The Experience of Reading
What kinds of imagistic or sensory experiences do you normally have when reading prose? Here are three possibilities, not exclusive:(a.) Inner speech. You "hear" (or more accurately auditorially imagine) a voice -- maybe your own voice, or the voice of the author, or the voice of a character, or some other voice, saying the words you are reading.(b.) Visual imagery. You experience visual images of the events described or hinted at in the text, or maybe images in other modalities (auditory images besides those of the words you are reading, maybe tactile images, olfactory images, motoric images).(c.) Sensory experience of the text. You visually experience

On Measuring People Twice
Lots of psychological studies involve measuring people twice. For example, in the imagery literature, there's a minor industry that seeks to relate self-reports about imagery to performance on cognitive tasks that seem to involve visual imagery, such visual memory tests or mental rotation tasks.(A typical mental rotation task presents two line drawings of 3-D figures and asks if one is a simple rotation of the other, for example:

Perplexities of Consciousness, submitted draft
I have just submitted my new book manuscript, Perplexities of Consciousness, to MIT Press. The whole thing is now viewable from my homepage.Comments still welcome -- more than welcome! -- either on this post or by email.Now that this manuscript is in, I can focus on catching up with all those other things I should have been doing and didn't!

Winner's Way
... a novel written by my father, Kirk Gable (born Ralph Schwitzgebel), is now available at Amazon. I hear his voice on every page, glimpse some piece of his worldview, which so affected my own.

A Very Simple Argument Against Any General Theory of Consciousness
Suspiciously simple, you might think. Here it goes:(1.) No general theory of consciousness can be justified except on the grounds that it gets it right about certain facts known independently of that theory. Those facts include facts about the presence or absence of conscious experience in a wide variety of actual and possible beings that are unlike us in potentialy relevant respects -- beings like frogs, insects, weird sea life, computers and robots of various types, alien beings of various types, and collective superorganisms of various types.(2.) Independently of a well-justified theory of consciousness, we cannot know, with regard to most such beings, whether c