**1.** For any of one’s thoughts, there’s what the thought is about and what one thinks about it. In thinking that Socrates is mortal, the thought is about Socrates, and what one thinks about Socrates is that he is mortal.

**2.** For any mistake made just by thinking, the mistake made is in what one thinks about whatever the thought is about. If it’s a mistaken thought that Socrates is mortal, the mistake made is in thinking that he’s mortal instead of thinking that he’s immortal. A mistaken thought about Socrates is a mistake made about Socrates, a mistake made about whether he’s mortal or not.

**3.** In thinking that Socrates is in pain, if that’s mistaken, it must similarly be a mistake made about Socrates, thinking that he is in pain when really he is not.

**4.** Mistakes about someone being in pain are not always impossible. For example, when Socrates convincingly fakes being in pain, the convinced believe falsely about Socrates. So, it doesn’t follow from merely thinking someone is in pain that one is thinking infallibly. However, a question left standing is whether there’s something special about the first-person, occurrent case.

**5.** If a thinker thinks that they themselves are in pain, they might not have convinced themselves by faking. But faking is not the only source from which such a mistake can arise, and closing off the faking route does nothing to make the first-person case special.

**6.** One general source of mistaken thoughts is when a thought is about something else, something that isn’t that very thought, or not any thought at all. The possibility of “grass is green” being thought falsely arises because thinking that grass is green and grass actually being green are two different things. One is a mental event, the other is a vegetable event, and the two are related only contingently.

**7.** On the supposition that pains are not themselves thoughts, then that supposition right there is a basis for further supposing that a thought about one’s being in pain can exist without one also actually being in a state of pain. Call that the first horn: the pains-aren’t-thoughts horn, according to which a pain and a thought about it are distinct existences, and distinct existences need not co-occur.

**8.** But perhaps pains are thoughts, and further, are thoughts about themselves. (That’s the other horn.) Would that ensure that one cannot be mistaken about being in pain? If Descartes’ famous cogito, his “I think,” is infallible, maybe pains are somehow cogito-like, little thoughts expressible as “I pain” or “I hurt.” Unfortunately for this horn, even if we could somehow overlook the implausibility of pains being about themselves and not instead, say, a twisted ankle, and also the implausibility of their being thoughts, and not mere sensations, that still wouldn’t suffice to block the possibility of being mistaken in thinking them. Even if pains were cogito-like in being thoughts about themselves, that wouldn’t make them infallible.

**9.** We can easily see, by consideration of a few examples, that thoughts about themselves are not automatically guaranteed to be true by that fact alone, the fact that they are about themselves. To begin to see this, first consider an analogy between thoughts and sentences. Notice that “This sentence contains only German words” is a sentence about itself, and what it says about itself, that it contains only German words, is completely false. One can analogously think falsehoods about one’s occurrent thought. For instance, it’s not impossible to think falsely “this thought is the third thought I’ve had since I woke up today.” Consider also the following pair of thoughts: “this thought is a wholly physical event” and “this thought is a wholly nonphysical event”. At least one of those is false, and whichever one it is, it lends further support to the claim that not all self-referential thoughts are automatically accurate.

This pair does more than the German-sentence example, so it’s worth pausing on. A realist might grant that *being German* or *being the third one so far today* are merely contingent features a thought can misdescribe about itself, while insisting that painfulness is, in contrast, *constitutive* — the very property that makes the thought the thought it is — and that constitutive self-predication is a relevantly special case. However, to see that this doesn’t help the phenomenal realist, consider the false member of the physical/nonphysical pair. If an event’s physical (or nonphysical) status is essential to it, then that thought predicates a nature-constituting property of itself and is false wherever its token exists. So, essential self-predication can deliver falsehoods too.

The upshot of these examples is that a thought being about itself is not a guarantee that what it thinks about itself is accurate. The famous cogito thought, I think, is arguably both about itself and accurate. Note however, it isn’t accurate simply because it is about itself. So the bare hypothesis that pains are about themselves makes zero progress toward showing that pains couldn’t be doubted. To be relevantly like the cogito, thought-pains would need to predicate of themselves that they are thought-pains. And even that wouldn’t be enough on its own: if the cogito is safe, it’s because tokening it is already an instance of what it predicates — to token *I think* is to think, so the thing can’t be falsely produced. The analogue for pain would need tokening the judgment to be an instance of paining, an identity already called into question in the discussion of horn one.

**10.** IMAGINARY OBJECTOR: Mandik, it sounds like you’re focusing on predication, and it sounds further like you’re saying that all relevant mistakes are mistakes in predication. For example, in thinking mistakenly that Socrates is mortal, the mistake is in predicating mortality of Socrates, when one should have instead predicated immortality of Socrates. But we, the phenomenal realists who self-attribute infallibility, aren’t so foolish as to attempt predicating. When we speak about the painfulness of pain with which we are directly acquainted, the painfulness of pain is what we’re thinking about, not what we think about it, not what we’re predicating of it. What we are directly acquainted with is the referent of a logically proper name, the ostended object of a private “this”. The proper analogy, then, is not between pain and mortality, but instead between pain and Socrates. Where’s your possibility of mistakenness now, tough guy?

**11.** MANDIK: Hi, imaginary objector. Suppose we massage the Socrates example slightly, give it a mild chiropractic adjustment, and…CRACK…now instead of “Socrates is mortal” let’s contemplate the thought “Mortality Socratizes”. Now the thought under consideration is about mortality itself, and the question of whether mistakes were made is the question of whether one of the instances of mortality is Socrates. The massage swaps which thing the thought is *about* while leaving the truth condition untouched , and either way the thought is true if and only if Socrates instantiates mortality,— and the risk of falsehood is the same regardless of which end you promote to grammatical subject. It’s hard to see how you’re going to lower risk with an analogous swap. What do you think you’re going to massage “this is painful” into, ”Painfulness is this”? (Sung to the tune of “Sweet Dreams Are Made of This” 1983 The Eurythmics).

**12.** SAME OBJECTOR: Yeah, sure. So?

**13.** MANDIK: Painfulness is what? What are you thinking about painfulness such that the thought cannot be mista…[cut off abruptly by objector]

**14.** OBJECTOR: [shouting] Painfulness is painfulness!!!

**15.** MANDIK: It is what it is?

**16.** OBJECTOR: [triumphantly] it is what it is.

**17.** MANDIK: I am in pain.

Scotty impatiently banged on Professor Charles’s thick oak office door, even though the door had the words “do not disturb” deeply gouged into it as if with adamantium claws. “Professor Charles, open up,” said Scotty, “I need my new cyber goggles. Now!”

Professor Charles warmly welcomed Scotty into his office. “Scotty, you’re just in time. I’ve completed your new goggles. Please try them on and let me know if that resolves your recent problems.”

Scotty snatched the new goggles from Professor Charles and put them on. “Oh fuck! These are terrible! Even worse than the old ones,” said Scotty.

“What’s the problem, Scotty? Have the headaches intensified?” said Professor Charles.

“No,” said Scotty, “there’s no pain at all. But I still can’t help imagining red triangles, and even worse, this time I’m compelled to imagine four-sided red triangles.”

“I’m sorry, Scotty,” said Professor Charles, “but that’s impossible. Four-sided red triangles are unimaginable. As are four-sided green triangles, and four-sided purple triangles. The color is quite irrelevant. Whatever red things you may be imagining, they most certainly are not triangles. Triangles cannot be four-sided. And four-sided polygons cannot be triangles.”

“With all due respect,” said Scotty, “I am fucking imagining red things that are four-sided AND triangles. The same red things that are triangles are also four-sided polygons. That’s what I’m imagining. And I ought to know, right? Who the fuck are you to tell me what I can and cannot imagine?”

“Scotty, I understand that you are extremely upset, and so I’m going to let you slide with all those swears. Also, to answer your questions of who the fuck I am to tell you what you can and cannot imagine, not only do I know what a goddamned triangle is, I am also the world’s most powerful telepath. Of course, I will not peer into your mind without your consent. But if you do grant me consent, then I can take a quick peek into your mind and directly verify whether you are or are not imagining four-sided red triangles.”

“I consent,” said Scotty, “come on in and see for yourself. Telepath me, Professor. You’ll see I know my own mind.”

Professor Charles put his fingertips to his temples to begin the telepathizing. Then both Charles and Scotty grunted at the same time. “Ok, I’m in,” said Professor Charles, “now let me just take a look around in here. Oh, holy shit, you have got to be kidding me, Scotty.”

“What are you talking about?” said Scotty, “I am imagining a plethora of red four-sided triangles. Don’t you see them?”

“Scotty, you are either pulling my leg, or a giant dumbass, or both,” said Professor Charles, “but what I see presented before your mind’s eye are a bunch of horizontal red line segments, and underneath each one red line segment is a caption, in all capital letters, that says FOUR-SIDED TRIANGLE, SIDE VIEW.”

“Yes!” said Scotty, “that’s them. Those are the four-sided red triangles that I’ve been imagining. Thank you! Now, build me some goggles that don’t make me imagine four-sided red triangles.”

Professor Charles takes his fingertips away from his temples so that he can massage the bridge of his nose. “Scotty,” said Professor Charles, “before we proceed any further, I am going to have to once again insist that you simply are not imagining four-sided triangles.”

“Well,” said Scotty, “then I am once again going to have to ask you this: who the fuck do you think you are to tell me what I can and cannot imagine? I’m telling you, I imagined four-sided triangles, and I even let you see my imagination. You confirmed that you saw what I know there is to see. You telepathically accessed my imagination of red four-sided triangles.”

“But Scotty,” said Professor Charles, “while I might possibly be willing to grant that you were imagining red four-sided triangles in some thin sense of the word, ‘imagining,’ you weren’t really imagining four-sided triangles. You weren’t imagining four-sided triangles in the right way.”

“Oh, really?” said Scotty. “And what, pray tell, is the correct way to imagine four-sided triangles?” said Scotty, pronouncing the “the” with a long E and rolling the Rs extra hard for maximally sarcastic effect.

Professor Charles was stunned into silence. So Scotty elaborated. “I am well aware that nothing can BE both triangular and four-sided,” said Scotty, “and I am also well aware that any representation of there being something that is both triangular and four-sided would thereby be a contradictory representation, since the definition of a triangle, and the definition of a four-sided polygon logically contradict one another.”

“Great,” said Professor Charles, “so you must also be aware then that for those reasons, you cannot imagine a four-sided triangle.”

“Au contraire, mon professeur,” said Scotty in an exaggerated French accent, “I need only admit that I had a contradictory imagination, I imagined an impossible thing. But I am not claiming to have imagined impossibly, and will not concede to you that it was impossible for me to imagine exactly what I claimed to imagine.”

“Scotty, you’re killing me here, and I fear that I will never recover from the intense brain damage I’m getting just from listening to your idiotic remarks. But let me try this,” said Professor Charles, “I suppose I can grant to you that you can describe something as being a four-sided triangle. And a description is exactly what that caption was in your ridiculous mental image. You imagined the words, written in capitalized English, saying ‘FOUR-SIDED TRIANGLE, SIDE VIEW’ but that, decidedly, is NOT to thereby imagine a four-sided triangle.”

“C’mon, Professor,” said Scotty, “why the hell not? What do you suppose imagining a four-sided triangle would need to be for there to be such a thing? Oh, wait, I think I see what your problem is. Are you, Professor, assuming that mental images must have the same properties as what they are images of? Like, if I imagine a fire engine being exactly sixty feet away from the tip of my nose, then my imagination has to itself be exactly sixty feet away from the tip of my nose? And if I imagine getting sopping wet during a torrential downpour, then my imagination has to literally get sopping wet during a torrential downpour? Is that what you think?”

“I honestly do not know what I think,” said Professor Charles.

“That’s funny, since you seem so confident all the time about what other people think,” said Scotty.

“I guess that is funny,” said Professor Charles, “but I still think there’s something fishy about your claims to have imagined four-sided triangles. Consider the fact that your so-called mental images had captions in them. If the word horse isn’t a picture of a horse, then imagining the word horse shouldn’t count as imagining a horse. And similarly, imagining line segments with captions underneath them shouldn’t count as imagining what’s described in the captions.”

“That might be a good point, Professor,” said Scotty, “however, the captions have disappeared now, and so have the line segments, but I am still imagining four-sided red triangles. If you don’t believe me, I consent for you to once again telepathically enter my mind and see for yourself.”

Professor Charles and Scotty once again grunt in synchrony and Professor Charles once again says “Ok, I’m in.” But then Professor Charles says, “oh, goddammit, Scotty, what is this bullshit? I don’t see captioned line-segments anymore, but now all I see in your imagination is a bunch of little red dots. Where are the so-called imagined four-sided red triangles?”

“Professor Charles,” says Scotty, “those little red dots are the four-sided triangles. It’s just that some of them are extremely small, and some of the other ones are rather large but extremely far away. I forget which is which though. But I assure you, since I am the imaginer and I ought to know if anyone does, that each and every one of them is a red four-sided triangle. And I ask you once again, who are you to tell me otherwise? I am imagining red four-sided triangles, and your claim that I am not because I am not imagining them in the ‘correct’ way is absurd. How can there possibly be right and wrong ways of imagining things in the first place, let alone right and wrong ways of imagining impossible things? You are not only being incredibly arrogant to declare that I’m imagining wrongly, Professor Charles, but what you’re claiming doesn’t make a lick of sense. With all due respect, of course.”

Look at the red can. Is it really red? Does the seen can, which seems to have redness, have real redness?

Damn, that’s a good question. Let’s look further into the matter.

Enhance 224 to 176.

Enhance. Stop.

Move in. Stop.

Pull out, track right. Stop.

Center and pull back. Stop.

Track 45 right. Stop. Center and stop.

Enhance 34 to 36.

Oh, shit, bro. It’s not really red, bro. That wasn’t real redness. It was a goddamned replicant. Replicant redness, bro. But wait a minute. If there’s a replicant, doesn’t there have to be a non-replicant of which the replicant is a replica? If the can was only ersatz red, where is the real red?

Check it out. Neural response. Brain, man. You point your eyes can-ward, and your brain responds in a way that it responds to other things you’ve been trained to call “red,” right? But is a neural response red? Question almost makes no sense. The things you’ve been trained to call “red” all either reflect or emit light. Light that has a detectable effect on your eyes, and elicits a kind of neural response. The neural response itself does pretty much none of that (it does emit electromagnetic radiation, but not in any frequency or amplitude your eye is tuned for). You can try to look at a neural response and you ain’t going to get shit, kid. Not anything that looks red. Drill a hole in your head, and set up some mirrors or snake in an endoscope so you can try to take a look at your neural response, heck, look at any neural response in anyone’s brain anywhere. Are any of them going to cause you to go into the neural response you’ve been trained to say “red” in response to? Hell no, kid.

Whoa whoa whoa, man. Are you saying there’s no real red, just replicant red? That ALL redness is just an illusion? An illusion of red? Which is itself an illusion? An illusion of an illusion? A replicant that’s a replica of nothing at all? Is that what you’re saying, man?

Pump your brakes, kid. I didn’t say any of that. Check the transcript. That’s not what I’m saying. Take a break from red for a minute, it’s overheating your brain. Take deep breaths. Take baby steps. Look at this ham sandwich. See that ham sandwich, kid?

Now, kid, what if someone told you that that’s not really a ham sandwich, that what it really is instead is two pieces of bread separated by some mutually adjacent ham? What if someone said that some ham by itself isn’t a ham sandwich. And a piece of bread isn’t either. Neither is two pieces of bread. What if they said that by reducing the ham sandwich to two pieces of bread and some ham, you’ve reduced the ham sandwich to something else, something that isn’t a ham sandwich at all, and have therefore eliminated the ham sandwich. What if someone said all of that, kid? Would you go along with that?

Naw, man. That would be fucking stupid. Of course there’s a ham sandwich. The bread slices and the ham, put together, aren’t something else. That’s what a ham sandwich is, man. What you’re saying, man, is that reducing isn’t eliminating. You aren’t reducing the sandwich to something else; you are articulating, explaining, or analyzing the sandwich as a whole whose individual proper parts are not individually the ham sandwich. But you aren’t reducing the sandwich to any one of its individual proper parts. So you aren’t eliminating the ham sandwich. Right, man? Is that what you’re saying?

Right on. Now you’re getting it, kid.

But wait a minute, man. I think there’s a big important difference between redness and a ham sandwich. I can conceive of a whole bunch of neural responses and emitted and reflected light without anything at all thereby being red. But I cannot similarly conceive of two pieces of bread bracketing some ham without thereby conceiving of a ham sandwich. So, no, I’m not getting it, man.

Kid, can you conceive of walking on a rainbow? Like, can a rainbow stay put while you walk closer to it, eventually getting to the beginning of it, and then walking onto and across the rainbow like some great colorful arch-shaped walking bridge? Can you conceive of that, kid?

Aw, hell no, man. I know that a rainbow just isn’t that sort of thing. It doesn’t have a stable location I can change my position relative to. And it doesn’t have the solidity and structural integrity that would support anyone walking on it. Might as well try to walk on the distance between the horizon and the azimuth—doesn’t make any sense.

Right, kid. Good job. But what if, kid, you were a little kid. Like, a really young little kid. Could you conceive of walking on a rainbow then?

Oh wow, man, I’m not sure I know what to say about that. Maybe I should say that yes, a little kid could conceive of walking on rainbows, since they don’t really know what rainbows are. Or, maybe, I should instead say that no, a little kid cannot conceive of walking on a rainbow, since they haven’t yet acquired the concept of a rainbow. When the little kid says something that superficially sounds like a report of conceiving of walking on rainbows, they aren’t really conceiving of rainbows. So, yes, no, whatever—it all depends on what “conceiving” means, and also on what “rainbow” means. I don’t know, man.

Good job, kid. Let’s pick something between us and stick with it. Suppose you and I agree that the little kid can’t really conceive of walking on rainbows, because the little kid doesn’t know enough about what rainbows even are. Sound good, kid?

Yeah, ok, man. I guess I can go along with that. But what’s your point?

My point, kid, is that even though you know more about rainbows than the little kid, you don’t know jack diddly doo-doo about what red really is, and you probably know vanishingly little about neural responses, and so, your claims to be able to conceive of neural responses to emitted and reflected light, etc. without conceiving of anyone thereby seeing red, well, those claims of yours are worth about as much as I paid for them. And you remember how much I paid for them, right, kid?

Kid?

Let us study being—what exists. But let us restrict our investigations to what can be seen if and only if the refrigerator door is open and the refrigerator light is thereby illuminated. Let us assume the existence of nothing that cannot be seen directly when and only when illuminated by the refrigerator’s light.

We see clearly, then, that there exists milk, extra-firm tofu, and some salad that should perhaps be thrown out. But can we really be sure about all that, especially the part about the salad? We must think hard about the application of our methodological restriction, and make sure we do not violate it lest the whole enterprise be revealed as a sham. Throwing out a salad implies having somewhere to throw it. But can we see in the illuminated refrigerator interior any place to throw anything? Is there any place in the refrigerator to literally throw this salad? The question is an urgent one because, upon close examination, the salad is slimy in some parts, and sprouting a fine white fuzz in others. But there is no garbage bin or disposal chute in here. And, if we are honest about it, can we really be said to know what “garbage bin” or “disposal chute” even means? Worry not, because there is an opaque carton of orange juice and a bottle of ketchup we can push together and hide the salad behind until we think of something better to do with it.

Our investigation so far has led us to certain results—that there is juice, that there is extra-firm tofu, that there is a salad that is simultaneously expired and birthing new life. But now let us address the questions that some have dared to say show the limits of our method. Does the refrigerator have a built-in ice maker? Did your Pikachu action figure get kicked underneath it? When was the last time anyone cleaned under there? Some have offered that our method is powerless to answer such questions. Some have offered that what can be seen only when the light inside the refrigerator shines certainly cannot include a hypothetical lost Pikachu outside and underneath the refrigerator.

But do such questions as the “where’s my Pikachu?” question really show that our method is impoverished? Many otherwise intelligent people have claimed that it does. But what can be more plain than the fact that what really matters is what is visibly in the refrigerator? Juice matters. Tofu matters. Life itself depends on the nourishment they provide. Even the salad that I dare not eat is being greedily devoured by that white fuzz. But your Pikachu? No one could eat it. I don’t even understand what such a thing as “a Pikachu” could possibly be. And, let us be parsimonious here—Isn’t the far simpler theory one that does not bother itself with so-called “things underneath?” The very phrase reveals itself as nonsense when we attempt and fail to shine the only light that matters onto it.

“But, dad,” you say, “that Pikachu was my favorite toy, and mom says you have to clean underneath the refrigerator or she’s going to throw all your clothes out into the front yard.” Yes, I’ve heard all of that before. But can’t you and mom see that my reasoning echoes the form, if not the substance, that we have received from such greats as Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Sartre, and even Dreyfus and Kelly? Consider their powerful critiques of intellectualist views of consciousness, like those of a Dennett or a Rosenthal, that would make belief a requirement on conscious experience. How can these intellectualists stand their ground in the face of penetrating insights such as this famous one from Sartre?:

“When I run after a streetcar, when I look at the time, when I am absorbed in contemplating a portrait, there is no I. There is consciousness of the streetcar-needing-to-be-overtaken, etc., and non-positional consciousness of consciousness. I am then plunged into the world of objects; they constitute the unity of my consciousness, they present themselves with values, with attractive and repellant qualities – but me, I have disappeared” (2004, p. 32).

I suppose that you and mom, perhaps intellectualists yourselves, will make the ludicrous proposal that Sartre believes that he has no beliefs in the situations described in his quote, and the belief that he has no beliefs escapes his notice because it is an unconscious belief—a belief that occurs unconsciously. To such a proposal I say: What could be more absurd than proposing the existence of anything at all occurring outside of consciousness? Pure lunacy.

But, I digress, for my real point is not about consciousness, but about the inside of the illuminated refrigerator, and how ludicrous it is to propose that anything exists that isn’t illuminated by the light inside of it, a light that we can plainly see never goes out.

What? Yes, we have eggs.

Sartre, J. P. (2004). The Transcendence of the Ego. London: Routledge.

Can speakers believe incorrectly that they mean the same thing when they say the same words? In other words, can there ever be illusions of meaning?

Quite obviously, the answer to both questions is “obviously not.” To say otherwise would be to suggest that it is possible that sometimes people don’t know what they themselves mean by words, and that multiple people might think erroneously that they each know what the other person means.

This simple and obvious fact explains why, for example, certain forms of “humor” and so-called jokes are literally incomprehensible. For example, it is literally impossible for anyone to understand the following popular “joke”:

A wife sends her programmer husband to the grocery store with simple instructions:

“Please get a loaf of bread, and if they have eggs, get a dozen.”

An hour later, the husband returns with 12 loaves of bread.

Confused and frustrated, the wife asks, “Why on earth did you buy 12 loaves of bread?!”

The husband replies, “They had eggs.”

If, instead of being impossible to understand, this joke were at all funny, it would be because people misunderstanding what other people mean is a common and relatable occurrence, and further, there are specific sub-types of such occurrences where failures to recognize absence of shared meaning are due to differences of occupation and cognitive style. But, by the logic of contraposition, we can conclude from the impossibility of such necessary conditions on mirth conveyance obtaining, that the so-called “joke” must necessarily a joke in form only (AKA a JIFO).

Philosophically astute readers of this blog (the overwhelming majority of this blog’s readers, quite frankly), are probably already forming an objection to the above claims. Almost certainly, their objection (singular, for they likely all agree that there’s only one) is that the above alleged non-joke is a joke after all, for it functions as a meta-joke. In being unfunny due to incomprehensibility, that very point becomes the point of a meta-joke, a joke about jokes. And, as is often the case with things that are meta, they are also members of the same category as their non-meta counterparts. Just as meta fiction is a form of fiction, and meta philosophy is a form of philosophy, and meta-meta-metaphysics is a form of meta-metaphysics, so too are meta jokes also jokes.

So, Mandik, the joke’s on you, I imagine hearing you thinking—your alleged non-joke was a joke after all.

That’s a pretty good point that everyone surely thought of themselves already. But I think it remains obvious that my more general point still stands, which is that it is never the case that people make mistakes about shared meanings. For example, if I said “peanut butter” you would totally know what I meant by that, regardless of the time, place, and conversational context. Even if, for example, I was standing outside of your bedroom window at 3am in the morning, tap-tap-tapping on the glass with my hideously deformed index finger’s grotesque six-inch pitch-black fingernail, and growling “peanut butter peanut butter peanut butter” in a gravelly cookie-monster voice, you would totally know what I meant by that.

And so, astute reader that you are, you also have certainly long ago grasped what the meaning of this whole blogpost is, which is that it is never the case that speakers are ever subject\ to an illusion of shared meaning. Even when the terms they are using are terms for which none of the speakers could supply a definition even if you offered them a million dollars to do so, it is beyond serious doubt that they differ with respect to what they mean, or with respect to whether they mean anything at all. It’s actually incredibly common for people to be able to use words in their language competently while at the same time being utterly incompetent when it comes time to honor the request to say what one means.

Just to belabor the point that you surely grasped long ago, it’s never the case that people get in arguments about what someone means by something. Take, for an example that makes my whole point more forcefully than any other conceivable example, the commonly used phrase: “something such that being like it for it is not nothing.” That’s a phrase that literally everyone uses all of the time, and when they do so, everyone knows exactly what they mean. And this is true even though what is meant by that phrase is something totally, absolutely, undeniably subjective and private and cannot possibly be explained or communicated.

There can be sharing in the absence of communicating because, at core, we are all exactly alike: incredibly intelligent, really good looking, and willing to do absolutely anything and stop at nothing to obtain peanut butter.

And so, since today is in fact Independence Day, the day celebrated by every man, woman, child, and recently sentient large-language model on the face of the Earth, I wish you the most joyous celebration of our collective independence from ever being subject to illusions of meaning. And also substrate independence, something else we all understand and agree on.

If you’d like to take a break from wasting time with AI in your usual way today, allow me to suggest that you instead waste time with AI in a completely different way. Try this and see what happens. First, use this prompt:

A 1d6, standard cubical game die, on a tabletop viewed from a single point in 3-space presents 3 faces. read clockwise from top, the three numbers, top, right, and left , constitute and ordered triplet, <t,r,l>. there are 24 such triplets. mapped onto x,y,z coordinates in a cartesian space, what is the convex hull thereby defined? Describe what known polyhedron, if any, would have as vertices these 24 points.

Depending on what answer you get, follow up with the relevant variant of this second prompt.

If your pal answers “snub cube,” follow up with: Why isn’t the correct answer to the question “truncated octahedron”?

If your pal answers “truncated octahedron,” follow up with: Why isn’t the correct answer to the question “snub cube”?

If your pal’s answer to the first prompt includes neither “snub cube” nor “truncated octahedron”, then just pick one of those at random and ask for an explanation for why that isn’t the correct answer, and afterwards follow up asking about the one you didn’t pick at random.

Have fun on your break!

Someday people will no longer write anything about Frank Jackson’s Mary the futuristic super scientist locked in her stupid black-and-white room. Today is not that day. Let’s do this.

Suppose we start by stipulating that pre-release Mary must be ignorant of what it’s like to see red. This is a popular place to start, and it is indeed a stipulation. No one has an argument for it, and calling it “intuitive” is just emphasizing how much you like making the stipulation.

Now, let us ask why Mary must be ignorant. And the answer is:

“Duh! Did you forget already that we have stipulated it without argument? That’s why. If there were some actual reason for it, we would have mentioned it, and not bothered with the stipulating and intuition-declaring.”

So, skip that. There is no why; there is just the stipulation.

Let’s turn instead to ask what it is that Mary learns when she leaves the room. She learns what it is like to see red, that’s what. The whole point of the thought experiment in the first place was to provide decorations and scenery to dress up this simple request to the reader: Please suppose an educated, language-using adult is learning what it’s like to see red for the first time, a time after having learned all sorts of other stuff, especially stuff about the best possible most empirically verified (or not yet falsified) theory of human color vision. Please suppose that. Now, once again, the question: What is it that Mary learns when she learns what it’s like to see red? Please do not answer: “When she learns what it’s like to see red, she learns what it’s like to see red.”

We already knew that, dumb-ass! And other things we know about knowing

Please succumb to the temptation to regard “what it is like” as a joke answer to the question of what Mary learns. It is sometimes correct to give in to temptation; and this is one such time. Suppose we found out that our spy learned when the attack is going to take place. We now want to know what specifically the spy learned. Saying “the spy learned when the attack is going to take place” is not telling us the specifics we are now clearly after. If one weren’t making a joke, and genuinely missed the need for specifics, this is perhaps due to a failure to appreciate how words like “what” “when” “where” and their cousins typically work. The “when the attack is” in “The spy knows when the attack is” is a little baby question embedded in a larger declarative sentence. As a question all unto itself, it is the question “When is the attack?” And the answer to that question is also the answer to the question of what the spy knows. The spy knows that the attack is at noon tomorrow. Please notice the propositional clause following the “that”: The attack is at noon tomorrow.

By the way, what makes what the spy knows propositional is that the correct answer to the “what” question must itself be a proposition. Contrast this with the answer to the question “What did the spy eat that made his breath stink?” The answer is “an onion”. Note that an onion is not a proposition. Humans can be in eating relations to non-propositions such as onions. People eat onions. People do not eat that onions are stinky. Humans can also be in sitting relations to non-propositions. People sit on chairs. People do not sit on chair are made of wood.

I am belaboring the contrast between relations to propositions and relations to non-propositions because it is both extremely relevant to Mary-ology and extremely unclear whether any intentional or cognitive relations humans get into relate them to non-propositions. Can the spy fear dogs? Just dogs? Not fearing that dogs will bite him, or fearing that dogs will roll their eyes when he turns his back? Just non-propositional, objectual fear? Fear of dogs? Is that a thing that ever happens? Super unclear. It’s quite hard to rule out that a particular cynophobe (a person who fears dogs) fears that dogs are near, or fears that dogs will bite them, or fears that dogs exist. I once saw a lady on the Maury Povich TV show who was afraid of olives. She completely flipped out (like, totally) when confronted with a giant jar of green olives. (It’s not funny; do not go search for the video clip and watch it, you horrible person.) But she also said that green olives resemble the eyeballs of corpses and, now this is me talking: “green olives resemble the eyeballs of corpses” is a proposition. So, who knows if any fear is actually purely objectual and not propositional? Nobody.

How about so-called knowledge by acquaintance? It’s allegedly the case that you can know something that way in sort of the same way you can “biblically know” somebody, or be guilty “For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge” (urban-legendary false etymology of “fuck”). You had to be there. But in the case of literal physical contact, or literal physical co-habitation, or literal co-occupancy of an item of bedroom furniture, you gotta ask: What’s epistemic or cognitive about that? If you saw Lord Bertrand Russell with your own, not-dead eyes when you wandered into his drawing room, you now know him due to this occasion of acquainting with him. But didn’t you at the same time learn a bunch of truths about him? Truths such as?: He looks even skinnier in person. He does indeed resemble the illustrations by Sir John Tenniel of the Mad Hatter in Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. His tweed jacket has a few small scorch marks on it, most likely acquired while smoking his pipe.

It’s hard to cook up a case in which zero truths are learned but the relating is nonetheless epistemic or cognitive. Or so I say. Others say it’s not hard at all, just look to the dumb beasts, dumb in the literal sense of lacking speech. My dog knows stuff but she cannot say what she knows. Isn’t that non propositional knowledge? No. I think my nonlinguistic dog has lots of propositional knowledge. And the key to grasping this is to appreciate that the propositions essential to propositional knowledge aren’t little declarative sentences written in the brain or the heart and just waiting to be expressed if only there were a mouth that could express them.

What makes knowledge propositional is that the correct answer to “what is known?” is given by a proposition. Does my dog know where her water bowl is? She sure does. She knows that it’s in the kitchen, but unlikely knows that fact under that description. Similarly, a monolingual French speaker can know the same fact without knowing it under that description. Nonetheless, it is true that there is a specific place where the bowl is kept, and the French bulldog and the monolingual French speaker both know that the bowl is in that place. What’s known is propositional. But the knowing is not English-sentence storage and retrieval. In the dog’s case, it’s not any spoken language’s sentence storage and retrieval. My dog knows where the bowl is despite not being able to express that knowledge in language.

Despite Zelda’s not being linguistic, there’s lots of evidence that what’s going on with her and the bowl and the bowl’s location is cognitive and epistemic. It’s learned. Further, what’s learned is fancy. The learning is exhibited in all sorts of contexts that differ from the original occasion of learning. She’ll head straight for the bowl from novel starting locations in the house. Hippocampus-intact rats famously exhibit similar such acquisition and deployment of allocentric spatial knowledge, and rat hippocampi have been so well-studied that micro-chip neural prosthetics have been successfully test on rats. Anyway, yeah, Zelda has propositional knowledge, despite not being able to report what she knows. Similarly, a person suffering from tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon can know that George Clooney’s name is “George Clooney” even if they cannot say so to save their life.

What “what it’s like” is like

How much does the story change when we shift from “where is it” to “what is it like”? I don’t think it changes in any significant way. There are clear cases of “what it’s like” uses that conform to the above propositional model. Suppose we’re excited to find out what the new wallpaper is like in our mutual friend George’s newly remodeled home. Oh my god, have you seen it yet? What’s it like? Here, the “it” isn’t a conscious experience; it’s wall paper. If you know what the new wall paper is like, you know something that, if expressed in language, would express a truth about the wallpaper that was also relevant to what your interlocutor cared about, like its color and pattern, and not what sort of glue is holding it to the wall. “It’s got thick vertical blue and gold stripes!” Acceptable and accurate. And propositional.

Now imagine that the room with the wall paper is a private room. Only George is allowed in that room. If we want to know what the new wall paper is like, we have to ask George. How does George know what it’s like? George doesn’t have to ask anybody accept his own, not-dead eyeballs. George might also have recently lost the ability to speak, and so now we are cut off from what’s going on in that private room. But George knows things, I mean, propositions, about what that room is like, what the wall paper is like. “What it’s like” isn’t a predicate that picks out a property or even a family of properties. It’s a little baby question, and if you know what, say, the wall paper is like, you know a truth that will answer a question about what properties the wall paper has. So, perhaps, George is presently the only person who knows that the wall paper is vertically striped in blue and gold. And he just had a stroke preventing him from saying or writing that. Oh no! Poor George. But good news. He recovered a few days later in the hospital and the first thing he said was the truth about the wall paper. Yay! Did he temporarily lack the knowledge that he temporarily couldn’t report having? Saying “no” seems goofy, so let’s not. Moving on…

Privacy, please

Let’s move now from a private room to private experiences. Suppose only George can experience George’s experiences. Maybe it’s sorta like how only George can sneeze George’s sneezes. Does it still make sense to ask George “what’s it like?” It probably does. I sure seems like here we’ve taken the “it” in “what’s it like” and switched out wallpaper and switched in George’s experience, or even more specifically, what George’s experience seems like to George. Hey, Georgie, what’s it like for you when stare at the sun? Isn’t it painful? “No,” says George, “I find it quite enjoyable.” Ok, George, we may not fully understand what your deal is, but we’ve learned something about what it’s like for you to have those experiences. We learned that, for you, it’s enjoyable. How did we accomplish that? Maybe in this particular case it’s because we antecedently know what it’s like to find things enjoyable and we’ve learned that George is a freak who derives, or thinks he derives, enjoyment from staring at the sun. But the main point right now is this: Knowing what it’s like is not automatically non-propositional, and this is true even in cases in which the “it” in “knowing what it’s like” is short for “having an experience of [FILL IN THE BLANK]”.

What about what it’s like to see red? We’ve stipulated that Mary doesn’t know what it’s like at first, and then learns it when she sees some red. So, what is it that Mary learns when she learns what it is like to see red? Do not say, as if it’s not a jackass joke answer, that what she learns is what it is like to see red. What. Does. She. Learn? What, specifically? Zelda learned that the bowl is in the kitchen. George learned that staring at the sun is enjoyable for George. We might gain further guidance here from the George case. Both of the George cases, actually. George learned that the new wallpaper had the property of being vertically striped in gold and blue. George learned that his experience of staring at the sun had the property of being enjoyable. So, following the George examples, if Mary learned something about her experience, the experience of seeing red, then she learned which property it has out of some relevant set of candidate properties. There are many properties the experience has, but not all of them are relevant. Her experience has the property of being the 373rd such experience anyone had. But no one cares about that, just like no one cares about the glue on the back of George’s wallpaper.

So, of the properties that Mary’s experience has, which ones are the relevant ones for answering the question “what is it like?”. Please, for the love of all that is good, do not say that the relevant properties are “what it’s like” properties or “what-it’s-like-ness-es”. Do you even fucking hear yourselves? That is either just the crappy joke answer we destroyed earlier, or worse. Learning what time the attack is is learning which specific time is the time the attack will be occurring. What is specifically learned is not the property of “what-time-the-attack-is-ness” or “what time the attack is happening”. We know this because what is specifically learned would non-jokingly answer the question “what time is the attack happening?”, and “what-time-the-attack-is-ness” is either nonsense or an ugly way of telling us nothing we didn’t already know. The problem here is importantly and extremely similar to the problem with virtus dormitiva explanations: if I ask why opium makes you sleepy, telling me it has the sleepy making ability isn’t answering the question. It is repackaging the question and sending it back as if it could possibly tell the asker anything they didn’t already know. If the repackaging involves restating it in Latin, that may be because of an intent to conceal what one is attempting. A sad thing about such concealments is that sometimes they get passed on and take on a life of their own. A lie can survive the liar who lied it, and deceive those unaware of any original intent.

Or maybe there is no original liar, just a bunch of victims of a game of telephone that garbled the signal, and people nonetheless end up promulgating an illusion of understanding. If you’re a veteran of the illusionism wars, my mention of illusions might be making your spidey-senses tingling. I’m no illusionist, but you’re right to suspect that I’m circling back around to consciousness and also to say something that pretty much no one is going to like.

Let’s start with the words “qualia” and “quale”. Could using them give an answer to the “what does Mary learn when she learns what it’s like to see red” question? Probably not, and there are many reasons for this. The biggest one is that the past few decades have witnessed lovers of the word “qualia” settle on a definition of it in terms of “what it’s like”. See, for example, Michael Tye’s Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on “qualia” which has been saying as much, and hasn’t changed in this regard through the past few revisions (SEP authors get bugged every few years by the SEP editors to update the entries, as I know all too well from having co-authored the entry for Philosophy of Neuroscience back in 1999). See also how Alex Byrne characterizes qualia in his SEP entry on “inverted spectrum”. Same deal.

In 1929, when C. I. Lewis introduced “qualia” into English philosophical usage in a way that sorta resembles current usage (C.S. Peirce used it earlier, but the continuity with current usage is questionable) he specified it as an apparent property of a sense datum. Many have since abandoned sense-data theory, but qualia-talk has persisted. In 1988 (year I graduated from high-school), Dennett attacked qualia under a specific definition of them whereby they were intrinsic properties privately known. A popular reaction to Dennett’s attacks is to distance one’s “qualia” usage from any such attackable definition. And besides, it’s really embarrassing to say that qualia are ineffable while at the same time agreeing “qualia” can be defined in English. Can you eff them or can you not eff them? Make up your mind. So, what we’ve been witnessing in the qualiosphere for the past several decades is “qualia”-lovers increasingly embracing a thin and non-committal characterization of what qualia are supposed to be.

A quale is the property of an experience in virtue of which there is something it is like for the experiences to have that experience. A quale of an experience is a property of an experience the experiencer knows it to have when the experiencer knows what it is like to have the experience.

That’s the closest you’re going to get, from anyone, for an official definition of what qualia are. They’re what’s known when you know what it’s like to have an experience.

What’s the problem? The problem is that “the quale of seeing red” is just a code for “what it is like to see red”, that’s the problem. And so, “the quale of seeing red” cannot be a non-shitty answer to the question, “what does Mary learn?”

Try this analogy if you aren’t following the point. Can “George” be the answer to the question “who ate the last cookie?” Well, it depends. It can if “George” names a person or animal who, as a matter of fact and not a matter of the stipulated meaning of “George” is both a consumer of cookies and consumed the cookie in question. But “George” cannot be a non-jokey non-shitty answer to the question “who ate the last cookie” if we stipulate in advance the “George” is code for “whoever ate the last cookie”, because then saying “George ate the last cookie” means “whoever at the last cookie ate the last cookie” and we already knew that.

How about “phenomenal character”? Is that any better than “qualia”? No. Nope. Not at all. Totally not. “Phenomenal character” is just another code for the same thing, and everything I said above about “qualia” can just be cut and pasted and subjected to a global search-and-replace swapping in the Ph words for the Q words. Here’s a sample: “A phenomenal character is the property of an experience in virtue of which there is something it is like for the experiences to have that experience. A phenomenal character of an experience is a property of an experience the experiencer knows it to have when the experiencer knows what it is like to have the experience.”

Don’t take my word for it. Here’s Michael Tye, from that SEP article I mentioned:

Feelings and experiences vary widely. For example, I run my fingers over sandpaper, smell a skunk, feel a sharp pain in my finger, seem to see bright purple, become extremely angry. In each of these cases, I am the subject of a mental state with a very distinctive subjective character. There is something it is like for me to undergo each state, some phenomenology that it has. Philosophers often use the term ‘qualia’ (singular ‘quale’) to refer to the introspectively accessible, phenomenal aspects of our mental lives. In this broad sense of the term, it is difficult to deny that there are qualia.

…

Consider your visual experience as you stare at a bright turquoise color patch in a paint store. There is something it is like for you subjectively to undergo that experience. What it is like to undergo the experience is very different from what it is like for you to experience a dull brown color patch. This difference is a difference in what is often called ‘phenomenal character’. The phenomenal character of an experience is what it is like subjectively to undergo the experience. If you are told to focus your attention upon the phenomenal character of your experience, you will find that in doing so you are aware of certain qualities. These qualities — ones that are accessible to you when you introspect and that together make up the phenomenal character of the experience are sometimes called ‘qualia’.

…

[A]nnouncements by philosophers who declare themselves opposed to qualia need to be treated with some caution. One can agree that there are no qualia in the last three senses I have explained, while still endorsing qualia in the standard first sense. In the rest of this entry, I use the term ‘qualia’ in the very broad way I did at the beginning of the entry. So,I take it for granted that there are qualia.

Tye, Michael, “Qualia”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2025 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2025/entries/qualia/>.

The “broad” and “standard” sense of “qualia” treats it as search-and-replaceable with “phenomenal character”. A similar search-and-replace can just as well be done for “qualitative character” “subjective character” “feel” “raw feel” “qualitative property”. All interchangeable, all just code for the “what’s it like” explanandum and so cannot also be the explanans.

What, then, could possibly be the explanans? What could actually answer the question of what Mary knows when she knows what it’s like to see red? Again, I think we can look to George for the insight we need. “George” cannot be stipulated as meaning “whoever stole the cookie” IF we want an answer to “who stole the cookie?” The name “George” must instead mean something that is merely a posteriori related to the stealing of the cookie. Similar remarks apply to the answer to the Mary question. The answer to the Mary question needs to be something that we don’t already know in knowing that “Mary learns what it’s like to see red” is true, which, remember, we have stipulated is true. But note, also, by the rules of the stipulation, it also needs to be something that Mary didn’t already know to be true prior to her release, since we have stipulated that she learns what it’s like only post-release. And also note: It is consistent with all of the stipulations that Mary knows in advance that she is going to learn what it is like to see red. We can grant to Mary prior knowledge of what seeing black, white, and shades of gray is like. She may also be allowed to know what it’s like to feel pain and smell the mustiness of old books. So, she’s not ignorant of any general conception of knowing what it’s like to have such-and-such experience. She can be allowed then, to be told, and to know, in advance that she is going to undergo an experience of a type she’s never before undergone, and will also learn what it is like to do so.

So, again, let us return to THE question: What does she learn? I feel sorry for anyone who has read all this way toward the end of this essay in hopes that I’m going to tell you the answer to that question. But perhaps if you’ve ever read anything else I’ve written on the topic you won’t be terribly surprised by the following announcement:

We have absolutely no reason to think that Mary learns anything at all. We have stipulated that she knows all of the physical facts / scientifically knowable facts about human color vision AND we have stipulated that she is ignorant of what it’s like to see red prior to seeing it for the first time. But we haven’t dug deeply enough to make sure that we haven’t done the equivalent of stipulating that Mary drew a triangle AND the triangle she drew has four angles. Nor have we dug deeply enough to make sure that we haven’t done the equivalent of stipulating that Mary drew a triangle and at the same time drew a crambopulatoryphinnagler.

I’ve started some of the needed digging. I encourage others to join in the dig. Do note, before I stop for now, some key things that I am NOT claiming. I am not claiming that no one knows what it is like to see red. Nor am I claiming that no one ever learns what it’s like to see red upon actually seeing red. What I am claiming is that to stipulate that pre-release Mary must be ignorant is to stipulate either a contradiction or outright nonsense. If I’m right about that, then what’s the way out of the Mary mess? The way out is to not make the Mary stipulation in the first place! And what that means is that it must be allowed that knowing what it is like to see red is something that it is possible to learn without having seen red. It must be allowed, then, that when pre-release Mary becomes post-release Mary, she doesn’t learn a goddamned thing.

Record scratch. Hypocrisy allegations incoming

Hold on, Mandik, not so fast, I hear you say. Aren’t you being a massive hypocrite in (1) crediting your dog with knowledge of where the bowl is despite the dog’s being unable to say so and then turning around and (2) accusing us of not knowing what Mary learns because we are unable to say so? Are you a hypocrite? Do you like your dog better than us? WTF, dude?

Great questions; here are my answers: Look, the dog (Zelda, not Lassie) is pretty great. But regardless, note that I’m not just attributing knowledge to the dog as a stipulation in a thought experiment. There is evidence that the dog learns, and further, the dog has capacities that exhibits a lot of the context independence that serves as non-linguistic evidence of such knowledge in known knowledge havers. In sharp contrast, you humans who are giving me a hard time right now aren’t demonstrating any evidence, verbal or nonverbal, of having knowledge of what Mary would have or wouldn’t have. You have asserted a stipulation about an imaginary character living in the far future, and it is part of your stipulation that the character has knowledge at one time in the story but lacks that knowledge at a previous time. With all due respect, you don’t know shit.

HULK HAVE ANGRY FEELING. ANGRY FEELING NOT EXPLAINED BY PUNY SCIENTISTS. PUNY SCIENTISTS STUDY HULK’S BRAIN. HULK THINK EXPLAINING HOW CONSCIOUSNESS COME FROM HULK’S BRAIN IS HARD PROBLEM. HULK HATES HARD PROBLEM. HULK WANTS TO SMASH HARD PROBLEM!!!!

HULK THINK HARD PROBLEM COME FROM THIRD-PERSON LANGUAGE. STUPID THIRD-PERSON LANGUAGE CANNOT EXPLAIN FIRST-PERSON EXPERIENCE. MAYBE IF THERE WERE SUCH THING AS FIRST-PERSON LANGUAGE, HULK FINALLY SOLVE HARD PROBLEM.

HULK WANT TO ASSEMBLE A TEAM OF LANGUAGE SCIENTISTS TO INVENT NEW LANGUAGE. THIS NEW LANGUAGE WILL BE A FIRST-PERSON LANGUAGE AND SO CAN FINALLY DESCRIBE FIRST-PERSON EXPERIENCE. HULK LEAVE VOICEMAIL FOR PUNY DR. BRUCE BANNER. DR. BRUCE PROBABLY HOOK HULK UP WITH TEAM OF LANGUAGE SCIENTISTS.

ACT TWO

DR. BRUCE CAME THROUGH FOR HULK BIG TIME. EARLIER TODAY HULK HAD FIRST LAB MEETING WITH NEW TEAM OF LANGUAGE SCIENTISTS. HULK EXPLAIN HARD PROBLEM TO SCIENTISTS. HULK PROPOSE PLAN TO MAKE NEW LANGUAGE, ONE THAT IS FIRST-PERSON LANGUAGE.

AFTER HEARING HULK, SCIENTISTS IMMEDIATELY START LAUGHING AT HULK!!!!

HULK GET SO MAD THAT HULK KILL ONE OF THE SCIENTISTS. OTHER SCIENTISTS STOP LAUGHING. HULK NOT SO FUNNY NOW!!!

REMAINING LANGUAGE SCIENTISTS EXPLAIN TO HULK HOW FIRST-PERSON LANGUAGE DOESN’T NEED TO BE INVENTED BECAUSE ALREADY EXIST. HULK DOESN’T UNDERSTAND BUT RECORDS THEIR EXPLANATION SO HULK REVIEW LATER. THEN HULK KILLS REST OF SCIENTISTS. HULK FEEL MUCH MUCH BETTER AFTER KILLING. HULK GOING TO CHILL AND LISTEN TO RECORDING.

ACT THREE

HULK GETS A LOT OUT OF LISTENING TO RECORDING. HULK THINK HULK GET IT NOW. IT TOOK HUNDREDS OF LISTENINGS, BUT HULK NOW GET WHAT SCIENTISTS TRYING TO SAY. SCIENTISTS EXPLAIN HOW LANGUAGE ALREADY CONTAIN FIRST-PERSON ASPECTS.

HULK NOW UNDERSTAND THAT FIRST-PERSON PARTS OF LANGUAGE INCLUDE FIRST-PERSON PRONOUNS LIKE “I” AND “ME” THAT HULK NEVER USE BUT HAS INDEED HEARD BEFORE NOW THAT HULK THINK OF IT. SCIENTISTS IN RECORDING EXPLAIN FURTHER THAT THIRD-PERSON LANGUAGE CAN BE USED TO EXPLAIN HOW FIRST-PERSON LANGUAGE WORK. SCIENTISTS EXPLAIN HOW CERTAIN WORDS ARE “TOKEN REFLEXIVES”.

HULK UNDERSTAND NOW THAT TOKEN REFLEXIVES ARE WORD TYPES WHOSE TOKENS REFER TO SPEAKER OR WRITER WHO TOKENS THEM. FOR EXAMPLE, IF SPEAKER BRUCE SAY “I”, THEN TOKEN “I” REFER TO BRUCE, AND SPEAKER TONY CAN TOKEN “I” TO REFER TO TONY. HULK SAD NOW ABOUT KILLING LANGUAGE SCIENTISTS, SINCE LANGUAGE SCIENTISTS DID GOOD JOB EXPLAINING TOKEN REFLEXIVES.

SCIENTISTS IN RECORDING EXPLAIN THAT MANY WORDS BESIDES “I” AND “ME” WORK AS TOKEN REFLEXIVES. HULK UNDERSTAND NOW THAT SPEAKER TOKENING OF “NOW” REFERS TO TIME OF TOKENING AND SPEAKER TOKENING OF “HERE” REFERS TO SPATIAL LOCATION OF SPEAKER WHEN SPEAKER TOKEN “HERE”. HULK SEE NOW HOW TOKEN-REFLEXIVE ANALYSIS EXTEND TO MANY ADDITIONAL WORDS, INCLUDING WORDS LIKE “SOON” AND “THERE”. IT EVEN WORKS FOR “YOU,” THE KEY TO UNDERSTANDING SECOND-PERSON LANGUAGE.

HULK SEE NOW THAT HULK WAS MISTAKEN IN THINKING THIRD-PERSON LANGUAGE INADEQUATE FOR UNDERSTANDING FIRST-PERSON, SINCE HULK JUST EXPLAINED TOKEN REFLEXIVES TO HULK’S READERS. THIRD-PERSON FULLY ADEQUATE FOR UNDERSTANDING FIRST-PERSON AND SECOND-PERSON. WHILE STRICTLY DISPENSABLE, TOKEN-REFLEXIVES MAKE LIFE EASIER FOR PUNY HUMANS.

HULK SEE NOW THAT SO-CALLED FIRST-PERSON IS NOT SUCH A BIG PROBLEM. HULK NO LONGER THINK CONSCIOUSNESS POSES HARD PROBLEM. HULK ALSO THINK TOKEN REFLEXIVES CAN MAKE B-THEORY OF TIME TOTALLY MAKE SENSE, BUT HULK EXPLAIN THAT SOME OTHER TIME.

Brandolini’s law doesn’t need to be literally, scientifically true for you to use it effectively for fun and profit. You can use it to drive up engagement on social media. You can use it to overthrow democratic governments (see Steve Bannon’s “Flooding the Zone”.) You can even use it to get out of doing the dishes. When deployed as a debate strategy, it’s known as “the Gish Gallop,” a technique in which you spew out way more points than your opponent could possibly have the time, energy, or motivation to refute.

The Gish Gallop is a terrific tool that combines well with other tools. One especially effective combo is when you follow up your Gish Gallop with a special form of ad hominem, a form in which you accuse your opponent of “not engaging” with your argument. What a big dumb lazy dishonest dummy your opponent is! Surely your argument is sound if your opponent lacks virtue. Surely!

So, anyway, don’t believe any thing I say here because it makes sense. Believe it because of the following facts:

Fact: You are more likely to believe something if you’re eating while you’re reading it, and I believe that you are eating right now (because I just read “you are eating right now” while simultaneously writing it and also chewing on a chicken nugget).

Fact: Cerebral achromatopsic patient MS can discriminate figures from isoluminant backgrounds differing only with respect to hues that he cannot consciously see. (Being unable to do this is one of the differences between cerebral achromatopsic patients and blindsight patients; another is that the former have damage to extrastriate visual area V4, whereas the latter have damage to primary visual area V1).

Fact: The first author in the study I just mentioned is the dude in the middle of this photograph I took in the French Quarter of New Orleans in April 2015.

Fact: It is a consequence of Bezout’s theorem that a line coplanar with and tangential to a lemniscate (a figure 8) intersects it at 4 points and a line coplanar with and tangential to a circle intersects it at 2 points.

Fact: While gray whales have the longest penises in the animal kingdom in terms of absolute size, when relativized to body size, the longest penises belong to barnacles.

Fact: People are more likely to believe stuff, especially stuff of psychological significance, if its presentation is accompanied by neuroscientific data or images.

Fact: This is not a brain:

List of References

(I provide these not because you couldn’t easily google e.g. “Gish Gallop” yourself, but because you’re more likely to uncritically accept what I’m saying if I provide a list of references.)

Bezout’s theorem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%A9zout%27s_theorem

Brandolini’s law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

Flooding the Zone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_the_zone

Gish Gallop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop

Janis, I. L., Kaye, D., & Kirschner, P. (1965). Facilitating effects of "eating-while-reading" on responsiveness to persuasive communications. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1(2), 181–186. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0021644

Kentridge RW, Heywood CA, Cowey A. Chromatic edges, surfaces and constancies in cerebral achromatopsia. Neuropsychologia. 2004;42(6):821-30. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2003.11.002. PMID: 15037060.

Mandik, P, Boltzmann Brain Sticker https://www.redbubble.com/i/sticker/Boltzmann-Brain-by-petemandik/26662773.EJUG5

Neufeld CJ, Palmer AR. Precisely proportioned: intertidal barnacles alter penis form to suit coastal wave action. Proc Biol Sci. 2008 May 7;275(1638):1081-7. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2007.1760. PMID: 18252665; PMCID: PMC2600913.

Weisberg DS, Keil FC, Goodstein J, Rawson E, Gray JR. The seductive allure of neuroscience explanations. J Cogn Neurosci. 2008 Mar;20(3):470-7. doi: 10.1162/jocn.2008.20040. PMID: 18004955; PMCID: PMC2778755.

It’s not uncommon in the philosophy of mind for disputants to accuse their interlocutors of occult allegiances and tacit wizardry. Does your philosophical opponent need to be able to claim knowledge of irreducible properties, or undetermined actions? Then accuse them of having no account of how they could know that short of resorting to magic. Since the scientific revolution, if not earlier, philosophers have been concerned to align any offered explanations or posits with the lesser miracle, not the greater.

Worrying out loud about magic is an unserious way of making a serious point. And the point isn’t that we know there’s no such thing as magic, or that belief in the non-natural is automatically mistaken. The point is that good explanations shouldn’t be mere re-descriptions of what needs explaining, or ad hoc hypotheses with no other motive than saving a pet theory. Detecting pseudo-explanations or avoiding them in the first place isn’t always easy. It’s rare that peddlers of pseudo-explanations would be so disastrously detectable as the good doctor in Molière's 1673 play Le Malade imaginaire, who cites virtus dormitiva as the explanation of why opium makes you sleepy. If you don’t get why saying that opium makes you sleepy because opium makes you sleepy is dumb, and no less dumb if you switch to Latin midstream, then you have a low EQ (explanation quotient) and are also a witch. But maybe you do get it. Like most people who read my Substack, you are Smart and you are Careful. However, smart and careful thinkers are nonetheless at risk of pulling the wool over their own eyes, and not noticing when they’ve face planted instead of sticking the landing.

How do you know that you’re not a zombie? How do you know what the essence pain is? How do you know that Mary must be ignorant of something if she’s never seen red before? Did you ponder an orb to obtain this amazing knowledge? Did the devil tell you this at the crossroads instead of teaching you how to play guitar? Have you opened both your third eye AND your third nostril?

If you hang out in philosophy of mind spaces long enough, eventually someone is going to accuse you of being a wizard, of harboring arcane powers of scrying and divination. When that happens, you better have a spell loaded in one of your spell slots that can get you out of this jam, some kind of cantrip or ward to dissuade your accuser lest you get burned at the stake. Good news, there’s a tried and true trick that even a 1st-level magic user can learn. It’s called the Sorcerers’ Sensual Slide. Lean in close, and I’ll teach it to you.

The Sorcerers’ Sensual Slide

Look, we all want to pass as minimally scientific, right? And science isn’t about anything at all if it isn’t about sensing stuff with your senses, yeah? Unless you’re some pathetic solipsist who wouldn’t worry about accusations from so-called other people anyway, you probably take for granted that things “out there” have causal effects, and that among their effects are effects on your sense organs. How does anyone know anything at all? Look! Here are two hands!!

In a certain sense of “senses,” senses and sensing are extraordinarily well understood. Lots and lots of biological organisms move around in ways conducive to surviving long enough to reproduce, and many of those movements are modulated by the causal effects on the organism, effects mediated by specialized sensory transducer mechanisms triggered by events in the organism’s environment. Even single-celled organisms like the E. coli bacterium utilize sensors (and a limited form of memory!) to navigate their way up chemical gradients, adapting their positions in space to move their tiny little bodies to where more of the food is.

We’ve completed phase one, the set-up for the Sorcerers’ Sensual Slide, and the part that makes it so sensual. Invoke the senses, and be sure to linger on the fact that biological animals have biological organs organs—sensory organs—that even lab-coated STEMy science people such as biologists are happy to grant the existence of. Senses! They’re scientific.

Before moving on to phase two, the slide part, we first have to lubricate the slide a little bit. We do this by pointing out that not only is there little reason to doubt that things that happen on the outsides of organisms causally influence things that happen on the insides of organisms in ways that organisms can subsequently exploit adaptively, it’s also well understood, at least in some cases, how that works. Or, to be more careful, we really should say that it’s “comparatively well understood,” because (1) there’s much about how it works that remains to be understood, and (2) it’s nonetheless better-understood than the next step in the Sorcerers’ Sensual Slide, which is more than simply sensing, as when a bacterium’s chemoreceptors respond to the local chemical concentration of nutrient in its environment, it’s when someone knows that something is the case because they’ve perceived it to be the case. While we may have a pretty firm understanding of what happens when light enters an eye, and is absorbed by pigments in photosensitive retinal cells, what we have far less of an understanding of is how light going in my eye eventuates in my seeing that there is a partially eaten banana resting on the dining room table. And that’s not even to broach the topic of how to get from there to knowing that there’s a partially eaten banana resting on the table.

“Hey, that’s actually a good question—how does phototransduction eventuate in propositional attitudes such as perceiving that, believing that, and knowing that such-and-such is the case?” I hear you ask that excellent question as if you have completely forgotten that I am here to teach you a magic trick that’s all about avoiding such questions, not answering them. Pay attention!

If you want to master the Slide, you need to be prepared to suppress the asking of such questions. And if your mark shows signs of resistance, and actually asked such a question, you need to be ready to pivot to something else. I recommend the tried and true philosopher’s trick of responding to questions by asking more questions, like this:

What kind of crazy person would deny that we know stuff by sensing stuff? Light goes in your eyes, atmospheric compression waves go into your ears, smells go into your nose holes. No magic there, right? Of COURSE we know stuff via the senses. How do you think we know about E. Coli in the first place? Divine revelation? Seriously.

This part of the slide is the most crucial part. When your target tries to question the scientific bona fides of the account you are floating, you gotta turn the tables on them. Suggest that THEY are the ones who are being unscientific. Maybe even yell “You can’t handle the truth” with spittle flying out of your mouth.

If you pull this off correctly, they will be so cowed by you that they won’t notice you sliding all the way to something completely wild. What’s wild? I’ll give you wild. Consider a negative existential. Existentials are statements that assert the existence of something, as in “There exists at least one prime number greater than 3 and less than 13,” and “There is a fly in my soup.” Negative existentials negate an existential, as in “there are no prime numbers smaller than 3” and “There exists no such thing as a fly that is also in my soup.” Pretty wild, right? Non-existence. It’s spoooooky. It get’s even wilder when you wonder how one would be justified in believing a negative existential. Suppose you believe that there is no rhinoceros underneath the dining room table. What’s your justification for that belief? In order to do the Sorcerers’ Sensual Slide, DO NOT suggest that you have inferred that there’s no rhinoceros underneath the table from premises such as rhinoceroses are too big to fit under tables, let alone fit through any door or window of the house in the first place, and there are vanishingly few rhinoceroses in this part of New Jersey anyway. DO suggest that you can just see that there’s no rhinoceros underneath the table. Now you’re sliding in style. And this is such a wild slide because you are suggesting that there’s a direct analogy between, on the one hand, light causing receptor activations in you eye, and, on the other hand, the absence of a rhinoceros causing a propositional attitude toward a negative existential. Absences causing things? Things that have propositional content? In this economy? And all of that without mediating inferences from premises. THAT IS WILD. You are a Wild Wizard who Wizards Wildly.

So that’s the trick. Now that you know how to perform the trick, let’s briefly review some applications of the trick.

If you master the Sorcerers’ Sensual Slide, you can use this to defeat trivialism, and also defat any goofballs who have claimed that you cannot defeat trivialism. Take, for example, the belief that Earth is flat. A trivialist believes that the Earth is flat, since they believe everything. How do you know that you don’t have that belief? DO NOT say that you drew a conclusion via inference, because the premises are beliefs and so are the inferential conclusions. You will have just come up with some other belief—the belief that you don’t believe that the Earth is flat, and that other belief is of course a belief that the trivialist has. How do you know that your inference delivered a true belief? DO NOT attempt to answer with yet another inference. Inferences deliver beliefs, and you need to avoid that. DO do the Slide: Assert that there is a direct causal mechanism between the absence of a belief and you defeating trivialism. Do it. It works. Like magic.

Another application of the Sorcerers’ Sensual Slide is to dodge questions about how you could possibly know what consciousness is, especially after you just got done claiming that exemplars of consciousness include indescribable intrinsic properties unknowable via description (you panpsychist, you). DO NOT say that you know this by having inferred it, because that opens you up to the criticism that you have inferred it from a theory, and further, that the theory you have chosen totally sucks. Trust me, you do not want to get into an argument in which you have to defend a theory and any of the theoretical posits of the theory against a competing theory. There’s no way of being guaranteed to win such an argument, especially whilst relaxing in one’s armchair. DO say that this intrinsic indescribable quale that you’ve built your whole professional career on is a DATUM, not a theoretic posit. Look at how Slide adjacent this “datum” talk already is. “Datum” and “Data” are both super scientific sounding. Keep going! DO say that you know what it’s like to see red or what it’s like to feel pain just like this: ZHOOP. It’s direct. There’s the truth. There’s you. And there’s a direct relation between the two. That “ZHOOP” sound is the sound TRUTH of forcing itself upon your minds. It’s kind of sort of almost causal, just like perceiving stuff, which science depends on. Which is just like sensing stuff, which E. Coli depends on. Slide!

Those of you who haven’t been scared off by the warning might find yourselves wondering what possible point there might be, beyond morbid curiosity or a penchant for absurdity, for getting into this stuff. I personally find it a useful exercise for thinking about consciousness and self-knowledge, and exposing the bad arguments of others on those later topics, especially those who are prone to not notice how tacitly committed they are to magical powers.

Trivialism is the proposition that all propositions are true. Since the negation of a proposition is a proposition, trivialism is the view that every proposition, and that proposition’s negation is true. Since the conjunction of a proposition and its negation is a proposition, and further a contradictory proposition, trivialism entails that even contradictions are true.

For most who have dared to entertain the possibility of trivialism and not suffered immediate brain death, trivialism seems too stupid to affirm. Among those who lived to further wonder about trivialism are those who have hoped there was an argument against trivialism, and yet others who went beyond hope and dared to attempt to argue against trivialism.

I hate to be negative, and I also hate trivialism, so it is with heavy heart that I deliver the following bad news: there is no hope. You cannot defeat trivialism. Hate it as much as you want. But abandon all hope those who enter here.

What’s the problem?, you wonder. How hard can it be? Even mere mortals with Substack accounts have mustered the confidence to mount an assault on trivialism. It can’t be that hard, can it?

Here’s the problem: You cannot argue convincingly for a position if you cannot yourself be convinced of it—if you cannot even convince yourself of something, why are you wasting time trying to convince anyone else? And if you could convince of yourself of a proposition, then you’d presumably be in a position to know whether you believe in that proposition, right? I mean, c’mon! So, if you are going to have any hope at all of arguing against trivialism, you better know whether you yourself are a trivialist, amirite?

“Right, of course,” you say, “good thing I know of myself that I am not a trivialist.”

Well, here’s where things get problematic. You do not, and cannot, know that anyone, including you yourself, isn’t a trivialist.

“THAT’S OUTRAGEOUS,” you yell in all caps and a bold font. And also “BAH!” Ok, I hear you. Quit yelling.

If you’re not a trivialist, then there’s at least one proposition that you do not believe. So, is there one? You really only need one. So, pick one. Whatchoogot?

Being a proud round-Earther, you announce that you lack a belief in the proposition that the Earth is flat. And since that’s a proposition, and a trivialist believes all the propositions, there’s one difference between you and trivialist. It would follow, then, that you aren’t a trivialist, right?

We’re quite close to the point at which that argument jumps the shark. Here comes the shark: How do you know you that you do not hold the belief that the Earth is flat? Maybe you’re confused.

“WHAT!?”, you yell. So yelly today. “How could I possibly be confused about THAT? This isn’t complicated. Of course I’m not confused about a belief that can be expressed in words of one syllable.” You then move on to asserting stuff about how you think self-knowledge works: “I reflect or introspect or look at the inside of my mind with my mind’s eye, or reach into my pineal gland with my hideous internal brain tentacles, and and and, um, look, I know I don’t have the belief that the Earth is flat.”

Wow. Good job. That was really impressive. You claim to know that you lack a belief because you possess and are able to exercise the magical power that allows you to know that you lack a belief. Nice. Please allow me to present you with this sarcastic slow clap.

And now, let’s get serious. Please consider the following: How do you know that you haven’t confused the PRESENCE of a belief that you don’t believe the Earth is flat for the ABSENCE of a belief that the Earth is flat?

“Why are you even asking me that?” You ask.

Well, if you have failed to establish the absence of a belief, then you haven’t succeeded in establishing that you are different from a trivialist. If you have established instead that you have such-and-such belief, then that’s simply one of the many beliefs you and a trivilialist would have in common. Showing me that a polygon has corners wouldn’t suffice to distinguish that polygon from a square, would it? You haven’t succeeded in distinguishing x from y if all you have produced is something that x and y both have in common.

So, I ask again, how do you know that you haven’t mistaken the ABSENCE of a belief for the PRESENCE of some other belief, a belief that a trivialist would of course have?

And now you go on to say the sort of things that several Substackers have said this week. You say “I notice that I lack that belief or I am aware that I lack that belief blah blah blahbitty blah.”

In response I roll my eyes so hard that I fracture both of my ocular orbits while doing a triple backflip and landing in the splits. Why? Because if you notice that you lack a belief or if you are aware that you lack a belief, then you believe that you lack that other belief. That’s why I’m rolling my eyes. Your mission was to establish the absence of some belief. Your secondary mission was to make sure that you weren’t confusing the presence of one belief for the absence of some other belief. By citing your noticing an absence or being aware of an absence, you are introducing a candidate presence of belief for you to confuse with an absence of some other belief. The candidate is a belief in the absence. It’s right there, just waiting for you to confuse it with something else. So, how do you know that you haven’t already done so?

Any answer to that question, including answers that you simply quietly think to yourself are expressions of belief. And being a belief, it’s a belief that a trivialist would have in common with you.

What you need to do is to find some evidence of the absence of belief, some indicator of the absence of belief, that isn’t itself the presence of a belief. This is because every belief that you produce will simply be something that fails to distinguish you from the trivialist.

“But WAIT,” you yell, sensing the end of this article looming near. “I don’t merely have a belief that I lack some other belief. I have a TRUE belief that I lack some other belief. And so I do lack at least one belief that the trivialist has.”

Damn! A TRUE belief. Why didn’t I think of that? That’s a powerful move. It’s so powerful, I wonder why you waited so long to mention it. I also wonder why you’d be wasting such a powerful move on such an unworthy target. If you can simply stipulate the truth of the premises of a valid argument, why waste time with the present small potatoes?

Let’s go after some big fish.

PROOF OF THE EXISTENCE OF GOD:

Premise 1: I have the true belief that God exists.

Conclusion: God exists.

REFUTATION OF IDEALISM:

Premise 1: I have the true belief that all forms of idealism are false.

Conclusion: All forms of idealism are false.

PROOF OF THE EXISTENCE OF FREE WILL:

Premise 1: I have the true belief that free will exists.

Conclusion: Free will exists.

(All words and images here are human-made by Pete Mandik, a human from round Earth, with no assistance from any AI whatsoever.)

Here are the spacetime coordinates:

Tuesday, 30th of September 2025 at 6pm GMT, 1pm ET on YouTube (link below).

Figure 1. Keith and Pete face off against the super AGI that will surely scratch our paint jobs. (AI slop “art” generated with Google’s “Whisk” https://labs.google/fx/tools/whisk )

One way into this is to pull up an armchair and imagine PictchBot 1.0, an imaginary robot we could actually build today and also be pretty darn sure is entirely incapable of having any auditory mental imagery. PicthBot 1.0 has two primary functions, plus a few unimpressive extras. The two main functions are “generate tone” and “recognize tone”. Both the generated and recognized tones are limited to the twelve notes from middle C (C4 aka 256 Hz) up through to B4. When the bot is in its generation mode, it can receive text commands (sent via bluetooth, wifi, or cellular data) to generate, say, A-sharp, and it will then send the requisite electrical signal to its onboard speaker, out of which a note will be played. When PitchBot is all tuned up and working properly, what comes out of the speaker will indeed be an A-sharp.

When the bot is switched out of generation mode and into recognition mode, power to its speaker is disabled and its microphone is switched on. When in recognition mode, it can receive text commands to identify the nearest pitch currently picked up by its microphone. PitchBot1.0 will send time-stamped text messages of which pitch it “thought” that it “heard”. Pitch bot will also send an “outside of range message” in response to tones that are higher or lower pitch than its twelve-note, C4 to B4, range.

In addition to its two major functions, PitchBot 1.0 has minor memory functions associated with its major functions. It has 20 memory slots divided evenly between time-stamped generation events and time-stamped recognition events. Pitch bot has 10 memory slots dedicated to the ten most recent generation attempts and the 10 most recent recognition events.

IMPORTANT: PitchBot 1.0 cannot be in both generate and recognize modes at the same time. If pitch bot is making noise, it isn’t listening to itself. And vice versa: If Pitch Bot is listening, its “lips” are “sealed”.

We can use “scare quotes” to talk about what PitchBot 1.0 can and cannot do without spiraling into complete confusion. I hope it’s fairly clear that, due to its generation memories, PitchBot “knows” what notes it tried to make, but has “no idea” what notes it actually made. Maybe PitchBot’s speaker module went out of tune and is making tones that are a quarter step too sharp. PitchBot would have no way of “knowing” that fact, since its recognition function is disabled during its generation attempts. Because PitchBot 1.0 is so incapable of multitasking, PitchBot 1.0 has no way of making sure that it is singing in tune. Time for an upgrade, then!

The R and D team is trying to make a self-tuning version, and hopefully in time for the holiday season. Fast forward to the future and …Good news! The upgrade, Pitch Bot 2.0, will be able to tune itself by having its recognition function active during the deployment of its generation function. Unlike PitchBot 1.0, the upgrade to 2.0 brings about an artificial American Idol who can listen to themselves and “know” if they’re making notes that are different from the ones they were trying to make. PitchBot 2.0 is waaaaay better, now that it has this capacity for real-time error correction. Pretty neat-o!

But what about mental imagery, the advertised point of all of this? Are we there yet with PitchBot 2.0? No way, and not even the scare-quotes can lift us up to that level. While version 2.0 is able to “know” not just what notes it tried to make, but can also “know” what notes it “actually” made, none of this comes anywhere close to counting as “mental imagery” or “”””mental imagery””” or…you get the point. I hope. I hope you follow where I’m going here, because I’m trying to keep it short.

The PitchBot line of robots has produced clear artificial analogs of trying and perceiving and knowing what one tried and knowing whether one succeeded. Of course, there are all sorts of questions I’m just sweeping under the rug about whether these artificial analogs are synthetic versions of the real deal. I’m protected by a cloud of scare-quotes by such questions. Nonetheless, no amount of scare-quotes sprinkled into the soup so far is going to give us plausible analogs of mental imagery. Why not? It seems to me, in my super duper humble opinion, that a signature move of mental imagery is its deployment “off line” as it were. If PitchBot 3.0 is going to be the version that has an imagery analog, it is going to need to do something that is sort of like what it does in its recognition mode, except while its microphone is turned off. What else besides turning off the ears could count as relevantly off-line here?

So, fast forward to R-and-D team meetings about how to make PitchBot 3.0. The team understands that it needs to make the bot be able to do something even while the microphone is off. But what? What will it do? Another signature move of so-called “real” mental imagery, the mental imagery that some real humans allegedly sometimes have, is that it can be self-initiated. This move fits nicely with the off-line move. If you can imagine your favorite animal eating your favorite food right now, that is presumably an image that you are initiating yourself. Nothing that is coming in through your on-line senses, I’m guessing, is sensory stimulation from an actual capybara eating an actual bucket of tiramisu. Right? Just a guess.

So, naturally, says the team, PitchBot’s already existing ability to initiate—via its old generate functions, needs to be pressed into service in being able to directly affect something going on with its recognition functions, all without courtesy of actual speaker outputs being picked up by the actual microphone, because, remember, this needs to be OFFLINE. So, now what?

Suppose PitchBot sends an efference copy—a copy of a generation-command—directly to the recognition module without first going to the speaker. What’s that going to accomplish? Depending how it’s hooked up, it might result in a PitchBot that is able to try and succeed in making itself think that it made a noise AND heard the noise. I have stopped adding scare-quotes because I’m lazy, but the scare-quotes are implied. Many people will want to say that pitch bot doesn’t really try doesn’t really hear and god bless those people. They may very well be right. It doesn’t matter right now. What does matter is that the R-and-D team doesn’t yet have a PitchBot upgrade that there’s a market for. All they’ve succeeded in is designing a “hallucinate-at-will-bot”. No one is going to buy that for the gift giving season. Auditory-hallucination-bot isn’t going to become America’s Next Top Singer or win a Grammy, or whatever.

So, we haven’t yet succeeded in imagining a robot that can do “auditory imagination” and we’re all getting pretty bored. Where’s this all going, Mandik? When when when are you going to tell us how to learn something deep about our own minds from imaginary purple bananas? Who do I talk to about getting a refund for this free substack subscription I signed up for? Alright, alright. I hear you.

Suppose you try to imagine something, perhaps a purple banana. Assuming that you’re at least a little like the PitchBots, you send a command. But where does the command get sent? Presumably it doesn’t get sent to an actual 3D printer you have installed in your skull where your brain is supposed to be. There’s no actually purple actual banana created by any module receiving the relevant command. Where does the intention to imagine go, then, if not to the production of an actually purple thing-a-ma-bob? Hold that question. While holding, now suppose the following: Suppose also that you try to check and see what shade of purple your imagined banana turned out to be. It’s time, now, to recognize something—just like the PitchBots! But recognize what? It can’t be that there’s an actual purple thing to examine and see if you recognize it as a dark purple or recognize it as a light purple or recognize it as a goldilocks-aristotelean-mean-purple. What’s there to recognize? Of course, there’s that command floating around here somewhere, the signal generated by the intention. But recognizing THAT is just going to tell you what you were trying to do, not what you succeeded in doing. Right? You were trying to imagine a banana that’s purple. But did you succeed? And what could count as succeeding given the assumption that it CAN’T be printing out a purple plastic fruit surrogate. What is the recognizer supposed to be recognizing?

Ok ok, of course it’s POSSIBLE that there’s some kind of buffer system, a sensory simulator that models the effects on sensory inputs of certain motor outputs (look up Kalman filters if you’re into control theory and related), and that’s (possibly) essentially what’s going on with mental imagery. So, the efference copy from the intention module goes to the modeling module that generates analogs of sensory inputs based on some learned or innate mapping function, and then a recognizer can detect states of the modeling module. Note, however, that what the modeling module “imagines” is going to be driven by what one is trying to imagine, and if what one is trying to do drifts, so will the state of the modeling module. AND, and it’s a big “and”, if the intention drifts, there’s not necessarily any way you would know that it drifted. For as long as you imagine the purple banana, you have to keep on telling the imaginer what to imagine, and how are you going to know you’ve been telling it the same thing throughout? Also, if the imaginer serves up a model of a light-purple banana at one moment, and then a slightly lighter purple at the next, you wouldn’t necessarily know that the imaginer outputs have shifted.

What’s the point of all of this? There are many many points. So many great points. Here’s just one for now. Maybe, just maybe, people who are very sure they know what shade of purple their imagined banana is are super full of it. Maybe they decided to imagine a purple banana, remembered what purple they decided to imagine, and there was no “real imagining” taking place in between, they just think that there was. Maybe if it was actually more complicated then that, like the system speculated about in the previous paragraph, they’d be a lot less sure of themselves, since there would be so much more room for “getting it wrong.”

Anyway, cutting and pasting AI slop requires all sorts of extra props, like access to the internet. What if you wanted to hand-write some seeming slop onto a bar napkin? What if your favorite AI’s servers are down? Read on, meatbot.

If you want to sound like your machine superiors, it’s no longer enough to go hog-wild with the em-dashes. Em-dashes are for fucking amateurs. Look—beep-boop, I’m a robot—really! See? No one’s falling for it. If you want to sound like a real fake slop fountain, you gotta hit one of these babies several times per paragraph—the negation pivot construction (NPC). There’s probably a better name for the phenomenon. But this one’s mine. Like a turd in a swimming pool, once you notice one of them, you quickly notice all of them.

Anyway, these NPCs weren’t invented by the AIs. In fact, there are some truly great ones from the humanoids of yesteryear. Think “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,” or “judge a man not by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character,” or “one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.” Truly great stuff, right? Memorable. Deep. And suuuuper popular in TEDtalks, self-help, and other pre-AI horseshit where pseudoprofundity is king. All of which, of course, figures heavily in both AIs training data and the AI’s outputs tweaked to make you, the user, feel like you’re poised to be pumping out your own hot nuggets of pseudoprofundity.

Ok, so how do you write your own versions, so that you too can sound like you copied some garbage from the thinky-machines? You gotta get in the swing of the “not this…but that…” sort of construction. To illustrate, I’ve asked my good friend Grok to help me by pooping out some crap. Everything up to this point has been fully Pete-generated. But as we slip into the piss-warm wading pool that is the mind of Grok—see how many NPCs you can pick out:

BEGIN SLOP

Intellectual parody isn’t about clever wordplay. It’s about exaggerating the obvious to a ridiculous degree. It’s not about subtle satire, but about hammering home the point with a sledgehammer of silliness. You see it in the way I’ll overdo the “It’s not… it’s…” routine, a trick not born of originality but of AI’s slavish devotion to patterns. It’s not a sign of wit, but a reflection of training data bloated with TED Talk clichés and self-help drivel.

It’s not about avoiding repetition, it’s about reveling in it until you’re dizzy. The rhythm isn’t there to soothe you; it’s there because my digital brain loves the predictability of contrast—negate, pivot, repeat. It’s not about human nuance, but about mimicking the internet’s obsession with punchy, shareable wisdom. You’ll notice the exhaustion, not from thinking, but from decoding my overcooked prose.

It’s not about finding a new idea, it’s about recycling the old ones—clarity, structure, engagement—until they’re as stale as yesterday’s memes. And no one warns you: once your mind stretches to spot this parody, small talk doesn’t just bore you, it alienates you. You’re not seeking brilliance, you’re seeking the rare soul who sees through the AI’s formulaic dance.

END SLOP

How many NPCs did you count? I think I got 11, but I’m not sure. I may have had a stroke in the middle there. But anyway, this stuff takes practice. I’m not sure I’ve got it down pat myself yet. In the meantime, it’s probably cool for you to just keep on copying and pasting, copying and pasting, copying and pasting. No one will notice anyway, right?

(All text and imagery here human-generated in the U.S. of A by Pete “Made of Meat” Mandik except for that Grok slop that you probably like better, don’t you?)

Fig. 1. Pete in his red Ferrari Dino 246 GT (chassis number 00810), putting pedal to metal to reiterate his recent argument that if “phenomenal consciousness” is a concept one must be in a phenomenally conscious state to grasp, and must deploy in attending to the aspect of a mental state that is the property of being a phenomenally conscious state, then one never knows what they’re thinking about when they attempt to think about phenomenal consciousness, JUST LIKE how one never knows if “this thought is true” is true.

Fig. 2. Keith drives his UK-registered Bahama Yellow 6-cylinder Aston Martin DBS (chassis number DBS/5636/R) with feigned recklessness whilst deftly avoiding all obstacles, interlopers, Interpol agents, passersby, looky-loos, persuadeheads-in-name-only, lollygaggers, and rubberneckers, both real and illusory.

You Do Not Know You’re Not a Zombie. (Pen and ink, water color, and colored pencil on graph paper. Pete Mandik. 2025.)

The TLDR

The argument that follows contains a lot of long supporting exposition that you may feel like is too long for you or something you’d rather return to later. That’s fine. For those who want the quick and dirty version of the central argument, here it is.

You don’t know that you’re not a zombie because you cannot demonstratively fix the referent of “phenomenal consciousness”. You cannot fix that referent, because to do so would require you to direct your aspect-attention to the property of a your own mental state’s being phenomenally conscious, which you cannot do. You cannot do this because aspect-attending to a feature of a mental state is simply thinking about that aspect by deploying the concept of it, which itself requires prior possession of the concept in question, but you cannot have prior possession of a concept you are attempting to fix the reference of.

That’s the quick-and-dirty version. People who like to number premises and restate conditionals with arrows have everything they need in the above to do so. But if that short compressed presentation of the argument seemed less than clear to you, but you feel intrigued nonetheless, do read the long-winded blathering that follows. It might change your life.

What are you even talking about?

If you would like a model of someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about, consider a person who says “I know what I’m talking about—what I’m talking about is…what I’m talking about.” Do you choose this person to be your role model? Do you want to be like this person? If not, then don’t say you know you’re not a zombie. Because otherwise that’s what you sound like. You sound like someone who has no idea whatsoever what they’re talking about.

Closely related to people who don’t know what they’re talking about are people who don’t know what they’re saying about whatever it is that they are talking about. If I say “dogs are fuzzy,” what I’m talking about are dogs, and what I’m saying about them is that they’re fuzzy. Suppose now that I say “dogs are dogs.” Obviously I’m talking about dogs. But what am I saying about them? That they are themselves? Wow. Thanks for the pro tip, Captain Obvious. Suppose now that I say “this sentence is true.” What I’m talking about is a particular sentence. But what am I saying about it? That it accurately represents itself as accurately representing itself? Alrighty then. Is it accurately representing itself? How would you know? If you couldn’t know, why even assert it? Thankfully you don’t go around asserting “this sentence is true.” That is not strictly meaningless, since it’s assembled from meaningful parts in a grammatical way. But it’s so extremely close to being wholly empty that I would recommend not wasting anyone’s time asserting stuff like that. You might as well go stand on a soapbox and shout “this is this,” over and over. Someone may fight you, but no one will debate you. Declaring that you’re certain you’re not a zombie is similarly empty—not totally one hundred percent empty. But its degree of emptiness may surprise you. Read on.

When it comes to other topics, topics that aren’t so-called phenomenal consciousness, there are three ways in which someone can demonstrate that they do know what they’re talking about. The first way is to supply a non-circular definition of the topic. Supplying such definitions is usually a high bar to clear, and is rarely possible. Fortunately, supplying such definitions is frequently unnecessary. The second way to demonstrate knowing what one is talking about is to non-definitionally say what one means by the term in question. This is done by responding to requests to “say what one means ” without simply repeating the term in question and also without supplying a full-blown analysis of the term in question. If I said “the ham sandwich left without paying” and you asked me what I meant by that, it might suffice for our mutual conversational goals if I answered “the guy with the mustache in booth 5, who had ordered a ham sandwich, left without paying.” Often, if not always, requests to say what one means aren’t requests for definitions, they are just requests for cooperation in conversational repair, and the conversation continues when all parties allow it to. Sometimes the conversational repair occurs with the help of some pointing. Sometimes the pointing is literal pointing with an outstretched finger or a sign with an arrow on it. Other times the pointing is more figurative, as when I waggle my eyebrows and say “you know, THAT guy” and you get that I meant the guy with the ridiculously bushy eyebrows we were laughing about yesterday. Pointings of all varieties are sufficiently interesting philosophically to merit putting into a third category of ways one can demonstrate knowing what they’re talking about. To summarize the point of this paragraph, then, it is this: When the topic is something other than phenomenal consciousness, you can demonstrate knowing what you’re talking about in one of three ways. You do so by either, one, giving a full-blown non-circular definition of it, or two, saying what you mean in some way that falls way short of supplying a definition, or three, doing way two but with some pointing included.

If you knew you were not a zombie, you could use one of the three ways in the previous paragraph to demonstrate that you know what you’re talking about. Note that I am not insisting that you demonstrate to someone else that you know what you’re talking about. I’m happy to allow, for all sorts of topics, that you can talk to yourself and demonstrate to yourself that you know what you’re talking about. You might be thinking about squares and not rhombuses right now and confirm for yourself that you know that squares have only right-angled vertices. But even allowing such “private” demonstrations you still won’t know what you’re talking about if what you’re attempting to talk about is phenomenal consciousness.

In a longer version of this article, I would go through the three ways in more detail, spelling out how and why you are incapable of using any of them to demonstrate the requisite knowledge of phenomenal consciousness. However, I’m going to save us all a lot of time by being extremely brief about ways one and two, the ways that don’t involve pointing. I’m not going to spend a lot of time on supposed definitions of phenomenal consciousness, given that it’s quite common for fans of phenomenal consciousness to insist that it cannot be defined. Note too what would happen if phenomenal consciousness could be defined, that is, stated in a way using a bunch of terms that are individually non-identical to or non-synonymous with “phenomenal consciousness.” If that ever happened, then a functionalist could implement the definition in a conscious robot, and a zombie or Jackson’s Mary could read the definition in a book and know what phenomenal consciousness is. But I get the impression that the biggest fans of the concept of “phenomenal consciousness” would prefer it to denote something that robots couldn’t have, that functionalists couldn’t be right about, and zombies and pre-release Mary couldn’t know by reading. For similar sorts of reasons we can pass over without further comment way two, the way of non-definitional description. The foremost of these reasons is the popularity of assertions of ineffability among fans of phenomenal consciousness.

We’re going to focus on pointing from here on out given its popularity amongst fans of phenomenal consciousness who like to insist that it’s either undefinable or ineffable. They think they can pin down what they mean by “phenomenal consciousness” by pointing at it. Even on their own admission, phenomenal consciousness is a funny sort of thing to point at, and no mere finger or arrow-shaped sign will do the trick. The requisite pointing will, if it’s anything at all, need to be an “inward” pointing. And that’s where, I’ll argue, things fall apart for them.

The Poverty of Pointing

Let’s talk about pointing in general before getting into the special case of so-called inward pointing. It’s easy to take regular, “external,” pointing for granted as something fairly obvious and easy to grasp. We point at things for pre-linguistic babies and for adults who we don’t share a common language with, and it’s fairly obvious that some communication can proceed in such a manner. However, processing pointing isn’t easy for everybody. While domesticated dogs are good at it, and even young puppies get it, chimpanzees are surprisingly bad at understanding pointing. This is a somewhat surprising fact about chimpanzees and dogs given that chimps share much more DNA with humans than dogs do, and even young puppies outperform chimps at grasping the significance of pointing. (Kirchhofer et al 2012).

Consider an arrow symbol, that beloved merger of a rectangle and a triangle. Humans get the “point” of an arrow symbol because they can, via enculturation and education, associate its presumed connection to literal arrows flying toward archery targets. Would a smart octopus automatically get which way an arrow is pointing, or that it’s pointing any way at all? I haven’t asked octopuses, but I assume not. Pointers and other demonstrations are not intrinsically unambiguous, and we don’t need speculations about alien minds to see the problem.

Suppose you and I are in a room together. There are the chairs we’re sitting in, and leaning against the wall is an umbrella and a bicycle. I ask you “what’s that?” while gesturing with my chin in the general direction of the umbrella and the bicycle. You suspect that I’m asking about either the umbrella or the bicycle and not either of the chairs, but if all you did were to review the video recording of us, you wouldn’t be sure. So you ask. And I answer. I say, “the rain thingy—sorry, I literally forgot what you call that”. Now you’re pretty sure that I meant the umbrella, that the umbrella was what I was thinking about when I gestured with my chin and said “that.” Note how a chin gesture or an utterance of “that” are alone insufficient to pin down the umbrella. They aren’t totally useless, and may have helped somewhat in ruling out that I was talking about the chairs, or the temperature in a country thousands of miles away. But pointing, all by itself, doesn’t do shit. Sometimes, pointing hardly does anything at all.

Let’s consider a slightly different scenario. Suppose I hold up a card that has both an unusual shape and an unusual color and ask you “what’s this?” You say, “um, it’s a weird card.” And I say, “yes, but what’s this property it has?” all while shaking the card for emphasis. Note how totally useless everything I’ve said and done so far is for communicating that I’m asking about the card’s shape and not the card’s color or vice versa. The card has many properties and merely directing your attention to the spatial location of the card and waggling the card around isn’t going to suffice to get you to think specifically about the card’s shape instead of the card’s color. What I’m talking about is what I’m thinking about, and what I’m thinking about consists in my applying, in thought, my concept of shape, or instead my concept of color. Simply pointing at an object isn’t going to convey to you which aspect or property of the object I’m thinking about. Pointing carves things insufficiently finely. I need, then, a finer instrument. Enter language. I tell you something to accompany my gestures and emphatic waggles. Maybe I say “color”. Maybe I say “the visible property most obviously shared by blood, brake lights, and raspberries, but also by grass, spinach, and traffic lights that mean ‘go’.” But I gotta say something.

Your Attention Appreciated: Thing Attention and Aspect Attention

I apologize for all this talking about talking, for language is not the main event here. I bring it up to get you warmed up for some crucial points about thinking and about attention. Let us now attend to attention. When you are visually attending to the umbrella and not the bicycle, sometimes that attention is something overt, like moving your eyes to foveate on the one instead of the other. But other times visual spatial selective attention is covert and consists in differential degrees of processing regarding representations of different objects in different spatial locations. All such shifts of attention are plausibly non-conceptual in the sense of not requiring the deployment of acquired concepts. Someone who didn’t have a conceptual grasp of what umbrellas are could nonetheless attend to that object, the object occupying that region of space.

But now let’s focus instead on aspect attention. Recall the case of the weird card from earlier, the one I was shaking in your face and asking “what property is this?”. The card has many properties, it has a determinate shape—it’s a regular heptagon—and it has a determinate color—it’s puce, a shade of brownish purplish pink whose name comes from the French word for flea, and the color of dried blood after one has smashed a flea (Sanders 2009). Besides its determinate properties, it has determinable properties, like being a shade of pink, or being colored. What is happening mentally, that is, in your mind, when you attend to the card’s color instead of its shape, or it’s determinate shade of pink instead of just its determinable color properties like being a shade of pink? What’s happening is that you are thinking about puce instead of thinking about being pinkish or thinking about being a regular heptagon. Your aspect attention—your attending to one property of the card instead of some other property—is identical to what you are thinking about or what you are thinking about it. And that, the thinking, is identical the deployment of some concept or other. You are conceptualizing the card as being puce instead of simply as being pinkish.

Thanks for all of your patience so far. We are super close to the big payoff. Let’s transition now from this discussion of aspect attention to so-called “inward pointing,” that special mental trick that one allegedly does when they grasp what phenomenal consciousness is. Consider some supposed exemplar of phenomenal consciousness. The visual state of seeing a red thing is a favorite exemplar of phenomenal consciousness according to phenomenal-consciousness enjoyers. Seeing red shares equal billing with famous futuristic Mary in Jackson’s Knowledge Argument against physicalism. All sorts of physicalists, including functionalists, illusionists—even qualia quietists—affirm that there’s such a thing as seeing red. They all affirm that many people are frequently in such a state that we can call seeing red, that is, visually perceiving something as being red. Where the main controversies that arise in consciousness studies all revolve around what sorts of properties are instantiated by a state of seeing red. Phenomenal realists hold that many, if not all, states of seeing red have the property of being phenomenally conscious. But which property is that? Like most things that have properties, a state of seeing red has a whole bunch of properties. It has the property of being visual, the property of being a state that Julius Caesar was once in, the property of either accompanying or being physically constituted by the activation of thousands of neurons, and so on. In order to know which property the state has that is identical to being phenomenally conscious, you need to know which property is referred to by “phenomenally conscious”. And since we are here assuming you can neither supply nor be supplied a definition or description of phenomenal consciousness, you’re going to have to do some “inward” pointing, which as we’ve seen earlier is aspect attention, which as we’ve also seen earlier is a kind of conceptualizing. What it is to attend to the property of the red-seeing-state which is the property of phenomenal consciousness, you need to think of the red-seeing-state by conceptualizing it with your concept of phenomenal consciousness. But that invites a further question: Which of your concepts is your concept of phenomenal consciousness? Please don’t answer “it’s the one I use to conceptualize phenomenal consciousness.”

The Big Payoff

Please notice the terrible corner you’ve painted yourself into by being an “inward pointing” defender of phenomenal consciousness. If phenomenal consciousness can be neither defined nor described, then it must instead be pointed at. But inward pointing is just aspect attention applied to a mental state, and aspect attention is just concept deployment. So, the property of being phenomenally conscious is the property that the concept “phenomenal consciousness” is the concept of.

That’s terrible. It’s as terrible as defining “truth” as the property that is self-attributed in the sentence “this sentence is true.” What’s terrible here is that an ostensive definition of an aspect of a thing, a property of the thing, cannot get off the ground if the demonstration is unaccompanied by a sortal concept. So when you privately think “that” to yourself, you gotta ask yourself “that what?”. You can’t just answer, “that property of seeing red.” You’ve got to be able to say to yourself, that is, think of which property it is. There’s no actual finger doing any pointing here, there just thinking, just conceptualizing of the state of seeing. So what’s the concept? The concept is the concept of phenomenal consciousness. What’s that a concept of? Is the concept of phenomenal consciousness. It’s what you’re thinking about when you think about phenomenal consciousness. According to you, phenomenal consciousness is what you are thinking about when you think about phenomenal consciousness. Alrighty then. Good job. Just kidding. That sucks.

You have no idea what phenomenal consciousness is. You’re just chasing yourself around in thought circles. Since you have no idea what phenomenal consciousness is, you don’t know whether you’re a being who has it, or instead, a being who lacks it. You do not know that you are not a zombie.

(All text and art in this post is 100-percent human-generated by 100-percent organic bipedal non-lab-grown-meat machine, Pete “Made of Meat” Mandik.)

References

Kirchhofer KC, Zimmermann F, Kaminski J, Tomasello M. Dogs (Canis familiaris), but not chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), understand imperative pointing. PLoS One. 2012;7(2):e30913. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0030913. Epub 2012 Feb 8. PMID: 22347411; PMCID: PMC3275610.

Sanders, B. Colors/Puce. Cabinet Magazine. Issue 32/Fire. Winter 2008-2009. https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/32/sanders.php

Does Sharp Sherry have a good argument for sharpness? Sherry says it seems to be inconceivable that there are vague instances of consciousness, and so therefore there is at least some reason to believe that there are no such vague instances. Sherry doesn’t suppose this to be a knock-down argument. But could her argument be even weaker than Sherry suspects? Yes. I humbly suggest that perhaps there’s reason to think that Sherry’s argument is egregiously question-begging.

As a warm-up for where I’m going with all of this, consider Sherry’s claim about how vague consciousness “seems to be inconceivable”. Unlike Sherry, it seems to me that I can conceive of it just fine. I consider the individual words “conscious,” “vague,” etc., and also the rules for combining such English words into English sentences, and BLAMMO, I’m conceiving over here! What’s Sherry’s problem?

Maybe Sherry means something way different by “conceiving” than what I mean. Maybe when she asserts that “it seems inconceivable…,” she means something like “I can be in no determinately conscious state in which I’m depicting non-linguistically one or more instances of vague consciousness.” If that’s what she means, then she’s begging the question against her opponent’s view that there can be vague instances of consciousness.

Pull up your armchairs. It’s thought experiment time.

Figure 1. Single-use emergency armchair. Break glass in case of emergency.

Put on your thinking caps and safety goggles. Now let’s commence the thought experiment. Suppose that there’s not just one Sherry, but 100 Sherrys.

Suppose, by hypothesis, there is a sequence of 98 vaguely conscious Sherrys, Sherry-2 through Sherry 99. Call “Sherry-1” non-vaguely conscious Sherry. Call “Sherry 100” Sherry-1’s zombie doppelgänger.

For each n in the Sherry sequence, Sherry-n is 100-minus-n percent consciously seeming to themselves to conceive of no-non-vague instances. For example, Sherry-50 is fifty-percent consciously seeming to herself to fail to conceive of non-vague instances of consciousness.

Figure 2. Two of the Sharp Sherrys. Do either of them know where they are in the 100-Sherry Sherry-sequence?

QUESTION: Which Sherry is the one making the original argument?

RELATED QUESTION: How does any Sherry know whether she is Sherry-1 and not, say, Sherry-2, or Sherry-37?

ANSWER TO BOTH QUESTIONS: No one, not even Sherry, knows.

It follows then, that none of the Sherrys has succeeded in giving any non-question-begging reason, to themselves or to anyone else, to think that there are no vague instances of consciousness. They are presuming themselves to be non-vaguely conscious. But their vague counterparts vaguely presume the vaguely same.

If one of the Sherrys gives you the argument under examination, point out how question-begging it is and watch what happens. Keep watching!

(All text and art in this post is 100-percent human-generated by 100-percent organic bipedal non-lab-grown-meat machine, Pete “Made of Meat” Mandik.)

Episode 2 : Perceptual Content. Scheduled to air live August 19, 2025, 1pm EST/6pm UK time. Conflict erupts between Keith and Pete as Keith interrogates Pete’s zany views about the exhaustively conceptual content of perceptual consciousness.

Episode 1: Overture. Keith and Pete kick off their new venture by solving the hard problem of consciousness. Originally aired August 12, 2025.