Laura Dern or Kyle McLaughlin or Naomi Watts talk about him and all the people in his crew that he worked with over and over again. Yeah. Yeah. The Dale Cooper character is just so good. Yeah. It's just such a great example of this. Like you're just rooting for the guy. You're just like happy that he's happy about getting his coffee. Well, wait till you see the return. Yeah. Before he. It's such a loss because he.

[00:16:45] I mean, well, on the one hand, he gave us 18 hours of just this incredible like, yeah, honestly, my favorite work of art of the last 25 years. So it seems like nothing to complain about. But but still, like he was going to work on he was going to do something else. He couldn't get a movie made since Inland Empire. And, you know, but he was a fine artist. It's like you said, he doesn't do his stuff with effects. He does it with like paint.

[00:17:11] And but then when video came along and he could do all this stuff cheaper, he just embraced that, too. He really just was an artist in his soul. And yeah. Yeah. Last thing I want to say, like more personally, I always treasure just going through his movies with my daughter who loved him from the get go. And so seeing his stuff was just a way for us to spend time together in ways we both loved. I remember actually Natalia.

[00:17:38] So we have a lot of bonus Lynch material on Patreon that I do with Natalia Washington and Jesse Graham. And she said she and her dad also bonded over the original Twin Peaks and and some Lynch. But then with Eliza, when the Twin Peaks The Return came out, we showed her the original, which we hadn't done yet and which I hadn't seen in forever. And then watched every new episode as it came out. Like she was 13 then. So I waited on fire walk with me.

[00:18:07] But she didn't make it to four to 14 before we saw it. I was going to say, whoa, you exercised judgment. Yeah. Well, there's some pretty intensely violent scenes and yeah, disturbing scenes in that. But yeah, it's too integral to the larger story of Twin Peaks The Return to not watch it. Anyway, so like it came out in May. And live, if I'm talking out of school here, you can just edit this. But she'd had a tough year.

[00:18:35] Seventh grade or two closest friends had left her school. And so she kind of struggled socially like she hadn't before that year. And it just sucks being a middle schooler, I think, in general. So then this comes out and she and I just got completely obsessed with it. And it's coming out over the summer. And we'd watch and rewatch and come up with theories and yell at each other. And it was honestly like at that time, for me anyway, like as meaningful as anything I feel like I could experience.

[00:19:04] Because we're spending a lot of time together. Like we're imbibing this supreme work of art. And I'm watching her evolve into a true art lover. And then she's fucking on – like she was on point with it. You know, like she came on at the end of an episode. I'll try to put – like give you this to put in the show notes – to give a theory about Audrey and Cooper in The Return.

[00:19:30] And I'll always remember Susan Wolf coming up to me and saying that her daughter's fiancé listened to it. And told Susan Wolf that he thought Lye – like he was buying what she thought Lye had like the best interpretation that he'd ever heard. You know, and she was like 13. So I'll never forget that. And I'll just never forget those times. And I think that he provided that for so many communities. And I know that other works do this too.

[00:19:58] But like this personally was – there's nobody like that. Yeah. Yeah. Really quickly, I just want to know, I know it's about David Lynch and not about you. But I do know that some people reached out to you. Doesn't that feel good? Like people cared about you when they heard about David Lynch. You know? It's just nice when people reach out to you, period. You know? Absolutely. It's just a way of – yeah.

[00:20:25] Like I think part of that is because I identify myself so fully as someone who's a fan. And so publicly. And also – and I was telling you this happened to me with when MF Doom died. Like that people know that you would be actually sad. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Like that means something. Like it's genuinely – you're not just like, oh shit, that sucks. Like – yeah.

[00:20:47] And I'm like embarrassed to admit that I would roll my eyes when people would say like David Bowie taught me it was okay to be weird or something like that. And like I shouldn't have. You're such an asshole. I know. Like – and I think like that's – I wasn't being as sincere and appreciative as like a David Lynch would be when I would do that. And then I – you know, like – and as often with these things it's like, oh, I get it now. You know? Yeah. So yeah.

[00:21:13] If you don't know David Lynch and you want to watch him, like what would you – of the movies you've seen, like what would you recommend? Seriously, I would say just start at Twin Peaks. Like I feel like that's the place to start before you go to the movies. You have to say like that that's also Mark – that's a collaboration with Mark Frost and he had a lot to do with both. But, you know, like there are parts of Twin Peaks which we associate with Lynch but actually like is more Frost. But yeah. I agree.

[00:21:43] And the pilot of Twin Peaks is like a masterpiece and very Lynch. Like any episode that he directed is very much his vision. Some of the other stuff is, you know, not or a real combination. And then I don't know. I would say like you ease in with that. I can't help but say Mulholland Drive. I just – but I don't know if you want to blow your load by going to what I think is like such a masterpiece. Maybe you work your way. I mean, yeah.

[00:22:10] I would say Blue Velvet might be a good one to start with because if you don't like that, you're probably not going to like Lynch. Yeah. I saw Blue Velvet too young or at least too immature to appreciate it. It's not that I didn't like it. I just didn't get it. And I haven't watched it. I really need to rewatch it. It has all his hallmarks but it's more accessible.

[00:22:35] You know, it doesn't as obviously take place in a dream world as like a Mulholland Drive or Lost Highway or Inland Empire which are all great. But like, yeah. It's also very – it has his perfect combination of it's super funny, really disturbing and, you know, like Twin Peaks, especially the original, shows kind of the underbelly. You have the – you know, that – you know, the two sides of him.

[00:23:01] The hokey, small town corniness and the dark underbelly. But in a way that isn't like a cliched thing. It just kind of all integrates perfectly. And it's great. If you don't like that, then you should hate yourself. And become a recluse. But then if you do, yeah, Mulholland Drive then – you know what's an interesting one is The Straight Story. Have you seen that? No. Yeah.

[00:23:30] This is rated G Disney movie and it's unmistakably a Lynch movie even though it's rated G and it's – yeah, it's really, really good. I only saw it like a few years ago because I was like, oh, that's just his thing for Disney and it's like amazing. Yeah. Yeah, maybe we'll do Eraserhead at some point soon. Yeah, I'd be super down. And for patrons, you can see we did Lost Highway. We did Blue Velvet.

[00:23:54] But we've had six hours, I think, of conversations about Twin Peaks The Return and Fire Walk with me. So there's a lot of content for you if you want to hear people who love Lynch talk about Lynch. And I definitely think you should get Jesse Natalian again. Yeah, that would be nice. All right. All right. Thanks for letting me express my affection for his work. Yeah, and we'll do something in his honor soon, I think. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. All right.

[00:24:24] We'll be right back for our Back to Basics Psychology Edition on top-down perception. Back to Basics. I really need to come up with a logo. Yeah.

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[00:30:06] That goes to show you my memory. Two, right? Two, we've only done two. So today we're discussing this big question in really cognitive psychology, but cognitive science writ large. So it's a question that philosophers, linguists, a lot of people care about. Because I think it gets to the heart of the question about how the mind is organized. Fundamentally, how does the mind work? And so this question is one of top-down influences on perception.

[00:30:36] So as we said in the intro, basically what this is trying to figure out is whether or not what you believe can affect what you see. Like at a real basic level, are we potentially seeing different things, you and I, if we have different desires or beliefs or motivations? Or is basic visual perception, well, in this case, visual perception, and I should say we're going to be talking mostly about visual perception. Is it protected from this stuff?

[00:31:03] Is it the case that, as many people argue, that visual perception is encapsulated, it's protected from these beliefs. And that you and I receive the same perceptual experiences from the world around us. And then things like memory and judgment and attention. All of those things, we might have completely different processes that kick in. But when I see a square, can I believe that you see a square, even though you really want to see a triangle? So that's at the heart of this question.

[00:31:31] How much of our perception is infused by what are these higher order cognitive processes? And that's why it's called top-down. It's because beliefs, desires, motivations are considered higher order processes than just raw perception. Exactly. And I'm glad you brought it up because I always have to explain this to my intro psych students. Like why? It sounds like you're throwing shade when you're calling something a lower order process.

[00:31:58] But it's really just a matter of what is the most basic process. Like collecting information from the world around us via our senses is the most basic of processes. Okay, so here's a little bit of a history about this topic. So in the 1940s, there was this sort of movement that started with one paper by a psychologist named Jerome Bruner,

[00:32:22] Bruner and Goodman in 1947, who did this like really clever set of experiments. What they purported to show was that the size of coins would appear different to kids who were poor versus those who were rich. And their thinking was, well, for poorer kids, you know, like money just looms large in their mind.

[00:32:49] Like 25 cents means a lot more to somebody who barely has anything than it does to a rich person. So maybe the coin actually looks larger. So they did some experiment. They did one experiment where they just asked like kids, they brought in like 30 kids. It was pretty low. And they asked them to report the size of a penny, a nickel, a dime, a quarter and a 50 cent piece.

[00:33:17] And what they found was on average, poor kids estimated a smaller size, sorry, a larger size for those coins. For all of them are just the bigger. Like on average, I think the biggest action was in the 25 cent coin. What is it like? How do you report how large a coin is? Yeah, it's a good question. So what they did specifically was they had a little machine that was like a little aperture that you could open or close.

[00:33:44] And it's shown a beam of light onto a surface. And so by turning the knob, it would just make that circle of light bigger or smaller. And so they had the kids actually use that knob and say, OK, how big, how big is it? Then they would measure how big they made it. The interesting thing was for one set of estimates, they had them do it from memory. But for another one, they had them do it by like literally holding a coin in one hand and turning the knob with the other hand. And they got this effect.

[00:34:11] So what they argued was that, well, in this case, whatever the desires, the motivations, whatever it was that was different between these poor kids and these rich kids was actually changing what they saw. Like the coin actually looked bigger. And this started like a huge movement in psychology. In fact, looking back at some of this work, it's sort of social psychology before there was social psychology. Yeah.

[00:34:39] There were a lot of these like, you know, almost like a cartoon. If you're hungry, that piece of chicken looks bigger than if you're not. Right, right. It's the same thing you just read about old people. So you walk slower. It's like, yeah, exactly. And they were all like kind of plagued by bad methods and low end. But there was literally, I think one estimate was that there was like 300 papers published in a decade. I think in 1957, Bruner wrote a retrospective of like how this movement. So it was called the new look movement in cognitive psychology.

[00:35:08] And yeah, like 300. And then sort of things went quiet because there were a lot of criticisms about the methodology, all sorts of criticisms. But one of the criticisms that's still relevant is that what people were calling perception wasn't really perception. It was some sort of judgment or memory or attentional effect that they were getting at. It's not that these kids were actually seeing something different. It's maybe they were remembering it differently, whatever the case might be.

[00:35:36] Well, but in the case where they're as they're holding it. Where they're holding it? Yeah. I know. I know. That's the one that always has gotten to me. And I think, to be honest, I just think those are spurious. Like it was a set of like, at that point, 10 kids in, you know, per condition. Right. And the data are kind of messy. Like I was looking back at that paper. Did they try to replicate that? Yeah. People have not replicated. Yeah. Yeah. There's been trouble replicating. So it kind of went dark and cognitive psychology just sort of proceeded.

[00:36:05] Almost like by the time I was around grad school, that was just talked about as something that was an interesting quirk in cognitive psychology, where people for a while thought that there was real evidence for this, but turns out that there wasn't.

[00:36:17] But then in like the 90s, a bunch of studies started coming out trying to revive this new look, trying to argue that maybe if you did it right, you could actually show that there were real effects of whatever beliefs, motivations on perception. And so you got another sort of resurgence of this new, new look as one psychologist so cleverly called it in perception.

[00:36:45] Now, in the meantime, and this is just the broader picture, Jerry Fodor in the 80s wrote a book called The Modularity of Mind. And that really was at the heart of it about this stuff. And what he argued was all that stuff was wrong because the way that perception works is it's modular. And so he drew, he said, look, there's two ways that you can try to, that people have tried to argue that the mind works.

[00:37:14] One of them is the mind is just one thing. Like it's just one big thing. So it's like an association machine, right? That's what like behaviorists believe or the connectionists. There's a general learning process such that cognition and your thoughts, the higher order stuff is continuous with all of the lower order stuff.

[00:37:33] So on that view, it would make sense that the stuff that you think about in this sort of higher order way, your desires or your beliefs or your motivations or your judgments or your culture or your language would work its way into your perceptions because there is no difference. For them, it was all one process. Fodor, on the other hand, argued, no, the mind is a bunch of things. And so he defended this view of the mind as modular.

[00:37:57] He said, the mind is built such that there are these subsystems that are dedicated to doing one thing, right? So you have a visual system that is just, its only goal is to compute what comes into your eyes and give you some perception, some perceptual experience of it. And that's like cut off from your beliefs and desires about it. Exactly. Those two things don't communicate within the mind or the brain.

[00:38:27] Right. Or the way that they communicate is that the visual subsystem does its thing. It computes. Yeah. And then it pops it into you. For now, you can use it. Now that I've given you the reliable perception, you can use it. Yeah. Right. So the way that these two come together is that the visual system is one of the main examples that Fodor was using. That and Chomsky sort of similarly believe this about language, linguistic processing. And he said, look, we know that there is some special computing going on.

[00:38:56] That is, the stuff that enters your retina is not really what your perception gives you. So to give you an example, if I'm looking at the door to this room, I see a rectangle. But the image on my retina is really some sort of weird parallelogram because I'm sitting at an angle. Right. But my brain, the part that's dedicated to vision, is computing the right things and spitting out this phenomenal experience that I'm seeing just the rectangle.

[00:39:23] And there's a lot of work that's clearly being done on just the light that's hitting our eyes. There's a lot of computation that's going on that's sort of filling in necessary information to give us a reliable perception. So there's computation going on there. The central example for why this stuff is protected from your beliefs is all of the visual illusions that we know occur. So the Mueller-Lyer is often one that's used as a central example.

[00:39:51] I don't think it's the best example, but just go with it because everybody knows it. This is the illusion where if I put two lines that are the same length, but one of them is the one on top has brackets that are pointing inward and the one on the bottom has brackets that are pointing outward. Yeah. Those lines look genuinely different. Right. Right. And knowing that they're the same and that it's an illusion doesn't change how they look. Yeah. Right.

[00:40:16] For me, the more powerful ones are like these instances of shading where two different spots on the image, one looks a lot darker than the other one, but that's only because of the contextual stuff around it. Like with the little cylinder on the chessboard. Exactly. Yeah. Right. Or like, you know, there's some that are like black and white tile floors. Right. They still look black and white tiled, but like one of them is the shadow.

[00:40:41] And when you separate them, when you, when you split those apart, you really see they're actually completely different colors or in some illusions, the same color. They just look different. But knowing that doesn't change your experience of it. You're just like, wow, that's crazy. It still looks like different to me. And so Fordor used these as examples of how the subsystems, these modules were encapsulated. They were unable to be cognitively penetrated, which is another term that's used.

[00:41:12] Cognitive penetration. Cognitively ravaged. Exactly. Doggy style of your cognitive, your perceptual system. Yeah. So Fordor argued that this was the correct way of understanding the mind, that there are these, at least some of our perceptual systems are encapsulated. And he said, this is important because look, if you and I literally are seeing something else, we would have no way of ever agreeing on the truth of anything.

[00:41:36] Like this is, as he admits in his pricey, this would lead us into some sort of relativism, like deep relativism about the world around us that is too depressing for him. Oh, yeah. Right. Well, if it's too depressing, then it can't be true. It's the great scientific principle. He has this great section of his pricey where he says, but look, you might ask, why do you care about modules so much? You've got tenure. Why don't you take off and go sailing? This is a perfectly reasonable question and one that I often ask myself.

[00:42:04] Answering it would require exploring territory that I can't get into here. But roughly, and by way of striking a closing note, the idea that cognition saturates perception belongs with and is indeed historically connected with the idea in the philosophy of science that one's observations are comprehensively determined by one's theories. With the idea in anthropology that one's values are comprehensively determined by one's culture. With the idea in sociology that one's epistemic commitments, including especially one's science, are comprehensively determined by one's class affiliations.

[00:42:32] And with the idea in linguistics that one's metaphysics is comprehensively determined by one's syntax. All these ideas imply a sort of relativistic holism because perception is saturated by cognition, observation by theory, values by culture, science by class, and metaphysics by language. Rational criticism of scientific theories, ethical values, metaphysical worldviews, or whatever can take place only within the framework of assumptions that as a matter of geographical, historical, or sociological accident, the interlocutors happen to share. What you can't do is rationally criticize the framework.

[00:43:02] The thing is, I hate relativism. I hate relativism more than I hate anything else, excepting maybe fiberglass powerpoints. Sorry, fiberglass powerboat. More to the point, I think that relativism is very probably false. That would seem more to the point. Than how. That would be, yeah. I can't believe that, like, that's okay to say. By, like, a very well-known and, you know, beloved philosopher who's a great writer.

[00:43:30] But the fact that that is supposed to be in some way compelling to somebody who just doesn't hate relativism, like, or maybe they even like fiberglass powerpoints. Powerpoints. Powerpoints. Powerpoints. Yeah. To be fair, this is only in the prairie of his book, not in his actual book. It's not part of the argument. And he does, all his arguments really are. Yeah. Presumably scientific. Can I ask a question about, like, the visual illusion? Yeah.

[00:43:58] Because it seems like there's a class of visual illusion where it's like that, where you can't get yourself to see the lines as the same or the two colors as the same, even though they look totally different. But then there's another class. And I don't know if this is a counterexample or could even be support for the modularity view. But, like, I came across something where they were talking about, like, this just blotchy thing where all you see are a bunch of ink spots. And then, yeah, the great Pyrenees mountain dog. Oh, yeah. Is it this one? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:44:27] And then you go and you see the dog in, like, a grayscale photo. So it's still just the same colors. But it's just – and then you go back and you can totally see the dog in it. Yeah. So in that case, it does seem like, you know, two different people, one who has seen that picture and one who hasn't would be getting the same raw data but seeing something or having totally different experiences as they saw it. Yeah, no, that's a good question and a good example.

[00:44:53] And I think that what the vision scientists say about those things is, look, it's not as if contextual information or information about the visual scene doesn't influence perception. There are a lot of contextual things that can actually change what you see. Like, there's ambiguous figures where you might see it one way if I've primed you with something. Like, whatever. But there's information that does work its way into your perceptual system.

[00:45:18] And the question is, is this extraneous information to perception or is this part of the visual information that the visual system just uses? And you might think that what's happened there is it's oriented you to see a figure. And that's just now part of the information the visual system has. And so it can organize better the inkblot version of that. So it boils down to what information are we saying can and can't make it, right?

[00:45:46] Because some information obviously does work its way into it. Like, it is what the module is doing, right? It is taking information. Right. And so is that other information truly extraneous to the perceptual processes or not? But how is it not top down if my memory of seeing this grayscale photo of a dog then affects me being able to see? I assume there's an answer to this. But then just, oh, I see a dog there and somebody else is just a bunch of inkblots. Yeah.

[00:46:15] I mean, there are other ways in which, like, experience works its way into what you see. Like, people who are experts at something will seem to see, I don't know, if you're an expert botanist, maybe you notice features of leaves differently than somebody else. Chess players, like, who are experts see different moves and they don't see other, like, bad moves that bad chess players see. Right. All right.

[00:46:41] I'm going to table this until, like, because I have one big question about this. Okay, good. Let me give you some examples from work that's been done more recently. So, like, in this resurgence, this, like, sort of anti-Fodor new embracing of the new look, there's just been a lot of work claiming to show these perceptual effects.

[00:47:00] And that, in fact, is the central paper that I gave to you to read is this behavioral and brain sciences paper from 2016 by Chaz Firestone and Brian Scholl, both good dudes, who really were trying to take down all of this new work. So, one example is if you are asked to estimate the steepness of a hill. Yeah. Researchers have found that wearing a heavy backpack makes you estimate it as steeper.

[00:47:29] So, you're literally given this little device to try to assess the angle of the hill. And if you're wearing a heavy backpack, people seem to report that they see it as steeper. See it as steeper by, like, giving angles? By giving this estimate, yeah. So, what they have is a little sort of like a board on a hinge and you're just, like, put your hand on it and you try to, like, angle it the same as what you think the angle actually is.

[00:47:54] Because people are actually terrible at, and I'm terrible at this, at reporting what an angle of steepness is. It turns out, like, five degrees is, like, super steep. Yeah, any hiker knows that you can be very bad at that. Right. And so, the idea here is that because you have this burden of walking, like, it's going to be hard to walk, it appears you're just like, no, no, that looks even harder. Just the idea of having to walk up that affects your actual perception of the steepness. Right. Yeah. Yeah, that's the argument.

[00:48:22] Another one is, and this comes from work by my former colleague Dave Dunning and Emily Balchettis, who have a bunch of findings trying to show that what you desire changes your perception. And so, a lot of what they do to show this is they use perceptions of distance. And so, in one study, they have people, like, here's the straightforward version of this. I put a $20 bill some distance away from you, or a $100 bill because inflation, or a $1 bill.

[00:48:51] And I ask you, how far away do you think the money is? And I tell you, you might have a chance to win the money that's on the table. People seem to estimate the $100 bill as closer to them than the $1 bill because they want it. So, like, if I, so I'd say, like, oh, that's 15 inches away if it's the $1 bill, but it's, like, 12 inches away if it's the $100 bill. Now, that's just reporting, and there's that kind of self-report. No one's going to really buy his perception.

[00:49:19] And so, they do these other ones where they say, okay, here's a gift card. We're going to put it on the floor. The gift card has, like, 50 bucks on it, and you can win it in one condition. Another condition, it's an empty gift card. There's no money on it. And they have you stand at some distance away from it and toss a bean bag to get as close to the gift card as you can. Right? It's like cornhole, but for gift cards.

[00:49:42] This is, like, psychologists are just, like, they just like to watch, like, poor people scramble for, like, $20 bills and gift cards like Squid Game. Like, that's what's clear from this research. But anyway, yeah, keep going. And so, it turns out that people undershoot more if it's a valuable gift card. Because on the story, they think it's closer to them. And so on and so on. Like, a lot of these effects. Like, hundreds.

[00:50:10] What's so even as someone initially prone to believe the general idea of top-down effects, the experiments just seem to presume that we're such fucking simpletons. It's like, oh, big money. Me want. Closer. Oh, heavy. Steeper. Like, we're just like, it's just kind of unbelievable the way in which they try to show this.

[00:50:35] Like, I have sympathy with Scholl and Firestone in just thinking this is not great evidence for that view. Right. This is why I thought you might like this paper, even though I know that you'd be motivated to believe the other thing. But this paper is, I like it a lot because they are making general methodological critiques to all this work.

[00:51:00] So they're like, look, there's hundreds of papers, hundreds of studies that have been done in the last, whatever, 20 years, trying to show this. And we're going to argue that, like, all of them are wrong. But we're going to do that by showing that with a few basic critiques to the methodology, all of these effects go away. And so a lot of it is just saying, like, look, this is just, like, flawed by demand effects, for instance. Like, what does the experimenter really want me to say here? Right.

[00:51:27] Or some of them are, as they argue, are just actually conflating judgment. Right. It's a judgment when I say how far something is. And just because I'm throwing it doesn't mean it's not a judgment. It's not that we're seeing it. And so, you know, one of the things I think they say is, like, seriously, put a hundred dollar bill and a one dollar bill in front of you right now. Like, does it like at equal distance? Are you telling me that you're actually going to see? Like, if these were real effects, it shouldn't be that difficult to demonstrate.

[00:51:56] You shouldn't need, like, the fancy beanbag toss. It should be like visual illusions, where if it's really affecting your perception, your perception should be like, yeah, no. Like, those really do look farther. This looks farther than this. Right. Yeah. So, like, as one of the commentators says, it's one thing to show that these studies, like some social psychology studies, don't actually demonstrate what they purport to demonstrate.

[00:52:19] But they seem to draw the conclusion that cognition, this is the title of their BBS paper, cognition does not affect perception. And so by like and that's the leap that doesn't seem justified. And maybe they don't even intend for it to be justified. Although one of the responders seemed to think that that's what their agenda was.

[00:52:46] But it's true that I was unconvinced based on their description of some of these studies that they showed what they, you know, any kind of top-down perception. But number two, like you said, they give all these, like, really useful pitfalls that just make this debate a lot more complex in terms of like, okay, that's not perception. That's attention. You know, like that's how you attend to things or that's a judgment based on a perception.

[00:53:16] But then that then leads me to a question about how much of this is really a debate about words rather than a debate about how the mind is organized. Right. But we can talk about that when you're done with this. Yeah. I mean, I think I'm pretty much done aside from like giving some other crazy examples. Yeah. So what are some others? That when you've like read something immoral, rooms look darker.

[00:53:44] It's like it was wrapped up in this sort of embodied cognition. Yeah. Like some of the good Damasio stuff. The most interesting one to me, because it seemed like one of the better demonstrations and they admit that it was a good demonstration, comes from a Levine and Banaji study where they showed people that faces of black faces and white faces.

[00:54:09] And they made sure that the luminance of the two faces was the same. So they basically corrected to make sure that both of them had equal brightness across the image, equal levels of white. But one was black. But one face was the face of a black person. They had black black person features and all that. So when you look at the black face, it looks darker. It actually looks darker than the white face does.

[00:54:37] And so what they argue is that the categorization, the judgment that you've made that this is the face of a black person is infusing your perception. That it's actually making you see that image is darker, even though, look, we clearly like we have done the right corrections on software to make sure that the average luminance is the same. And so this meets one of the criteria that Firestone and Scholl are saying, like it should we should be able to see it.

[00:55:04] Like if these things are really affecting perception, it shouldn't be hard to demonstrate it. Right. And this is the thing about vision science. A lot of these studies like that Brian Scholl does on perceptions of causality, where he animates, for instance, two balls on the screen. So one ball is going across the screen and it looks to make contact with the other ball and the other ball takes off. Yeah. Like we can't help but think that ball A hit ball B and caused ball B to launch. Like it just looks causal. Yeah.

[00:55:34] If he changes it slightly so that ball B takes off right before it gets hit by ball A, it looks animate. It looks like that ball decided to leave. Right. Right. It's like being chased. And so all you have to do, and I remember talking about this, I was like, why do you for a lot of these studies, like with visual illusions, it's so obvious that the effect is there. Why do you need to run subjects? Right. Like all you have to do is show it to a reviewer and it'd be like, oh, yeah, you're right. Right. Yes. Great question. And you don't get that in all of these other things.

[00:56:03] All of these other purported instances of cognition, higher order cognition affecting perception doesn't work. But this one does work. This one really does look, the black faces really do look darker. And so they themselves ran some studies to try to disentangle what was happening. And what they showed is that even though it's the average luminance of the image is the same across, the shadows that are falling on the black face, like in the particular way that they're falling, actually do make it look darker. What do you mean the shadows?

[00:56:32] So they're taking the average luminance of the two figures, but there's still variability in how much light is on any given spot. Oh, I see. So under your cheeks, right? Like you look at me right now, I'm lit in a particular way. Sorry, listeners can't see it. But Tamar's looking at me and you'll see that there's going to be more shadows under my eye because the light, the way the light's bouncing. The black images have a different pattern of this distribution of light.

[00:56:56] And so what they said is, OK, if it really is the judgment that this is a black face that's causing it to look darker, then let's blur it so that you can't even tell what race the people are. Blur the white and black faces so that you can't tell whether it's a black or white person and then see whether it looks darker. And what they found was it just so happens that the pattern of lighting on a face with black features is different.

[00:57:23] And so it just looks darker and you don't need race information for it to look darker. It's just like a low level feature that is actually different in the two images. And so there's a case where they say, OK, this is just the compound. This this is it was actually low level features like the distribution of light, not the high level feature, what race the person is. Right. So that's one that was harder to explain away, but you could explain away in the end or at least according to this view.

[00:57:52] What about the experiments where they show that people who don't live in modern societies, they're more like hunter gatherers or they don't live somewhere where, you know, there's a lot of sharp angles and corners that they are not as susceptible to the Mueller liar illusion. Yeah, I think that's the right question.

[00:58:17] And I was thinking about this and this is why I don't think the Mueller liar illusion is the best example because of those studies. I've never read the original papers that show that. But I believe that that might be a case where experience really is changing the way that your visual system is organizing the information. And I don't know that in principle, Firestone and Shoal would say that that can't happen. The question really might be what is going on with that experience?

[00:58:43] Like what is working its way into the way that the visual system is whatever parsing that information? And I don't know what the right answer is and I don't know what they would say. I kind of wanted to ask Chaz what he thinks about those studies because it may be that those studies actually are bad or they don't show it in that case, then who knows? Yeah. But if it does show it, then I'm not sure because experience has to influence the way that we see things, right? Like if you're raised in darkness, like those old cruel experiments on cats that are raised in a room with only like black and white stripes or something. Yeah.

[00:59:13] Like they're kind of fucked. You need like experience does shape how you see the world in some important way. Whether they would call that just like part of what's going on in the perceptual system or if it's like presumably those people in societies that weren't raised around a lot of sharp angles like modern societies, they can't shake the way they see it either. Right. So it's not something about their knowledge per se. Not at all. But they're right also.

[00:59:40] Like why would they be able to like see something that's wrong when they're right? Yeah, totally. So I think that the question would be, is this higher order stuff that's working its way in or is this just a feature of how the visual system learns? Because I think nobody would disagree that the visual system has to learn. You know, there's one thing that Fodor, I think, did better than Firestone and Shal in this paper, which is Fodor was very like, look, I think that there's just some feature of the visual system that is encapsulated.

[01:00:10] And it doesn't have to be all of it. He's just I think some of it is protected. His view on modularity was actually quite, he was like, who knows? I think that there's just some aspects of it that are protected that give us and we can show this with all of these visual illusions. Yeah. But where the cutoff is, who knows? So a lot of people, and I think you brought this up in our document, a lot of the responses that came from brain people were like, no, no, the brain isn't. When you look at the brain, it's not consistent with the way that the module people think.

[01:00:39] And so they say like, so the visual system is broken up into stages of visual processing where V1 is the earliest, earliest, probably like the most basic processing that's going on. And then you have V2, V3 and they say, no, look, there's lots of connections between these later stage visual processing and V1. You can see the connection. And I have mixed feelings about this because I think it's messing up levels of analysis to try to argue that way. Yeah.

[01:01:08] You know, it's like what the mind is doing. You can't just look at like not even Fodor would think that you could see the module. Right. Right. It's just a feature of just what it's doing, like how it's computing. I mean, I agree. Like just because you're showing certain like neurons interacting in certain ways, it's not obviously telling you something about like the functional level that the psychologists are talking about.

[01:01:35] But then you start to wonder, like, what are we actually talking about here? Yeah. And that's connected to my other question of to what it. So sometimes they will respond to a certain study or a certain set of considerations by saying, oh, you're confusing perception and judgment or perception and attention.

[01:01:56] And it's like, well, at that point, like given that these reported experiences are different and that we have no way to peer into the phenomenology of of people. Like, are we just arguing over the different ways of describing what we all agree that we see? Or are we is this really something that is and I actually like I want to be convinced by you that it's not terminological.

[01:02:24] I don't want this to be like the panzykism thing where we were like, wait, really that that's what this is? Because I think this is it's super interesting, this idea, this interplay of of your experience and your, you know, desires and beliefs and past experience and how that all interacts is super interesting. But then, you know, when they start talking about the, oh, no, you're just attending to a different part. And that's why you see it differently.

[01:02:49] It's like, well, then, like, what's the difference between I see it differently and, oh, I'm attending to it differently, but I see it the same when the experience I'm having is different than the experience someone else is having? Right. I mean, that's the million dollar question. So I do have a view. And let me pitch it to you by talking about some other studies that I didn't bring up earlier.

[01:03:11] So for a while, there was like a lot of people were interested in the idea of linguistic relativism, as you wrote, the Saper-Whorf hypothesis. The idea that your language can in some way constrain your thinking, in some non-trivial way, constrain your thinking, even maybe your perception. And as a way to test this hypothesis, people were looking at color words because this is a really interesting linguistic difference. Like, obviously, there is a spectrum of color, but it's continuous.

[01:03:40] Like, what we see in the visible energy spectrum, the wavelength that goes from red to violet, right? That is arbitrarily described by our language terms. So we say, like, roo-gy-bib, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. Those are categories. But, you know, you can imagine that somebody might have more or fewer words. In fact, there are a lot of people I know who use words like fuchsia and mauve. And I don't know what the fuck they're talking about.

[01:04:08] But, like, presumably they're indicating some other shade. And they're gay. And they're definitely gay. Yeah. If they're guys. Right. So some languages carve up that spectrum differently. And so some languages have only one word for what we call green and blue. So some word like grew that's describing green and blue. So if you're from one of those languages, you were raised, you've never actually had this distinction, linguistic distinction between green and blue. You would say if somebody said, what color is the grass?

[01:04:38] You would say grew. And if they said, what color is the sky? You would say grew. Like, those are both in the same category for you. Now, are they seeing the same color when they see green and blue? That's what they went out to study. And so there's a lot of different methods that you could use. And the one that I remember is, I'm going to give you some paint swatches like you get at, like, Home Depot. You're trying to decide what to paint your bedroom or whatever. And so you get a bunch of these little cards with colors on it.

[01:05:04] If I just say, organize these into piles where the same colors are in one pile. So for you and me, red, green, and blue would be three different piles. But for the people with a language of grew, they put blue and green in the same pile. And so some people argued, see, they're not seeing a difference. Yeah. Like, they're actually not seeing. Well, none of these studies turn out to be very satisfying if what you really want to argue is that they're seeing a different color.

[01:05:30] They all relied somehow on judgment and categorization and memory of colors. And so this is where I'm with Firestone and Shoal where I say, but look, there is such a clear, like, I don't think it's just word games because there's such a clear distinction between the claims that we're making here. Like, are you literally having the same phenomenological experience?

[01:05:54] So if someone says, oh, there's hot pink and there's fuchsia, here are the two colors, I can see what they mean. I'm not blinded to that one is darker. If you put them next to each other, yeah. Yeah, right. Like, it's not working its way that deep. And if it were, it would be, like, kind of distressing. Like, if I literally couldn't see it. But sometimes it's like that, right? Yeah.

[01:06:17] So I think what is true is that there are designers or people who work with, like, whatever, you know, websites where they have to know all of the different values of shades. And those people, I think, do in some important way have a different phenomenological experience. They are seeing differences and they're remembering them. They're encoding them. They're categorizing them. They're attending to different features. Like I was going to say with the botanist who's looking at a garden or whatever, they're seeing things in a way that I'm using the term seeing.

[01:06:47] Like, it seems as if attention, memory, categorization, judgment, all of those things are different for them. But if they pick up a leaf and they pick up another leaf and they say, look at the difference between these two leaves. I've never noticed it before. I don't know about these two different plants. If they point it out, pretty sure I could see it. And so it's more than just a folk psychological term that seeing is different than attending and judging.

[01:07:11] I think it really is the case that those are meaningfully different categories of phenomenal experience. But it's hard. It's surprisingly hard to isolate, though, sometimes like what that difference actually is, even though I kind of share your intuition that there ought to be some way to do it. Yeah. And OK, so here, like attention is one of those really low level things that is nonetheless higher level than perception, at least on this view.

[01:07:40] And so let's take the Necker cube, because I think that's a good example of a change in your perception occurring due to attention. So if you don't know, the Necker cube is that illustration of a cube that looks to be in like 3D, like when you're a kid and you learn how to draw like a 3D cube. It's like that. But sometimes it looks like the inside of a room with a corner sort of in the back. And sometimes it looks like the outside, like it's like you're looking at the cube. Yeah, like a like a dice or something.

[01:08:10] Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And it turns out that you can willfully change what you see by attending to different parts of that cube. And so I can and this is just shown from research, like I don't know which parts, but if they direct you to look at this corner, for instance, then it looks like really does look like a dice that you're looking at from from above.

[01:08:33] But if I draw your attention to this corner of the image, then it really looks like the inside of a room that's square or that's cube. And there is a case where the distinctions even matter for the people who are arguing against far central, because it's a meaningful thing to say when I attend to this. All of a sudden it looks different. Right. Because like that that thing that you're saying that looks different. That's the perception that they're talking about.

[01:08:59] Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, there are clear cases where you can clearly see a distinction between attention and perception. It's just some of the grayer cases where you can't actually isolate why, you know, I don't know if this is a good example, but maybe the gray, blue dress, you know, like the gray, gold, blue, whatever dress thing that people just saw it differently.

[01:09:22] Then nobody knew why they saw it differently or had like a really good understanding of and there was nothing you could do to make somebody who thought it was blue see it as gold or whatever. And then it's like, well, you're not seeing different things. You're just attending to different things. I mean, maybe, but like. Now, that's a good example of how from my understanding of the people who ended up studying what was going on here. Your visual system is doing computation and it is making assumptions.

[01:09:50] And so I don't think we have a clear understanding of why some people's visual system was making an assumption in one direction or the other. But it turns out that what's going on is your visual system is assuming that the lighting in a room is either like kind of dark or kind of bright. And it's that information that's making it really appear one way or the other. But like when you saw it for the first time or when I saw it for the first time, why we saw it different in that moment? Like, who knows? Why is your visual system making a different assumption? Yeah.

[01:10:20] So the visual system is making assumptions about context and environment. It's taking information in that is relevant to the perceptual system. It's just, again, I think they would argue that's information that's not extraneous to visual processing. Like you can't, there's nothing you can do or believe or change in your attention that will make you switch. Right. But it is consistent with it just being the module of perception, which has to make these different assumptions to even get going.

[01:10:50] Exactly. Okay. I have two, well, one big question, one more idiosyncratic question. The big question is to put on my like Daniel Dennett hat. Does this whole debate kind of presume a Cartesian theory of the mind, you know, where it's like, okay, I got this perception that's giving me this box and then I've got attention and then I've got judgment.

[01:11:17] And that gives me the homunculus in the watching the screen, like the information for how to act. I mean, like, in other words, might you think, and I think you could also ask this question from a, like, maybe Eastern philosophy perspective, that this is a very kind of Cartesian way of even thinking about perception and judgment and human experience in general. That is a, you know, has its own internal difficulties.

[01:11:47] But also this is where the kind of the neuroscience and the might come in to kind of also shed additional doubt on that. Yeah. Like, what's your feeling about that? I mean, it's super interesting. Okay, so I don't know that that particular concern is special to this view of the mind.

[01:12:08] Because just to the whole debate, I mean, even just the whole, yeah, that's the, it would be a concern that says, like, you could only have this debate if you had this very implausible Cartesian theory of mind. Yeah. You know, if what you're saying, like, whatever the opposite of the Cartesian view of the mind, like, what does it do with, because I think this is at heart a question of how is the mind producing a particular phenomenology?

[01:12:33] So what is going on that the inputs from the world are causing me to experience this, to truly experience the color red or whatever? Like, if that's Cartesian, then I don't know how to get around it. Like, that we do have, like, phenomenological experiences of what we see. I can't, like, I can't shake that. And I would think that even, like, a Buddhist would say, yeah, but that phenomenology is misleading.

[01:12:58] But in saying that, you have to admit that there is a phenomenology, that it can be the proper subject of either introspection or thought or theorizing, right? Yeah, I mean, just set the Buddhism aside. Like, I want to say something about that later and just think about it, you know, like, the kind of Dennett, not Churchlands, because it doesn't have to be, like, a limitivist view of consciousness or anything like that.

[01:13:21] But more just, like, we know the mind doesn't work like there's this little man, like, inside of you, like a little miniature Dave Pizarro in your brain just getting all this information and assembling it to give, or your brain is giving, is assembling all this information to give you this holistic picture. We just know that's not the case. Nothing supports that view, even though it might feel that way sometimes.

[01:13:45] So does the debate kind of assume that something we know is false just because it doesn't have any real scientific backing and it is not even clear how that could possibly work because we don't understand consciousness at all? Like, you know, is this debate dependent on something that we might kind of already know is deeply implausible? I don't think so. Like, I'm struggling to see why it would.

[01:14:10] I think that the people who adopt this view would just say, this is just information processing that's going on. Like, our view is very computational. It just says that information is coming from the external world. It's hitting the senses. And in order for the organism to make sense of how to act on the world, it requires information to be processed. But then represented in a certain way, right? Like, to what, though? Yeah. Yeah.

[01:14:39] Well, again, I think you would have to deny that we have, like, experiences. I guess I don't think that this is saying anything really that metaphysic-y about the mind other than we have mental experiences. And the mental experience that is, at core, the perceptual one, how we see the world, is protected from other mental experiences.

[01:15:04] I don't think that you need to say that it's dualist to say that the organism has mental experiences. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Fair enough. The other question I have that's more idiosyncratic to me, and I just don't even know. I imagine there's a lot of research done, and probably most or all of it bad, on, like, meditators with some of this work.

[01:15:27] And just personally speaking, like, you know, as not advanced as I am on whatever path, the biggest difference for me having, you know, been meditating for 10 years, and especially in this non-dual style, is my perception. I do feel like I perceive, and this is a little Cartesian even just saying it like that, but, like, I do feel like I experience the world perceptually differently than I have, maybe especially with vision, but with all the things.

[01:15:57] And things feel a lot more decentralized, doesn't feel like I'm someone looking out of my eyes or something like that. Mm-hmm.

[01:16:42] Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[01:17:39] Mm-hmm.

[01:18:08] Mm-hmm.

[01:18:34] Yeah, but it still insists, or they might, that there is this part of your visual system that's not actually getting changed, but I think, I don't know whether that's true. Right. You know, like, what do I know? And even if that were true, it wouldn't affect, like, that would be an empirical question that was disconnected from experience in some significant way.

[01:19:26] Right. But there's a ton of lower level things that might be, like, yeah. Yeah. So, like, what's going on in this kind of categorizing of lower level and higher level and, you know, talk about reification. Right, right. Like, our category is, like, I kind of buy what, you know, that there is such a sharp divide in seeing versus the other things. but all of the categories that I'm using for experience,

[01:19:54] like, I don't know, like what is judgment and memory? And, you know, I think we're on some safe ground with attention, but even then, if you get into the attention literature, you start getting confused real quickly as to what is what. Sure. There are clear paradigm cases where you can say, oh, that's different. But then as soon as you get into the more boundary cases, it becomes really hard. And it makes you think, at least made me think, wait, maybe the way we're conceptualizing this is what's getting us into these difficulties.

[01:20:24] Yeah. And so here's like my beef to kind of repeat what I just said, but hopefully in a better way. These arguments about modularity or encapsulation of the visual system really do have importance because they're supposed to tie into these broader views of the mind. And the broader view of the mind that people who believe this also is a broader view of the mind that believes in a fixed human nature,

[01:20:54] in the... The modularity view. It's like an evo-sac. Yeah. The modularity people tend to be nativists. They tend to have a particular view about genetics. Like there's all kinds of beliefs that go along with that. Not that are entailed by this view at all, but that just sort of go along with it. On the other side, the people who tend to believe that top-down effects do work, they're more likely to be some sort of associationist, some sort of like, they believe in statistical learning,

[01:21:23] they're more empiricists than they are nativists, they're more behaviorists. Crazy relativists. Crazy relativists. Like fiberglass PowerPoint. Yeah. Then I think that we need to protect against using this as some sort of way of arguing that there is a fixed human nature more broadly. Because to get back to the linguistic relativism and the cultures that have different words for colors, if having different words for colors

[01:21:50] means that I tend to remember, categorize, and judge things very differently, then that really matters. Like, that's a huge thing. And I think it gives short shrift to all of those things mattering to focus so much on this one aspect. In other words, I think we need to be careful to not think that this view of perception ties necessarily to all of these other things

[01:22:19] and ignore the fact that experience and culture and whatever might really, really matter so deeply that it's true that encountering people from other cultures, that you might encounter a radically different way of experiencing the world. Yeah, right. So it's a very local question and a very kind of, in some sense, smaller question than, and that's a perfect way of putting it. Like, okay, so all these other things, your experiences, your desires, your culture can affect your judgment, your attendance,

[01:22:48] your self-reports of what you think of it. You're like all of that. If that makes a difference, that's huge. That's arguably, like, way more important than the fact that there might be this one little thing, this kind of, you know, that is just one part of your experience, tiny part, in some sense, of your experience that is immune from those things and unpenetrated. Yeah. Exactly. And Fodor, I think, himself, later on, saw that people were taking this modularity view

[01:23:18] and applying it so widely to the way the mind works that what he called massive modularity, the massive modularity hypothesis. You know, Steve Binker wrote a book called How the Mind Works that you could argue is an example of this. And this bugged Fodor so much that he wrote a book called The Mind Doesn't Work That Way. Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah. And they're both such modularity of mind people, so it's funny. Yeah. No, that's a really good point. You have this, like I said, like I guess, a local thesis

[01:23:46] about a very specific aspect of perception and then you go from that to like women wear sluttier clothes when they're ovulating or something like that. Like those two things are not connected. I want to be very clear that Chaz Firestone is not that kind of guy at all. These are real vision nerds, you know, they're, but yeah, like it should, we should guard against that because it's ridiculous. Yeah, not even for its political

[01:24:14] like incorrectness just because it's ridiculous. But I think this is like the Sillen's paper that you put in the Slack. You know, when he starts talking about the epistemic implications of these views, he makes the good point that even if the Firestones and Shoals are right, there's still huge epistemic problems based exactly on what you said that all these other things are changing even if raw perception under their kind of framework isn't. and also that

[01:24:44] if there is cognitive penetration, it's not always a bad thing epistemically in terms of what you know. Right. There's so much where we need that top-down information to work to make like the right judgments. The other thing I was going to say is that I don't know how good a job they do in this paper. Maybe you could answer for me, but this really is an argument about vision. And so to refer to it as are there top-down effects

[01:25:13] on perception broadly is I think a bit misleading as well because I think you really would need other arguments and other data to try to show that this is true or not true. There is, I think, a response from somebody who argues that, yeah, like everything they say is true for auditory perception as well. Like so they're on the modularity boat for auditory perception. But taste is an interesting one where I actually don't know about, but there's plenty of research at least purporting to show

[01:25:40] that knowledge influences taste. That's got to be true. It feels like. Yeah, right? Where even like the stuff where you just like put a different label on a bottle of wine. Yeah. Or just discriminating between like which bourbon, is this a different bourbon than the last one based on your... Yes. Yeah. And so is that just attention or you're able to pay attention to the like after whatever? I don't know. But just because you make a case for vision doesn't mean that you've made a case for perception writ large. Yeah.

[01:26:11] Maybe we could wrap up, but there was one example in the Cillin's paper, which I think he just made up, but that just seems so like this must happen all the time. This is on page 15 at the top. Suppose that Jill antecedently has an unjustified belief that Jack is angry at her, where as a result of top-down effect from her belief, Jack actually does look angry at her when she next sees him. In response to her experience,

[01:26:39] Jill reaffirms her belief. So he's using this in a different way to try to figure out to what extent these might affect like epistemically how justified your beliefs are. I just thought that example was so perfect because I think that's got to happen all the time. If I think Jen is mad at me and she walks in the room with like an otherwise probably normal expression, I will literally say like, what? Why are you still mad? Or something like that. And she'll be like, I'm not mad. And I'm like, yes, you are.

[01:27:10] Let's just have it out if you have to. And I just feel like that stuff and how you describe something like that, oh, that's a difference in attention or that's a difference in judgment. That would be, I guess, judgment. But like... Yeah, but does it matter? Like, does it really matter? She looks mad to me. Yeah. You know? Totally. In fact, there are some studies that show... Okay, here is the method. So I give you a little video, like just a really short video of somebody

[01:27:39] who moves from a neutral face to an angry face. And you have a little slider where you're like, you slide it manually and you see the face changing. And the question that they ask is, at what point does the face start to look angry? Yeah. And so, and this is work from Paula Needenthal and her colleagues. What they show is that if I've made you angry already, you see it earlier. Like exactly what Sillans is saying. So like you make the judgment that anger is on the face sooner than somebody

[01:28:09] who's not angry. Now, again, judgment, perception. Right. Really, really, like I am the same as you. Like I swear I see it as angry. And maybe it does actually feed into the, maybe they get angry because we're insisting they're angry. Yeah, well that definitely happens. I knew it. And then I'm just right. That's reaffirmed. I knew you were mad. All right. Well, this was fun. This was super interesting. Good. More psychology back to basics.

[01:28:39] It's too much prep. It is. Let's do philosophy. All right. Join us next time on Very Bad Wizards. Look, man. Good man. Good man.

[01:29:28] Just a very bad.