Procrastination

 I have reached peaks of procrastination that even I might once have thought were too great, too high. I've done it with the help of 'working from home', this monstrous situation that allows me to practice the piano, play video games, read nonsense, and any other disastrous activity, any time I like.

Back when I worked at the lab, in an office, I could only procrastinate for so long before I was cornered and had no choice but to do-the-thing. I couldn't play the piano or watch Netflix on a Tuesday afternoon in the lab. I might avoid work for a while by reading internet garbage, but eventually that runs out - it really does, it just takes a few days - and I have to do-the-thing.

But this...

Since the beginning of the pandemic, I've learned a Chopin nocturne - pretty well - laid groundwork for several Rachmaninoff preludes, memorized the 3rd movement of Beethoven's 'Moonlight' Sonata (biggest thing I've memorized in.. decades, probably?), and now I'm getting the hang of the awesome last movement of his first Sonata. I'm getting pretty good at improvising random lines over 9 chords! It's great! 

And it's worthless and stupid and dangerous, since I'm not a pianist and I'm not getting paid to play the piano. I have papers to write, finish, revise; experiments to plan; blah blah blah.

A point on interpreting inattentional blindness studies

On Inattentional Agnosia

In a recently published study, Cohen et al showed that, under very naturalistic conditions (viewing 3D natural scene videos in VR), observers often fail to notice that the entire periphery of the visual stimulus has been rendered colorless, i.e. completely desaturated. Cohen et al conclude that the visual periphery is far less colorful than one might have thought. They state this conclusion in several ways:

“these results demonstrate a surprising lack of awareness of peripheral color in everyday life”

-here qualifying the phenomenon as ‘lack of awareness of peripheral color’. Later, they say it less ambiguously: “If color perception in the real world is indeed as sparse as our findings suggest, the final question to consider is how this can be. Why does it intuitively feel like we see so much color when our data suggest we see so little?”.

So, Cohen et al believe that their data suggest we see very little color. This particular claim is logically absurd, however. I explain why in the following:

Cohen et al clearly believe that the phenomenon they present is a case of inattentional blindness. Inattentional blindness phenomena are frequently encountered in visual experience, and are not difficult to bring about in experimental scenarios. Typically, an observer is shown some stimuli connected to an explicit or implicit task; during the course of the task, some unexpected stimulus is inserted, and the observer may fail to notice. These failures to notice are often very retrospectively surprising, since once the observer knows what to look for (once they’ve been debriefed) it is easy to see the missed stimulus. Experimenters often conclude from these results – both the failures to notice and the retrospective surprise - that, in one way or another, the observers (and the rest of us) must see far less than they think they do. But this is not the kind of conclusion that Cohen et al are drawing.

The most famous example of an inattentional blindness phenomenon has got to be Simons and Chabris’ gorilla. In their experiment, observers watched a video of several people playing a ball-passing game. The players move around constantly, throwing the ball back and forth; the observer’s task is to count the number of times that certain players catch the ball. With no warning, halfway through the video, a person in a gorilla suit wanders into the middle of the ballgame, stops and waves at the camera, and then wanders back out of the frame – the ball game continues. Many observers do not notice the gorilla at all!

Simons and Chabris used this and similar results to advance a version of the “we see less than we think” argument. But what if we transplant Cohen et al’s conclusion to the gorilla experiment?

Here is a sentence in general terms that describes both studies:

“Observers viewed a complex stimulus that engaged their visual attention. After a while, a change was introduced to the stimulus that was retrospectively obvious. Many observers did not notice the change.”

Now, here is the reasonable, broad conclusion (a la Simons & Chabris):

“We must not notice as many things as we would expect based on what seems to be obviously noticeable.”

And here is the unreasonable, specific conclusion (a la Cohen et al):

“We must always be having the kinds of experiences evoked by the changed stimulus.”

In the Cohen et al study, they replaced a colorful scene with a colorless scene; observers didn’t notice; so, according to their reasoning, we must actually be having colorless experiences all the time (or more precisely, experiences of “so little” color). Otherwise, the reasoning seems to go, we would notice the change from colorful to colorless. We don’t notice it because it was colorless all along (they do include a caveat that maybe it’s the other way around, that even the grayscale scene evokes a colorful ‘filled-in’ experience, but that doesn’t seem to be their favored interpretation).

For the gorilla study, a gorilla was introduced incongruously into a ball game; observers didn’t notice; so, we must actually be having experiences of incongruous gorillas all the time (or, maybe more precisely, experiences of gorillas in ball games?). Otherwise, we would notice the change from a no-gorilla to an incongruous-gorilla scene. I don’t want to go on with this because it’s obviously absurd. But isn’t it the same logic as the color argument?

The absurdity comes in part from arguing from a complete lack of evidence: they are taking absence of evidence (failure to notice the change) to be evidence of absence (of color experiences). The experiments they are doing have no bearing, it seems to me, on whether or not their observers are actually experiencing color in their peripheral vision.

But more than this, the absurd conclusion comes from a lack of engagement with the important concepts at play. Color, most importantly. What does it mean to see color? That's for another time, I guess.

Before I finish here, an attempt at charity:

Perhaps the logic Cohen et al would derive from Simons & Chabris is somewhere in between the broad & reasonable, and the narrow and unreasonable:

"If we do not notice something, we are not experiencing it."

This is a strong claim, which I know that Cohen et al and many others would more-or-less endorse. But it does demand some engagement with some basic questions: if one's experience is colorless, what is it like? Is it like experience of a monochrome scene? Why are shades of gray excluded from 'color' status? What is special about 'chromatic hues'? Is there really less to seeing a monochrome scene than there is to seeing a color scene? Think about it: if you are seeing a spot as blue, that precludes your seeing it as any shade of gray, just as much as it precludes it from being yellow or red or whatever. Each part of the visual field always - it seems, at least - has some color in the broad sense.

In fact, Cohen et al did find that subjects always noticed if all color, in the broad sense, was removed from the periphery, i.e. if it were replaced with a flat gray field. Which would seem to defeat their basic conclusion that we are not seeing color, or much color. So, again, what is supposed to be so special about chromatic hues? Interesting questions, definitely.

A dialogue! (old but good)

I ask you to point your eyes up towards the clear sky and to tell me what you see. “An expanse of blue,” you say. I nod and say, “Ah, so simple. Blue is just one thing – your visual experience is so simple. Is that surprising?” 

This doesn’t sound right to you. You shake your head. “No, it’s not simple. There’s blue everywhere. Every location is blue; every part of the space is blue. It’s clearly not simple – it’s a vast structure of blue spots. I’m not even sure how to describe it to you.”

“Well,” I say, “you’re most likely confabulating this description. Through your life experience with using vision, you know that the sky is extended spatially, and that if you move your eyes around you’ll still see blue, and you know from moment-to-moment that the last thing you saw was what you’re seeing right now – simple blue – so you are illuded into claiming you see an expanse of blue. But you actually see no such thing.”

“How can you claim this?” you ask. “Why should you doubt what I tell you?”

I shake my head sadly. “Subjective reports are known for their fallibility. People often claim to have seen things that they could not have seen; they claim their experiences have qualities that they cannot have. But I’ll suspend my disbelief for a bit. Can you convince me?”

You seem a little annoyed, but you nod. “Perhaps.”

“Okay. How many parts are there to this blue expanse?” I ask. You don’t know. We go through some basic tests and it seems that you can’t really tell me about more than a handful of spots at once – yet you persist in claiming that the actual number of blue ‘spots’ is vast.

“Are they all there at once?” You seem to think that they are. “Could it be that the parts are there only when you look for them?”

“No,” you say, “it feels like a big, continuous expanse of blue. It’s not a little searchlight.”

I proceed. “But I’m asking you to convince me of that, not just to tell me again and again. As far as I can tell, you can only report the color of a few spots at a time – a big ‘sky-sized’ spot, or a few little ‘point-sized’ spots. But your momentary capacity seems to be extremely small – where is this huge expanse? And how does it make any sense that you should experience such enormous complexity, but be able to interact with only a vanishingly small portion of it?”

You seem unsettled: “Why,” you ask, “would I claim to see an expanse of spots when I only see a few at a time? What do I gain by confabulation?”

“But it’s a meaningful confabulation – you are unaware of the limits or boundaries between your momentary visual experience, your memories of recent experiences, and your expectations of what future experiences will be like. The reports you generate are more a confusion of these different processes, rather than a confabulation.” I concede a word, but little else.

“Well then,” you say slowly, “what does this confusion feel like? Might it feel like an expanse of blue? Or do you assume that only the perceptual process constitutes experience?”

I miss your point. “But we’re exactly talking about perceptual experience – of seeing blue – don’t try to shift the goal posts.”

“No, we aren’t talking strictly about perceptual experience, though I do think my experience is fairly categorized as perceptual rather than memorial or expectative. You’re the one who introduced other ‘processes’ into the conversation.”

“Well, this can’t work,” I say. “I can concede the process thing, but this doesn’t address the reportability issue at all, and it’s highly implausible, even worse than if you put everything in ‘perception’. Are you claiming that you experience all your memories or all your expectations, at once?”

“No no,” you dismiss the idea with a wave of your hand. “I was just asking – what do you think such confusion should feel like?”

“Like what you’re feeling now,” I say.

You roll your eyes. “Come on. Clearly the confusion you’re suggesting should feel very different from what I am feeling – or no, from what I claim to be feeling. Otherwise we wouldn’t be having this debate.”

“Well, I can’t say exactly. You are experiencing what you have access to, and you can report what you have access to; so your experience must be of a narrow set of blue spots. And you claim otherwise because whenever you check other spots, you immediately begin to experience them – so you mistakenly believe that they were there all along. Your experience isn’t what you think it is – and it isn’t what you claim.”

You seem perplexed. “Does that mean that unless I am queried about my experience, I am not under this illusion? I only become mistaken when asked to describe what I’m experiencing?”

“Maybe?”

You decide to change tack. “Okay. Can you tell me what substantive difference there is between this illusory or mistaken experience and an actual experience of a blue expanse?”

“Well, it would be a huge difference – the illusory experience is actually very limited and consists of very few parts, including the few blue spots and a particular set of expectations and memories that lead you to claim that you see an expanse of blue. The actual experience of a blue expanse would be just that – many many more spots, and no necessary memory or expectation aspects, though you’d probably also have those in addition.”

“I can’t help but think,” you say carefully, “that you’re doing something slippery here. You want to know why I claim to see a blue expanse, and your explanation has to do with these non-perceptual processes and how they seamlessly support my very limited perceptual process. And you reject my explanation for my claim – that I really am experiencing a blue expanse – because I can’t report the whole expanse to you. But can I report all my memories and expectations to you? Do you know how to collect such data?”

“I think that the fact you’re able to so quickly report on what you see at randomly cued locations suggests that those processes must be at work.”

“Surely they are, and I can tell you that I do indeed have experiences of memory and expectation. But I’m wondering why you think you must reject my explanation but are satisfied with your own.”

“Certainly I’m not satisfied – there is much to learn. We really understand perception etc rather poorly at this stage.”

You shake your head.