A post by Ana Elisa Ulloa Labariega

Imagine a mobile—the kind that hangs above a child’s bed. Glass figures suspended at different lengths, each positioned in relation to the others. The structure is not arbitrary: it has been built to support those particular elements, with their specific weights, distances, and tensions. At the same time, the structure itself takes shape in relation to what it is meant to hold; frame and elements are not fully independent, but emerge together as a single configuration.

For a moment, everything holds together. Each figure moves slightly, but never entirely on its own. Its motion is shaped by the others, and by the frame that sustains them all. In other words, the range of movement is delimited by the possibilities given by the whole.

But the balance is conditional.

If one figure becomes heavier, the strings must adjust. If new elements are added, the structure must redistribute tension. Changes are possible, but only up to a point. Once something shifts, it cannot simply be undone: it can only be rebalanced. At the same time there are limits to what it can sustain. At some point, the configuration no longer holds: the system strains, distorts, and eventually breaks. Pieces fall to the ground. Some may remain intact, but the mobile as it was—and the structure that held it together—cannot be recovered.

Scientific models, I want to suggest, are more like this than we usually admit.

Usually, models are understood as tools for explanation and prediction. But this way of putting things risks obscuring another dimension of modeling: its narrative character, sustained and structured through imagination.

To call modeling “narrative” is not to suggest that scientists tell stories in any literary sense. Rather, it is to recognize that models organize elements in a temporally and logically structured way, allowing us to explore possible states of affairs (Frigg & Nguyen 2022; Kind 2022). In this broader sense, narratives are not defined by plot or characters, but by their capacity to guide us through sequences of transformation under constraints (Kind 2022). Scientific models do something similar: they structure a space of possibilities and allow us to move within it.

Understanding a model, in this view, is not simply a matter of grasping a representation from the outside. It is more like moving within a structured space. One follows the relations it establishes, tests how far they can be extended, and senses when coherence begins to give way. What matters is not only what the model represents, but how it holds together—and how long it can continue to do so under pressure.

This becomes especially clear when we consider how models are actually used in scientific practice. They are not static objects, but tools for exploration. We adjust parameters, introduce variations, and consider alternative scenarios. Counterfactual reasoning, idealizations, and heuristic scaffolds are not isolated techniques, but ways of sustaining a space that can be navigated in an intelligible and coherent way. This kind of structured imaginative engagement has been increasingly emphasized in recent work on the epistemology of imagination (Kind 2022; Nanay 2016).

It is here that the narrative dimension becomes especially helpful. Counterfactuals are not just “what-if” statements: they are moves within a structured space of possibilities, as has been explored in work on imagination and make-believe (Walton 1990). Idealizations are not mere distortions; they help stabilize that space so that it can be explored without collapsing under its own complexity—think of the well-known example of spherical cows. Even highly abstract mathematical or computational models—such as climate simulations or population dynamics—encode temporal development, conditional dependencies, and transformations that can be followed step by step. They do not tell stories, but they make something like narrative traversal possible: a way of moving through a structured configuration, following its transformations, dependencies, and limits (Frigg & Nguyen 2022; Walton 1990).

This perspective also brings into view a dimension of modeling that is often treated with suspicion: the role of aesthetic judgment. Qualities such as simplicity, symmetry, beauty, and elegance frequently guide the construction and evaluation of models. These are sometimes dismissed as merely subjective preferences or biases. Yet, in practice, they often function as more than that, shaping how models are constructed and understood as structured systems.

A familiar example is Kepler’s early commitment to circular planetary orbits. Circles were associated with perfection: simple, symmetrical, and mathematically elegant. When observational evidence forced a shift to elliptical orbits, this is often described as a case in which aesthetic preference had to be abandoned. Nevertheless, the transition is more revealing than this story suggests. What Kepler gave up was not aesthetic judgment as such, but a particular conception of it. The ellipse does not eliminate order; it introduces a more complex and less immediately transparent form of it—one that accommodates irregularity while preserving coherence. In this sense, aesthetic criteria do not disappear with the change of model. They remain, but in altered form. What counts as elegance, symmetry, or beauty is itself reconfigured by the new structure.

The point, then, is not that science leaves aesthetics behind once better evidence arrives. It is that aesthetic judgment must sometimes be educated by the very models it helps to guide. A form that first appears less perfect may come to seem more compelling once one learns to perceive the order it makes possible. From this perspective, aesthetic features function as cognitive guides. A model feels “elegant” or “coherent” when it can be inhabited without excessive resistance—when one can move through it, follow its implications, and extend it without immediate breakdown. Conversely, what is often experienced as “ugliness” may reflect a kind of friction: a difficulty in navigating the structure or making its internal relations cohere. Yet this too can shift. What initially appears awkward or resistant may, with time, reveal a different form of order—one that becomes perceptible only once we learn how to move within it.

This tension is not a flaw in modeling; it is part of its epistemic function. Models are provisional structures. They allow us to explore possibilities, but they also expose their own limits. When a model begins to resist extension—when adjustments accumulate, when coherence starts to strain—we encounter a kind of epistemic friction. That friction is not merely a sign of failure; it is informative. It signals that the structure may need to be revised or replaced.

Seen in this light, scientific understanding is not a matter of achieving a final, stable representation of the world. It is an ongoing activity: constructing, shaping, navigating, and revising models that are at once enabling and constraining.

To describe modeling as narrative is, therefore, not to reduce it to storytelling, but to recognize its dynamic and imaginative character. Models organize elements across a space of possibilities, guiding transitions and constraining developments. They make certain paths intelligible while excluding others. Working with a model is to follow those paths, to test their limits, and sometimes to reshape the structure itself.

This perspective invites a shift in how we think about scientific knowledge. Models are not simply tools for getting things right. They are frameworks that allow us to engage with the unknown—to explore, to extend, and to recognize when a once-coherent structure can no longer be sustained.

Like the mobile, they hold together only under certain conditions. They can be adjusted, changed, and sometimes transformed. But they can also collapse. And when they do, what we lose is not just a representation, but a way of moving through a space of possibilities.

Understanding, then, is not just a matter of seeing the world correctly. It is a matter of learning how to move within structures that make the world intelligible—structures shaped by imagination, constrained by evidence, and guided, in part, by our sense of what holds together.

References

Kind, Amy (2022). Imagination and Creative Thinking. Oxford University Press.

Nanay, Bence (2016). Aesthetics as Philosophy of Perception. Oxford University Press.

Frigg, Roman, and James Nguyen (2022). Modelling Nature: An Opinionated Introduction to Scientific Representation. Springer.

Walton, Kendall (1990). Mimesis as Make-Believe. Harvard University Press.

A post by Zachary Srivastava

Over the past five to ten years, there’s been a surge of interest in the role of imagination in science, particularly since the release of The Scientific Imagination, edited by Arnon Levy and Peter Godfrey-Smith (2019). As research continues, we can return to traditional problems from the literature on imagination and philosophy of science to see if our cross-disciplinary excursions have revealed new paths to exploring old problems. The comparisons between fictional characters or stories and scientific models on fiction views of models has led me to think about the problem I was working on in a broader context: how do we gain real understanding from fictional models? The question strikes me as highly similar to Colin Radford’s (1975) “How Can We Be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina?” and the paradox of fiction, which asks how we can justifiably be moved by the fate of Anna Karenina when we know she isn’t real. The similarity between the two questions led me to consider how the paradox of fiction could be repurposed for the philosophy of science. I call this new version the paradox of scientific fiction. This post examines both versions of the paradox, whether they’re truly posing analogous questions, and how this could shape how we think about the relationship between artistic and scientific imagination. 

The paradox of fiction is typically represented by three statements that cannot all be true. Consider the following formulation of the paradox of fiction from Florian Cova and Fabrice Teroni (2016, 930):

P1. We can feel genuine emotions for fictional characters.

P2. We do not believe that fictional characters exist.

P3. To feel genuine emotions, we must believe that these emotions are directed at actually existing objects.

There are a few modifications needed in order to shift the paradox to concern scientific fictions. First, rather than consider emotions, I propose considering epistemic reactions. The phrasing is intentionally vague and chosen to be neutral in the debate about the aims of science when considering potential solutions to the paradox. Second, fictional characters are replaced with scientific fictions; by which I mean things that are scientifically useful, but known to be untrue, such as idealized representations, thought experiments, models, simulations, and the like. There are ongoing debates in the literature over the status of fictions in science (Toon, 2010; Levy, 2012; Frigg & Nguyen, 2016; Thomasson, 2020; Salis, 2021). This too, seems to be relevant to how the paradox might be resolved, so again neutral language is preferable. So, the paradox of scientific fiction can be articulated as follows:

P1.*    We have genuine epistemic reactions to fictional objects.

P2.*    We do not believe that fictional objects exist.

P3.*    To achieve genuine epistemic reactions, we must believe the object of understanding actually exists.

The most pressing question to consider is whether these two paradoxes are really posing the same question. There are two main challenges that are worth considering. First, do the paradox of fiction and paradox of scientific fiction consider the same sense of fiction? If they do not, then it would cast doubt on whether we are dealing with the same kind of imagining. Second, is the broad notion of epistemic reactions the right substitute for emotions? As I will explain in more detail below, I think our focus should be on scientific understanding, but this also seems to bias us towards a particular type of solution.

The first question to consider is what we mean by fiction. Colin Radford (1975) asks: why are we moved by the fate of Anna Karenina when we know she isn’t real? From this, we might conclude that fictional characters are the sort of fiction Radford has in mind. This is in line with the majority of fiction views of scientific models. However, in “The New Fiction View of Models”, Fiora Salis (2021) provides reasons to think this might not be the case. One of the unique elements of her view, compared to other fiction views of models, is that models stand in for fictional stories rather than fictional characters. Rather than saying the Lotka-Volterra equations are comparable to Captain Ahab, we would say the Lotka-Volterra equations are like Moby Dick. Models are complex objects that involve a model description and model content. On Salis’ view, the description and content are distinct and only constitute a particular model when considered as a whole. Salis uses Kendall Walton’s prop theory of make-believe to connect truth claims to the fictional models.  The model description is a prop, like the text of a novel, and provides an initial set of fictional truths. It consists of symbols that prescribe how something should be imagined in a particular context and is used to specify a particular model. The content of the model refers to the fictional truths that can be indirectly inferred from the description (Salis, 2021). This seems like a promising view to hold for both paradoxes. We feel emotions towards the characters based on the descriptions of what happens to them, just as the description of the model guides the fictional truths we can derive about them.

The second question addresses whether epistemic reactions are the right substitute for emotions. The paradox of scientific fiction was formulated with general language of “epistemic reactions” in an attempt not to bias it towards certain types of solution. However, I’m not convinced that different types of epistemic reactions are equally suitable. Consider gaining scientific knowledge versus scientific understanding. Knowledge has a much closer association with truth, which can create difficulties when dealing with fictional models. For example, consider a scientific model that incorporates significant idealizations, such as the ideal gas law. We know that gas molecules do not really behave as the model prescribes, but it still provides us with a greater understanding of how gasses behave. Sometimes scientific progress often requires us to make posits or assumptions that are “true enough” or even known to be false (Elgin, 2004; Potochnik, 2017, 2020).

The non-factive standard of understanding seems to be more in line with the literature regarding the fittingness of emotions than a factive standard would. (Scarantino & de Sousa, 2021; Currie 2014). Understanding generally involves discussions of “grasping” or some other reference to the understanding as a cognitive achievement of the individual (Elgin, 2004; Potochnik, 2017; Le Bihan, 2016). Likewise emotional fit distinguishes between the cognitive and strategic rationality. While it might not be cognitively fitting for me to have a certain emotional reaction towards a fiction, it could be strategically fitting, i.e., in the sense that it is in the agent’s best interest. 

At this point, we have good reason to think the paradoxes are asking analogous questions. From here, the central question I want to consider is whether how we solve these paradoxes could give us good reason to believe artistic and scientific imagination are the same kind of activity. My general line of thinking is that resolving the paradoxes with a single solution would provide pro tanto reasons to believe the two kinds of imagining are the same kind of activity. On the other hand, if we think the solutions only apply to the paradox of fiction or the paradox of scientific fiction, then we would find pro tanto support to believe they are different activities.

I’m optimistic that both paradoxes can be resolved with the same solution. The standard approach is to reject the third premise, either by adopting a realist position towards fiction or arguing that belief is not a prerequisite for emotional reactions. Kendall Walton denies the first, claiming we feel quasi-emotions, not genuine ones, for fictional characters. Peter Langland-Hassan (2020) denies the second premise, arguing that we do believe that fictional characters exist within the context of the fiction. My plan for the project moving forward is to follow the standard approach and reject the third premise. In doing so, I plan to examine how the shift in philosophy of science from knowledge or truth towards understanding could also provide a blueprint for resolving the traditional paradox of fiction. That being said, I look forward to seeing other views regarding whether the two versions of the paradox press us to consider the same problem.

References

Cova, F., & Teroni, F. (2016). Is the paradox of fiction soluble in psychology? Philosophical Psychology, 29(6), 930–942. https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2016.1164306

Currie, G. (2014). Emotions fit for fiction. In S. Roeser & C. Todd (Eds.), Emotion and Value (pp. 146–166). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199686094.003.0010

Elgin, C. Z. (2004). True enough*. Philosophical Issues, 14(1), 113–131. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1533-6077.2004.00023.x

Frigg, R., & Nguyen, J. (2016). The fiction view of models reloaded. The Monist, 99(3), 225–242. https://doi.org/10.1093/monist/onw002

Langland-Hassan, P. (2020). Explaining imagination (First edition.). Oxford university press.

Le Bihan, S. (2016). Enlightening falsehoods: A modal view of scientific understanding. In Explaining Understanding (pp. 111–136). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315686110-7

Levy, A. (2012). Models, fictions, and realism: Two packages. Philosophy of Science, 79(5), 738–748. https://doi.org/10.1086/667992

Levy, A., & Godfrey-Smith, P. (2020). The scientific imagination: Philosophical and psychological perspectives. Oxford University press.

Potochnik, A. (2020). Idealization and Many Aims. Philosophy of Science, 87(5), 933–943. https://www-jstor-org.uc.idm.oclc.org/stable/48800964

— (2020). Idealization and many aims. Philosophy of Science, 87(5), 933–943. https://doi.org/10.1086/710622

Radford, C., & Weston, M. (1975). How can we be moved by the fate of anna karenina? Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, 49(1), 67–94. https://doi.org/10.1093/aristoteliansupp/49.1.67

Salis, F. (2021). The new fiction view of models. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 72(3), 717–742. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjps/axz015

Scarantino, A., & de Sousa, R. (2021). Emotion. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2021). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2021/entries/emotion/

Thomasson, A. L. (2020). If models were fictions, then what would they be? In A. Levy & P. Godfrey-Smith (Eds.), The Scientific Imagination (1st ed., pp. 51–74). Oxford University PressNew York. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190212308.003.0003

Toon, A. (2010). Models as make-believe. In R. Frigg & M. Hunter (Eds.), Beyond Mimesis and Convention: Representation in Art and Science (pp. 71–96). Springer Netherlands. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3851-7_5

Walton, K. L. (1978). Fearing fictions. The Journal of Philosophy, 75(1), 5. https://doi.org/10.2307/2025831

A post by Christian O. Scholz, Jianghao Liu, and Andrea Blomkvist

In this blog post, we will argue that aphantasia rightfully ascended from a niche curiosity to a hot topic across the cognitive sciences, that mental imagery research and aphantasia research stand to gain a lot from one another, and that the future of both should lie in interdisciplinary research and collaboration. This will then allow us to ultimately segue into shameless promotion for the upcoming interdisciplinary aphantasia conference at the University of Glasgow, IRCA 2026.

Aphantasia, the strong diminution or complete absence of mental imagery in at least one sensory modality (Zeman et al., 2015, 2025), has received growing attention over the past decade and was most recently featured in Nature magazine (Quill, 2026). This increase in interest largely stems from the growing corpus of findings showing that aphantasics are not significantly compromised on a range of tasks that were traditionally believed to rely on mental imagery (Bainbridge et al., 2021; Liu & Bartolomeo, 2023; Kay et al., 2024). This puzzle of aphantasia competency (Scholz, 2024a), namely the question of how people who supposedly lack or have severely diminished imagery can carry out tasks that supposedly require it, currently has two main possible solutions (but see also Blomkvist, 2023; Lorenzatti, 2025; Phillips, 2025; Teng, 2026, for important nuances): 1) Aphantasics are utilizing alternative (non-imagery-involving) cognitive strategies (Reeder et al., 2024), and we were thus wrong in supposing that mental imagery is necessary to carry out the tasks in question (Scholz, 2024a; Blomkvist et al., in press). 2) While most aphantasics do not report any imagery experience, they might nonetheless utilize the same (or relevantly similar) underlying neuronal processes to solve the tasks; that is, they might have unconscious mental imagery (Nanay, 2021, 2023; Michel et al., 2025).

Both of these possible solutions to the puzzle carry exciting implications for the cognitive sciences at large. On the one hand, if the alternative strategy solution is correct, this would show us that we might have severely underestimated the flexibility of our cognitive toolkit in solving these (and other) tasks. If, on the other hand, the unconscious imagery solution is correct, the imagery experience that many visualizers take to be causally relevant for their performance on imagery tasks would turn out to be largely epiphenomenal, and aphantasia might turn out to be a model phenomenon to understand consciousness (Liu, 2026) and what function it serves. Thus, whichever solution turns out to be true, the mere investigation of either path promises potentially deep and general insights into the workings of our mind and the relationship between brain, behavior, and subjective experience. Furthermore, somewhat orthogonal to this main puzzle, aphantasia has also been meaningfully connected with discussions about, among other topics, dreaming (Whiteley, 2021), episodic memory (Blomkvist, 2023), attention (Liu, 2026), and interoception (Silvanto & Nagai, 2025), thus arguably justifying the current ‘hype’ surrounding the topic in both academia and popular news media.

While it is certainly true that aphantasia research is still in its infancy (after all, the very term was only coined in 2015), we are fortunate to be able to draw from a rich and long history of philosophical discussion about imagination and, later on, empirical imagery research in psychology and neuroscience (Kosslyn, 1994; Tye, 2000; Pylyshyn, 2002, 2003; Kosslyn et al., 2006; Thomas, 2014; Kind, 2016; MacKisack et al., 2016; Abraham, 2020). For example, we can trace a line from Aristotle’s assertion that “the mind never thinks without an image” to the doubt that is brought up in response to assertions from people who claim to be aphantasics (Faw, 2009). On that line, we can also locate the so-called imageless thought controversy, where the topic of discussion was whether thought without accompanying imagery was even possible (Thomas, 2014). Somewhat tangentially, we can see Hume’s weak percepts theory to foreshadow contemporary empirical investigations into the neuronal overlap between brain activity during perception and imagery (Naselaris et al., 2015; Dijkstra et al., 2017; Liu et al., 2025), which itself is an important signpost for current debates about possible unconscious imagery in aphantasia (Chang et al., 2025a, b; Scholz et al., 2025, 2026). Similarly, the so-called imagery debate, the debate about the underlying representational format of mental imagery (Tye, 2000; Pylyshyn, 2002; Kosslyn et al., 2006; Langland-Hassan, in press), provides vital resources to draw inspiration for potential alternative strategies that could be used to solve imagery tasks. For even if the descriptivists, who argued that mental imagery relies on a non-pictorial representational format (Pylyshyn, 2002, 2003), were wrong about the representational makeup of typical visualizers (though the jury is still out [Langland-Hassan, in press]), their suggestions might help us better understand how aphantasics might solve ‘imagery’ tasks without recourse to depictive representations (Scholz, 2023).

Relatedly, concepts born from the imagery debate, such as Kosslyn’s visual buffer (Kosslyn et al., 2006), which is defined as the totality of the retinotopically mapped areas in the visual cortex, and which itself is a precursor to the currently dominant blackboard view (Pearson, 2019), according to which mental imagery and perception share a representational format and jointly ‘draw’ on the early visual cortex (Nanay, 2023), are not only a topic of discussion in contemporary neuroscience (Bartolomeo, 2020; Spagna et al., 2021, 2024) but are also crucial for the investigation of aphantasia. For if the unconscious imagery view postulates that aphantasics make use of the same (or relevantly similar) neuronal processes that underlie imagery experiences in typical visualizers, then it is crucial to understand where and how imagery is represented in the brain (Scholz, 2024b, 2025).

But the informative relationship between imagery research and aphantasia is bidirectional. For example, consider how aphantasia research impacts Schwitzgebel’s (2011) treatment of introspection and imagery. One of the arguments Schwitzgebel makes is, roughly, that since subjective reports of imagery abilities obtained via the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ; Marks, 1973) seem to be unrelated to more objective tests for imagery, such as mental rotation tasks (Shepard & Metzler, 1971), this should make us pessimistic about the suggestion that people are accurate judges of their own imagery experience. Now, in 2026, we have ample evidence showing that aphantasics can solve mental rotation tasks (Pounder et al., 2022; Kay et al., 2024), as well as that aphantasics differ from typical visualizers on both physiological (Wicken et al., 2021; Kay et al., 2022) and neurological (Milton et al., 2021; Chang et al., 2025a; Boere et al., 2025; Liu et al., 2025) measures. Thus, pace Schwitzgebel, the lack of correlation between self-report and more objective imagery tasks indicates that we are not poor at introspecting our own conscious experience, but that imagery experience is either largely epiphenomenal, or that the tasks in question are not really ‘imagery tasks’ to begin with (Bouyer et al., 2025). In any case, the accuracy of people’s self-reports of their conscious imagery experience (or the lack thereof) seems somewhat vindicated through aphantasia research. 

What becomes apparent is that not only is the investigation of aphantasia crucially intertwined with that of mental imagery, but the investigation of both mental imagery and its absence in aphantasia crucially requires perspectives from multiple academic disciplines, including those of philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience.  Arguably, the best outcome may result if the researchers in any of these disciplines communicate and collaborate with their peers from other disciplines. Philosophers, for example, are in the exciting position not only to have access to an existing corpus of empirical findings but also to have the chance to actively propose new theoretical frameworks and experiments, which can then be tested by empirical collaborators (see e.g., Blomkvist & Marks, 2023; Krempel & Monzel, 2024; Boere et al., 2025; Scholz et al., 2026). Psychologists and neuroscientists, on the other hand, can consult philosophers for their deep knowledge of the history of philosophical debates about imagination and for much-needed conceptual clarification. For example, next to the everlooming puzzle of aphantasia competency, a crucial task that faces aphantasia research is the development of a fine-grained taxonomy of supposed aphantasia subtypes (Dawes et al., 2022; Nanay, 2025; Scholz et al., 2026; Zeman, 2025), a task that requires not only careful review of evidence but also proficiency in conceptual engineering and creative novel ideas for experimental designs and diagnostic tools. Another important task that demands interdisciplinary attention is the investigation of links between aphantasia, mental health, and psychological disorders (Cavedon-Taylor, 2022; Monzel et al., 2023; Gao et al., 2025; Kvamme et al., 2025).

It was precisely this shared appreciation for the importance of interdisciplinary communication and collaboration that motivated two of the authors of this post, Jinaghao Liu and Christian Scholz, to form the Interdisciplinary Reading Club on Aphantasia (IRCA), a monthly online colloquium where aphantasia researchers from the fields of psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy meet to discuss their ongoing research and get feedback from their peers. Now, almost 2 years and 20 sessions later, we have decided to turn the IRCA into a (hopefully yearly) conference, with the goal of not only shining a light on the importance of the phenomenon of aphantasia but also the shared idea of endorsing and facilitating interdisciplinary collaboration. We are excited to announce that the Call for Abstracts for the first IRCA conference, 2 - 4 September 2026, hosted by Andrea Blomkvist at the University of Glasgow, is now open. Notably, the University of Glasgow has a rich history in imagery research, with the first research grant on aphantasia (The Eye’s Mind) shared between local powerhouse Fiona Macpherson, herself a mainstay in the philosophy of imagination, and the godfather of aphantasia, Adam Zeman, being partially carried out at the university, including a big conference on art and aphantasia. We hope this interdisciplinary conference will also provide opportunities for connecting people in the research communities of imagination, mental imagery, and aphantasia, consolidating current knowledge, and elaborating future research plans, where Junkyard contributors and readers would be interested in joining in our quest to tackle the many puzzles of aphantasia.

References

Abraham, A. (Ed.). (2020). The Cambridge handbook of the imagination. Cambridge University Press.

Bainbridge, W. A., Pounder, Z., Eardley, A. F., & Baker, C. I. (2021). Quantifying aphantasia through drawing: Those without visual imagery show deficits in object but not spatial memory. Cortex, 135, 159–172. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2020.11.014

Bartolomeo, P. (2002). The relationship between visual perception and visual mental imagery: A reappraisal of the neuropsychological evidence. Cortex, 38(3), 357-378.

Blomkvist, A. (2023). Aphantasia: In search of a theory. Mind & Language, 38(3), 866–888. https://doi.org/10.1111/mila.12432

Blomkvist, A., & Marks, D. F. (2023). Defining and ‘diagnosing’aphantasia: Condition or individual difference?. Cortex, 169, 220-234.

Blomkvist, A., Krempel, R., Walsh, E., Wadle, D., Iavanova, A. (in press). ‘The function of Mental Imagery’. Philosophy and Neuroscience Volume 3 (eds. De Brigard, F., and Sinnott-Armstrong, W.). MIT Press.

Boere, K., Krempel, R., Walsh, E., Li, H., MacLaughin, L., Krigolson, O., Blomkvist, A. (2025). ‘Task Evoked EEG Reveals Neural Processing Differences in Aphantasia’. Scientific Reports. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-27735-x

Bouyer, L. N., Schwarzkopf, D. S., Saurels, B. W., & Arnold, D. H. (2025). Objective priming from pre-imagining inputs before binocular rivalry presentations does not predict individual differences in the subjective intensity of imagined experiences. Cognition, 256, 106048.

Cavedon-Taylor, D. (2022). Aphantasia and psychological disorder: Current connections, defining the imagery deficit and future directions. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 822989.

Chang, S., Jiang, R., Cao, Y., Pearson, J., & Meng, M. (2025a). Reply to Scholz et al. Current Biology, 35(13), R647–R648. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2025.05.010

Chang, S., Zhang, X., Cao, Y., Pearson, J., & Meng, M. (2025b). Imageless imagery in aphantasia revealed by early visual cortex decoding. Current Biology, 35(3), 591-599.e4. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2024.12.012

Dawes, A. J., Keogh, R., & Pearson, J. (2024). Multisensory subtypes of aphantasia: Mental imagery as supramodal perception in reverse. Neuroscience Research, 201, 50-59.

Dijkstra, N., Bosch, S. E., & Gerven, M. A. J. van. (2017). Vividness of Visual Imagery Depends on the Neural Overlap with Perception in Visual Areas. Journal of Neuroscience, 37(5), 1367–1373. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3022-16.2016

Faw, B. (2009). Conflicting intuitions may be based on differing abilities: Evidence from mental imaging research. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 16(4), 45-68.

Gao, W., Nagai, Y., & Silvanto, J. (2025). Autonomic, neurodevelopmental, and early adversity correlates of acquired aphantasia. Neuropsychologia, 219, 109272. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2025.109272

Kay, L., Keogh, R., Andrillon, T., & Pearson, J. (2022). The pupillary light response as a physiological index of aphantasia, sensory and phenomenological imagery strength. eLife, 11, e72484. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.72484

Kay, L., Keogh, R., & Pearson, J. (2024). Slower but more accurate mental rotation performance in aphantasia linked to differences in cognitive strategies. Consciousness and Cognition, 121, 103694. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2024.103694

Kind, A. (Ed.). (2016). The Routledge handbook of philosophy of imagination. Routledge.

Kosslyn, S. M. (1996). Image and Brain: The resolution of the imagery debate. MIT Press.

Kosslyn, S. M., Thompson, W. L., & Ganis, G. (2006). The case for mental imagery. Oxford University Press.

Krempel, R., & Monzel, M. (2024). Aphantasia and involuntary imagery. Consciousness and cognition, 120, 103679.

Kvamme, T. L., Monzel, M., Nagai, Y., & Silvanto, J. (2025). When weak imagery is worse than none: Core aphantasia and hypophantasia relate differently to mental health, mediated by subjective interoception and alexithymia. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/6fhj4

Langland-Hassan, P. (in press). The Imagery Debate Exhumed and Reanimated. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.

Liu, J. (2026). A Neural Model of Conscious Mental Imagery and Aphantasia. Neuropsychologia, 224, 109392.

Liu, J., & Bartolomeo, P. (2023). Probing the unimaginable: The impact of aphantasia on distinct domains of visual mental imagery and visual perception. Cortex, 166, 338–347. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2023.06.003

Liu, J., Zhan, M., Hajhajate, D., Spagna, A., Dehaene, S., Cohen, L., & Bartolomeo, P. (2025). Visual mental imagery in typical imagers and in aphantasia: A millimeter-scale 7-T fMRI study. Cortex, 185, 113–132. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2025.01.013

Lorenzatti, J. J. (2025). Aphantasia: A philosophical approach. Philosophical Psychology, 38(4), 1476–1504. https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2023.2253854

MacKisack, M., Aldworth, S., Macpherson, F., Onians, J., Winlove, C., & Zeman, A. (2016). On Picturing a Candle: The Prehistory of Imagery Science. Frontiers in Psychology, 7. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00515

Marks, D. F. (1973). Visual Imagery Differences in the Recall of Pictures. British Journal of Psychology, 64(1), 17–24. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8295.1973.tb01322.x

Michel, M., Morales, J., Block, N., & Lau, H. (2025). Aphantasia as imagery blindsight. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 29(1), 8–9. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2024.11.002

Milton, F., Fulford, J., Dance, C., Gaddum, J., Heuerman-Williamson, B., Jones, K., Knight, K. F., MacKisack, M., Winlove, C., & Zeman, A. (2021). Behavioral and Neural Signatures of Visual Imagery Vividness Extremes: Aphantasia versus Hyperphantasia. Cerebral Cortex Communications, 2(2), tgab035. https://doi.org/10.1093/texcom/tgab035

Monzel, M., Vetterlein, A., & Reuter, M. (2023). No general pathological significance of aphantasia: An evaluation based on criteria for mental disorders. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 64(3), 314–324. https://doi.org/10.1111/sjop.12887

Nanay, B. (2021). Unconscious mental imagery. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 376(1817), 20190689. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2019.0689

Nanay, B. (2023). Mental imagery: Philosophy, psychology, neuroscience. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198809500.001.0001

Nanay, B. (2025). Varieties of aphantasia. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 29(11). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2025.06.008

Naselaris, T., Olman, C. A., Stansbury, D. E., Ugurbil, K., & Gallant, J. L. (2015). A voxel-wise encoding model for early visual areas decodes mental images of remembered scenes. NeuroImage, 105, 215–228. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2014.10.018

Pearson, J. (2019). The human imagination: The cognitive neuroscience of visual mental imagery. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 20(10), 624–634. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-019-0202-9

Phillips, I. (2025). Apahtansia reimagined. Noûs, 60(1), 65-86. https://doi.org/10.1111/nous.12551

Pounder, Z., Jacob, J., Evans, S., Loveday, C., Eardley, A. F., & Silvanto, J. (2022). Only minimal differences between individuals with congenital aphantasia and those with typical imagery on neuropsychological tasks that involve imagery. Cortex, 148, 180–192. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2021.12.010

Pylyshyn, Z. W. (2002). Mental imagery: In search of a theory. Behavioral and brain sciences, 25(2), 157-182.

Pylyshyn, Z. W. (2003). Seeing and visualizing: It's not what you think. MIT Press.

Quill, E. (2026, February 3). Many people have no mental imagery. What’s going on in their brains? Nature. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00311-7

Reeder, R. R., Pounder, Z., Figueroa, A., Jüllig, A., & Azañón, E. (2024). Non-visual spatial strategies are effective for maintaining precise information in visual working memory. Cognition, 251, 105907.

Scholz, C. O. (2023). Imaginability as Representability: A Wittgensteinian Approach to Aphantasia. Master of Logic Series. https://philarchive.org/archive/SCHIAR-11

Scholz, C. O. (2024a). The Visualizer’s Fallacy: Why Aphantasia Skepticism Underestimates the Dynamics of Cognition. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 46. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0k4282bn

Scholz, C. O. (2024b). Reevaluating aphantasia representation skepticism in light of the HeXaGen model. Comment on" Visual mental imagery: Evidence for a heterarchical neural architecture" by A. Spagna et al. Physics of Life Reviews, 49, 115-116.

Scholz, C. O. (2025). Mental imagery through the lens of aphantasia. Mind & Language, 40(3), 317–324. https://doi.org/10.1111/mila.12560

Scholz, C. O., Monzel, M., & Liu, J. (2025). Absence of shared representation in the visual cortex challenges unconscious imagery in aphantasia. Current Biology, 35(13), R645–R646. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2025.05.009

Scholz, C., Monzel, M., Kvamme, T., Liu, J., & Silvanto, J. (2026). An Integration Model of Mental Imagery and Aphantasia: Conceptual Framework, Neuromechanistic Pathways, and Clinical Implications. Neuropsychologia, 225, 109401.

Shepard, R. N., & Metzler, J. (1971). Mental rotation of three-dimensional objects. Science, 171(3972), 701-703.

Schwitzgebel, E. (2011). Perplexities of consciousness. MIT Press.

Silvanto, J., & Nagai, Y. (2025). How Interoception and the Insula Shape Mental Imagery and Aphantasia. Brain Topography, 38(2), 27. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10548-025-01101-6

Spagna, A., Hajhajate, D., Liu, J., & Bartolomeo, P. (2021). Visual mental imagery engages the left fusiform gyrus, but not the early visual cortex: A meta-analysis of neuroimaging evidence. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 122, 201-217.

Spagna, A., Heidenry, Z., Miselevich, M., Lambert, C., Eisenstadt, B. E., Tremblay, L., Liu, Z., Liu, J., & Bartolomeo, P. (2024). Visual mental imagery: Evidence for a heterarchical neural architecture. Physics of Life Reviews, 48, 113–131. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.plrev.2023.12.012

Teng, L. (2025). Metacognition in Aphantasia: Taking the “Conscious” View Seriously. Neuropsychologia, 221, 109331.

Thomas, N. (2014). Mental imagery. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2021 edition). Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2021/entries/mental-imagery/

Tye, M. (2000). The Imagery Debate. MIT Press.

Wicken, M., Keogh, R., & Pearson, J. (2021). The critical role of mental imagery in human emotion: Insights from fear-based imagery and aphantasia. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 288(1946), 20210267. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2021.0267

Whiteley, C. M. (2021). Aphantasia, imagination and dreaming. Philosophical Studies, 178(6), 2111-2132.

Zeman, A. (2025). A decade of aphantasia research–and still going!. Neuropsychologia, 219, 109278. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2025.109278

Zeman, A., Dewar, M., & Della Sala, S. (2015). Lives without imagery – Congenital aphantasia. Cortex, 73, 378–380. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2015.05.019

Zeman, A., Monzel, M., Pearson, J., Scholz, C. O., & Simner, J. (2025). Definition: Aphantasia.  Cortex, 182, 212–213. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2024.07.019

A post by Luca Marchetti

One of the best popular-science books I’ve read in recent years is Ed Yong’s An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us. It’s a guided tour of how different animals perceive the world: Yong pulls you beyond the confines of human sensing and into the distinct “sensory bubbles” that different animals inhabit, shaped not just by sights and sounds, but by vibrations, pressures, smells, and even electric and magnetic fields. Along the way, he shows what dogs smell on an ordinary street, what bees see in flowers, what songbirds hear in their tunes, and how a crocodile’s scaly face can be as sensitive as fingertips – all while telling the stories of the discoveries that made these strange worlds intelligible in the first place.

I appreciated the book both for what it says and for how it says it. But I also loved it for a more idiosyncratic – and philosophical – reason: when I read it, about a year ago, I had just started thinking about the possibilities and limits of imagination in trying to understand other animals’ minds, and about the epistemic, moral, and even aesthetic value that this imaginative activity might or might not have. What I found in Yong’s book was a vocabulary – and a kind of conceptual consonance – that resonated with what I was trying to think through myself: that imagination is something we inevitably rely on in these contexts; that it is often a matter of striving to imagine; and that, despite its limits, it can still have profound value. For example, in the book’s introduction Yong writes that in understanding other animals’ minds, “our imaginations will be our greatest assets”: the “ultimate feats of understanding” always require “an informed imaginative leap”; and, even if the task is hard, “there is value and glory in the striving” (Yong 2022, 13). But what kind of imagination is this? And what kinds of value are at stake? Those philosophical questions are not answered in Yong’s book, and they are the ones I will take up – sketchily, partially, and tentatively – in this post.

An Informed Imaginative Leap

In philosophy of mind, the issue of other animals’ minds has been approached mainly as an epistemological problem in the wake of Nagel’s classic discussion of the “what it is like” of alien experience (Nagel 1974). Nagel’s bat case makes the worry vivid. Many bats primarily perceive through sonar (echolocation), a form of perception that operates unlike any sense we possess. And, Nagel writes, there is “no reason to suppose” it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine (Nagel 1974, 438). The deeper point is that our imagination draws on our own experiential materials; so imagining bat-like behavior tends to yield, at best, what it would be like for us to behave as bats behave, not what it is like for bats to be bats (Nagel 1974, 439). My focus, however, is not the question whether and how we can know what it is like to have the experiences of some another animal. Rather, it is the experience we ourselves undergo when we try to imagine another animals’ mind – or one of its features. That activity, I think, is philosophically interesting in its own right.

Recent work in philosophy helps to bring out the centrality of imagination in attempts to understand other minds and the work it can do in partially overcoming Nagel’s worry, mitigating his pessimism. For example, Kind (2019) argues that Nagel’s considerations primarily target accurate imagination, not imagination simpliciter: the fact that our efforts fail to teach us exactly what we want to know does not show that we cannot imagine bat experience at all (Kind 2019, 167). She supports this by discussing Temple Grandin’s claim that her “visual thinking” allows her, in a limited way, to simulate what cattle see and hear, with practically successful outcomes in livestock handling (Grandin 2006; Kind 2019). Godfrey-Smith (2013) suggests that whereas with humans verbal descriptions can “prompt memories and guide the imagination,” eliciting variations on experiences we already know firsthand, with non-linguistic animals we must instead constrain imagination by drawing on what we know about their behavior, sense organs, and nervous systems, sometimes by mapping alien capacities onto familiar ones (Godfrey-Smith 2013; see also Dawkins 1986). In a similar vein, Yong uses the phrase “an informed imaginative leap” for the step beyond third-person data, when your aim is not only to describe what an animal’s sensory system does but to get some grip on what it might be like to inhabit its perceptual world. You can do the standard explanatory work – study the environment, the animal’s behavior, and the relevant neurophysiological mechanisms – and yet the “ultimate feats of understanding” still require “an informed imaginative leap” (Yong 2022).[1] “Informed” is crucial: the leap is not a freewheeling anthropomorphic projection, but imagination disciplined by empirical constraints (ecology, anatomy, behavior, neurophysiology) and meant to push against the limits of the human Umwelt, which distorts how we think about other creatures. Imagination, for Yong, is thus a methodological tool for pressing against our own cognitive boundaries – and it seems to be so for many of the sensory biologists he is in conversation with throughout the book.

All this suggests that experts on animal minds take imagination to be central to understanding other minds. It also indicates something about what enables – and limits – this imaginative activity. But it still does not tell us what kind of activity is at issue. I cannot give a full account here (that’s the bigger project I am working on), but here is a first approximation. When we try to grasp another species’ mind, we usually run two kinds of imaginative work in parallel, both constrained by what we know about the animal’s body, brain, behavior, and ecology. On one track, we build an “outside” picture: we form careful claims about what the animal can detect, discriminate, and represent (mainly propositional imagination). For bats, for example, we might say that echolocation gives them a structured sense of “echoic space,” allowing fine-grained spatial discrimination. On the other track, we sometimes attempt an “inside” picture: we try, as best we can, to approximate what it might feel like to inhabit that perspective, without simply projecting human psychology onto the animal (mainly recreative, imagistic imagination). With bats, that might involve trying to imagine echolocation less as “hearing turned up” and more as a way of perceiving space that plays a role similar to vision (Dawkins 1986). When there is no close human analogue, the outside route does most of the work and the inside route can only be metaphorical at best, as the bat’s case suggests. But when that inside approximation seems feasible, it can help discipline and enrich the outside claims. For example, dogs’ color vision seems more tractable than bat sonar: they are dichromats, so the red–green distinctions that structure so much of our visual world largely collapse for them. If you try to imagine a bright red toy on a green lawn, the toy may not “pop” in the way it does for us; the scene looks more like a range of yellows, blues, and grays. That kind of controlled “inside” exercise can then feed back into the “outside” claims about what dogs can and cannot visually discriminate in everyday contexts. Crucially, both tracks are forms of an overall striving imaginative endeavor: they proceed through repeated, revisable attempts to get closer, corrected and refined in light of evidence, rather than by a single leap to a final picture.

There is Value and Glory in the Striving

Like Yong, I think there is value in striving to imagine other animals’ minds. There is epistemic value because, e.g., it can help us push past our own Umwelt recalibrating what we take to be salient in animal behavior and making us better at noticing what their perceptual and cognitive capacities actually allow them to feel and do. There is moral value because, e.g., it can make their peculiar kinds of mindedness harder to ignore, widening the scope of our concern beyond the human case. But, as weird as it might sound, I also believe there is aesthetic value. Here is why.

First, imagination can be a disciplined, heuristically significant ingredient of scientific inquiry, and in that setting the aesthetic reward can be understood as part of the satisfaction of inquiry itself – along broadly Kantian lines, as a constrained “free play” of imagination and understanding in the pursuit of knowledge (Breitenbach 2013). This applies not only to scientists who model animal perception, but also to non-specialists who, through well-informed popular accounts such as Yong’s (2022), retrace some of that imaginative labor.

Second, aesthetic gratification can lie in the striving to imagine as such. When we try to imagine what it is like to experience the world through, say, a sonar-like perceptual system, we can enjoy the struggle of approximation rather than the attainment of a final, correct result – something that likely remains beyond our reach. The exercise captivates because we repeatedly aim to get closer, while our imaginings remain constrained by background knowledge about the animal’s behavior and functions. The pleasure here is, in large part, a pleasure in the exercise of imagination (Feagin 1984) and in the striving endeavor as such – structurally akin to what Nguyen calls “striving play,” developed from Suits’s account of games, where the point is not simply the goal but the struggle of striving toward it (Suits 1978; Nguyen 2020).

Third, aesthetic pleasure can also come from the methods we use to scaffold this striving. In practice, our imaginings are often supported by props – artifacts such as books, films, VR, and soundscapes – that guide and constrain imaginative work. Some supports mainly add information, while others work by altering perception itself and giving imagination new materials – for example, movies, VR, bioacoustics. These methods still fall short – our brains remain human – but they can be aesthetically striking precisely because they foreground the interplay between perception and imagination (Walton 1990), an enjoyable blend that can later enrich further attempts to imagine other minds.

And, last but not least, part of the aesthetic pull lies in the minds themselves that we are trying to reach through imagination and in the effects this encounter can produce: for example, a sense of the weirdness – and even eeriness – of forms of mindedness so unlike our own, or a kind of sublime response to the sheer peculiarity and otherness of other minds.

An Immense World is full of these kinds of beauty. Maybe that’s why Yong’s book struck me so strongly, after all.

Notes

[1] Yong takes the phrase “informed imaginative leap” from Alexandra Horowitz—a cognitive scientist who studies canine cognition—and specifically from her book Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know. It’s another book I warmly recommend.

References

Breitenbach, Angela. 2013. “Beauty in Proofs: Kant on Aesthetics in Mathematics.” European Journal of Philosophy 21 (4): 955–977.

Dawkins, Richard. 1986. The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Feagin, Susan L. 1984. “Some Pleasures of Imagination.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 43 (1): 41-55.

Godfrey-Smith, Peter. 2013. “On Being an Octopus.” Boston Review. URL = https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/peter-godfrey-smith-being-octopus/.

Grandin, Temple. 2006. Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism. 2nd ed. New York: Vintage Books.

Horowitz, Alexandra. 2009. Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know. New York: Scribner.

Kind, Amy. 2019. “Mary’s Power of Imagination.” In The Knowledge Argument, edited by Sam Coleman, 161–179. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Nagel, Thomas. 1974. “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” The Philosophical Review 83 (4): 435–450.

Nguyen, C. Thi. 2020. Games: Agency as Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Suits, Bernard. 1978. The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Walton, Kendall L. 1990. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Yong, Ed. 2022. An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us. New York: Random House.

A post by Zach Kohler

There is something strange about the experience of theatrical magic. Anyone who has watched a good magic trick knows the feeling—it presents itself without fanfare, yet leaves us with the troubled sense that something about the world we take for granted has briefly been unsettled. This post asks what kind of imaginative engagement makes such an experience possible. Against accounts that assimilate magic either to fictional make-believe or to the presentation of known impossibilities, I contend that theatrical magic ought to operate on what I call the cusp of impossibility: a liminal modal space in which events are experienced as radically implausible without being decisively foreclosed as impossible. My claim is that while magic may, and often does, present itself as outright impossible, its most compelling and aesthetically successful instances do not. Drawing on Kendall Walton’s theory of make-believe, Jason Leddington’s alief-based account of illusion, and Richard Moran’s distinction between hypothetical and dramatic imagination, I argue that imagination plays an essential role in magic—not by transporting spectators into a fictional world, but by enabling a resisted, emotionally charged way of relating to our own.

The debate centers around Kendall Walton’s theory of make-believe. In Mimesis as Make-Believe (1990), Walton explains many art forms in terms of games of make-believe, in which real objects function as “props” that generate fictional truths. In theatre, for example, a wooden stage may count as a ship at sea within the fiction. Some have suggested that magic can be understood along similar lines. Spectators imaginatively participate in scenarios where physical laws are bent or suspended, and ordinary objects such as cards or coins serve as props within a fictional world. Yet this division between fictional worlds and real representations falters in the case of magic, since a magic performance uses real, perceptually present objects, not fictional stand-ins.

This difficulty becomes sharper when we consider Walton’s account of emotional response. How can spectators feel genuine emotions toward situations they know to be fictional? Walton’s answer is that such emotions are quasi-emotions—participants in the game of make-believe pretend to be afraid or astonished. Though, magic resists this explanation too, since the audience is not asked to pretend that a dagger is sharp, they must know that it really is, as when a magician cuts fruit with it before impaling the box where an assistant lies. The emotional stakes of magic depend on this realism. Walton’s framework thus captures something important about imagination, but relocates magic too quickly into fiction, precisely where its distinctive tension dissolves.

Professor of philosophy at Bucknell University, Jason Leddington, offers a cogent alternative. Arguing that magic is not fiction, but illusion, Leddington claims that a successful magic performance presents an impossible event as impossible, directly to the spectator. As he puts it, “the spectator should not be called on to imagine that the impossible is happening, because it should already appear so.” (Leddington, 2016, emphasis in original) Imagination, on this view, is superfluous—yea, counterproductive—since fiction requires world-building elsewhere, whereas magic presents itself here and now. The central problem, then, is how such an experience is psychologically possible. How can spectators respond to something they recognize as impossible without endorsing contradictory beliefs?

Leddington’s solution appeals to Tamar Szabó Gendler’s notion of alief. Unlike belief, alief involves the presence of a representational content in the subject’s cognitive system without endorsement. Aliefs are automatic, arational, and affect-laden, and they can conflict with a subject’s standing beliefs without generating irrationality. In the case of magic, the spectator retains the belief that the event cannot really be happening, while simultaneously alieving that it is. For Leddington, this “belief-discordant alief” explains the immediacy and force of magical experience while avoiding appeals to suspension of disbelief or fictional make-believe.

Leddington further insists that alief must be sharply distinguished from imagination. We can imagine at will, and imagining that not-p while believing that p involves no cognitive conflict. One may imagine flying unaided while fully believing it to be impossible, without any pressure on one’s cognitive system. Alief, by contrast, is involuntary and norm-governed. Believing p while alieving not-p places pressure on the subject because the alief is affectively and behaviorally charged. One may, for instance, retain the belief that humans cannot fly, yet feel ill at ease when witnessing an apparent levitation. It is this belief-discordant tension, Leddington argues, that magic exploits—not merely to generate cognitive dissonance, but to maximize it. (Leddington, 2016)

While Leddingont’s account is compelling, it rests on a restrictive conception of imagination—one that too readily identifies imagination with make-believe. Imagination, however, is not tied in any definite way to fiction-making. We routinely imagine aspects of the actual world, including future events, emotional realities, and even highly abstract features of our physical universe, such as curved spacetime or quantum superposition. Moreover, imagination is not monolithic. Philosopher Richard Moran (2017) distinguishes between hypothetical and dramatic imagination. Hypothetical imagination involves impersonal reasoning about what would follow if some proposition were true. Dramatic imagination, by contrast, involves inhabiting a point of view through affective rehearsal and emotional attunement.

Imagination with respect to emotional attitudes, Moran argues, requires more than propositional supposition. In such cases, what is imagined is not merely the truth of a proposition, but a total perspective on a situation. This form of imagination is norm-governed and resistant; although, resistance here is not a rejection of a proposition, but a refusal or struggle to inhabit a point of view. Applied to magic, Moran’s account shows that the spectator’s imaginative engagement is not a matter of entertaining the proposition that an impossible event has occurred, nor of “feigning belief.” Rather, the spectator is drawn—often involuntarily—into a perspective in which the event is experientially real, even as they resist fully integrating it into their understanding of the world. The tension that sustains magical wonder thus arises not from belief-discordant alief alone, but from the spectator’s struggle to inhabit, without collapse, a perspective that places familiar reality into question. Imagination here is not a vehicle for fiction-making, but a way of relating to the actual world through a resisted, emotionally charged perspective.

It may be tempting to say that alief already does all the work attributed here to dramatic imagination, since both involve non-propositional, affectively charged, world-directed states; but this conflation obscures an important experiential difference. Alief generates resistance to belief—a conflict between representational systems—but it does not account for resistance within experience itself. In other words, alief accounts for the onset of magical experience (automatic belief-discordant response), but not the persistence of the experience. Dramatic imagination, by contrast, names the spectator’s ongoing attempt to inhabit a way of seeing that is experientially compelling, yet resistant to full cognitive integration. This distinction explains why good magic does not merely provoke dissonance but invites continued engagement by allowing uncertainty to be maintained rather than resolved or rejected.

This clarifies a further limitation in Leddington’s account. He claims that the object of magical experience is something “impossible and known to be so.” (Leddington, 2016)  This overstates the role of settled impossibility in the phenomenology of magic. While spectators typically retain a standing belief that what they have witnessed cannot be explained by ordinary means, the experience itself rarely presents as a confrontation with brute logical contradiction. Even granting belief-discordant alief, the modal character of the experience remains more indeterminate than Leddington allows. While magic may—and often does—force the spectator into contact with events experienced as decisively impossible, this is not where magic is at its aesthetic best. Instead, great magic sustains engagement by holding possibility open just long enough to resist closure. I call this the cusp of impossibility.

The cusp is a liminal modal space in which an event is experienced as radically implausible without being conclusively foreclosed. When impossibility is fully settled, the experience collapses into dismissal or abstraction. By contrast, magical effects often exploit domains of partial ignorance or conceptual openness, where background beliefs remain intact but insufficient to stabilize the experience. The result is not endorsement of impossibility, but a lived uncertainty in which the spectator registers the anomalous event without resolving its modal status. The goal of good magic, on this view, is not to maximize cognitive dissonance, but to maintain a delicate balance that leaves the spectator teetering between the possible and the impossible.

Recognizing magic as operating on the cusp of impossibility allows us to treat alief and imagination not as rivals, but as complementary components of the experience of magic. Leddington is right that magic induces an automatic, affectively charged state in which an anomalous event is represented without belief-endorsement, and alief plausibly accounts for the immediacy and force of this initial engagement. What alief alone cannot explain, however, is the persistence and resistance characteristic of magical wonder. Here Moran’s notion of dramatic imagination becomes indispensable as it sustains the spectator’s relation to the event by holding open a resisted point of view. The spectator imaginatively inhabits a stance in which the event is experientially real while remaining resistant to full cognitive integration. Alief anchors the experience perceptually and affectively, while dramatic imagination shapes and prolongs it by negotiating its unresolved modal status. Together, they explain how magic achieves its distinctive aesthetic power—one that depends not on the maximization of cognitive dissonance, but on its careful modulation.

References

Leddington, J. (2016). The Experience of Magic. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 74(3), 253–264. https://doi.org/10.1111/jaac.12290

Moran, R. (2017). The philosophical imagination : selected essays. Oxford University Press.

Walton, K. L. (1990). Mimesis as make-believe : on the foundations of the representational arts. Harvard Univ. Press.

A post by Kerry Clark

Introduction

Imagination is used in many ways—whether in daydreaming, anticipating future outcomes, or engaging in creative works. I take imagination to be (roughly) the mental faculty that allows individuals to form images, ideas, and sensations without direct input from the senses. This mental faculty supports important human activities, whether it be for practical purposes like imagining how to organize furniture, daydreaming for entertainment purposes, or imagining to better understand the world around us. This post explores imagination within two distinct but related processes: learning and creativity.

A helpful way to clarify imagination’s separate roles is to distinguish two uses: transcendent and instructive (Kind and Kung, 2016). First, the transcendent use of imagination involves imagining significant departures to the world as it is, for example, a world with different laws of nature. Transcendent imagination can contribute to the creative process because an individual may exaggerate or distort reality to develop a novel idea. Second, imagination can be instructive in the sense that one constrains imagination to reality, for example, by constraining imagination to the current laws of nature. This use of imagination can help one learn about the world around them. While both uses of imagination are valuable, their effectiveness depends on context. Since learning is generally aimed at accurate knowledge or practical action, instructive imagination typically supports learning better than transcendent imagination. By contrast, creativity is typically aimed at producing something novel and valuable, and therefore, transcendent imagination tends to support creative thinking better than instructive imagination.

Imagination in the Learning Process

The purpose of learning is to acquire knowledge, understanding, or to develop a skill. Since imagination does not require direct input from the senses, it can facilitate learning by allowing one to mentally represent phenomena and possibilities that are not directly observable. For example:

• Imagination helps when one mentally rehearses information, like visualizing states to remember capitals.

• Imagination helps when picturing the various phases of cell division to better understand biological processes.

• Imagination helps a dancer practice a new routine by visualizing the movements.

These examples illustrate how imagination effectively helps the agent learn something without direct contact with the phenomena. It seems that imagination can also help organize and support one’s memory.

 Imagination seems to be most helpful for learning when it tracks reality. Consider evaporation, the phase of the water cycle when liquid water turns into water vapor. A student does not need to directly observe evaporation to understand it; she can use instructive imagination to visualize liquid water becoming gas, thereby reinforcing her grasp of the process.

However, imagination may stray from reality (transcendent imagination) and hinder learning. If a student imagines water flowing up into the sky turning into clumps of glitter and exploding into ashes, the mental image no longer corresponds with the phenomena being learned. Because imagination can depart from reality, it may lead to a misunderstanding that prevents the student from acquiring knowledge that constitutes learning.

This raises an important qualification: there are cases in which transcendent imagination appears to facilitate learning, but typically this works only insofar as the imaginative project contains some element of truth. For instance, a child interacting with a fantastical imaginary friend may learn how humans work (bodily and socially), even though the friend is invented. The child may develop social skills or learn the value of friendship with others, but this only works if the imagination is tracking some truth about how humans operate. Learning occurs not because the fantasy is accurate, but because the child’s imaginative project still reflects real features of social interaction.

Imagination is not sufficient for a person to acquire knowledge or understanding because there needs to be some form of evidence, justification, or some reality-based constraint that imagination cannot provide. As a result, imagination can only play an enabling role for learning factual knowledge. Jonathan Egeland (2024) makes a similar point that imagination cannot generate new knowledge and Shannon Spaulding (2016) contends that imagination whether it is spontaneous or deliberate cannot provide knowledge of contingent facts. While it is true that imagination alone cannot generate new factual knowledge, imagination may support learning in other ways. Imagination can support learning by providing a mental place where an agent can explore or practice their skills. For instance, a writer imagining possible plots, or a scientist gaining understanding by imagining a concrete example of a general natural phenomenon. In these cases, imagination is most effective when it is instructive because it can guide accurate understanding, or other aims of learning.

However, if imagination is a skill like some philosophers claim (Kind 2020, Blomkvist 2022), then not just the instructive use, but also the transcendent use can contribute to developing the skill of imagination. While the transcendent use can contribute to strengthening this skill, as Paul Hager (2005) notes, successful learning (of any kind) should enable an agent to act effectively in the world. Therefore, the instructive use of imagination is typically more effective for learning overall.

Imagination in the Creative Process

Unlike learning, creativity requires novelty. Most accounts of creativity posit novelty and value (of some kind) as necessary conditions (Runco 2012). Thus, it is widely held that creativity aims to produce something new and valuable. In the creative process, imagination likely helps generate novel ideas because the freedom of imagination allows agents to visualize possibilities unconstrained by reality. For instance, it seems that transcendent imagination would play a direct role in the aspiring writer. A writer’s imagination may facilitate the development of the story, picturing different characters, and internally acting out dialogue. The newness imagination brings is the ability to create unfamiliar places, people, and narratives. These new aspects satisfy the novelty condition which is necessary for the creative process. In this way, transcendent imagination clearly supports the development of new ideas, which is essential for creativity.

Even the instructive use of imagination can lead to creativity. For example, a writer gets inspiration for a historical fiction novel, while imagining historical events. The writer constrains her imagination to a particular event, then blends that factual event with a realistic narrative. The result is a creative novel developed from imagining an authentic setting and dialogue based on history. In this case, instructive imagination can be the spark that leads to a new idea.

Rigidly constraining imagination to reality, however, may hinder creativity by preventing the possibility of visualizing new ideas. Imagination facilitates creativity because of its mental playfulness. Since novelty is an essential feature of creativity, imagination’s usefulness is primarily when it departs from reality. Even in the historical fiction case, creativity occurs because there is novelty present in the fictional narrative. Thus, there needs to be some sense of newness or freedom for creativity. As a result, imagination when used to track reality does not as easily lead to a creative idea, as this ability may hinder the aims of creativity. Instead, creativity typically thrives in breaking away from tradition and reality.

The Interaction Between Creativity and Learning

Have I oversimplified imagination? Within this post I separated the learning and creative processes, but the likely truth is that the two are deeply connected. There is disagreement in the creativity literature about the connection between learning and creativity. Maria Kronfeldner (2018) argues that originality is a core feature of creativity and contrasts it with learning. Kronfeldner clarifies that this is not a direct opposition, yet there are methods of learning that prevent creativity, like rote copying. Thus, these methods of learning can stifle creativity. However, Lindsay Brainard (2024) compares creativity to learning and exploring, which supports the claim that the two are not directly opposed. Brainard uses this analogy to support her view that creativity involves epistemic value, this suggests that creativity may be tightly connected to the learning process.

Just as imagination is not a strict dichotomy between instructive or transcendent use, creativity and learning are not polar opposites either. While both are distinct processes, they involve each other in a variety of ways. Learning may be partly creative, or the creative process may include learning. Often both learning and creativity happen together whether we are aware or not. For instance:

(A) A poet might learn something about herself while writing a whimsical poem.

(B) A student might develop a creative story while learning about honeybees.

These examples highlight the complexity of both processes and how they may operate amongst each other, not always in opposition. Imagination can spark creativity, and sometimes conflict with truth-directed learning. Focusing on the different aims of learning and creativity clarifies when each use of imagination is appropriate. Thus, developing the skill of imagination is beneficial for both learning and creativity.

References

Blomkvist, Andrea. 2022. "Imagination As a Skill: A Bayesian Proposal." Synthese 1-23.

Brainard, Lindsay. 2024. "What is Creativity?" The Philosophical Quarterly 1-23.

Egeland, Jonathan. 2024. "Imagination Cannot Generate Empirical Justification or Knowledge." Erkenntnis 2951-2970.

Hager, Paul. 2005. "Philosophical Accounts of Learning." Educational Philosophy and Theory 649-666.

Kind, Amy. 2022. Imagination and Creative Thinking. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

—. "The Skill of Imagination." In The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Skill and Expertise, edited by Ellen Fridland and Carlotta Pavese, 335-346. New York: Routledge.

Kind, Amy, and Peter Kung. 2016. "Introduction: The Puzzle of Imaginative Use." In Knowledge Through Imagination, by Amy Kind and Peter Kung, 1-37. Oxford : Oxford University Press.

Kronfeldner, Maria. 2018. "Explaining Creativity." In Creativity and Philosophy, by Berys Gaut and Matthew Kieran, 213-229. London: Routledge.

Runco, Mark A., and Garrett J. Jaeger. 2012. "The Standard Definition of Creativity." Creativity Research Journal 92-96.

Spaulding, Shannon. 2016. "Imagination Through Knowledge." In Knowledge Through Imagination, by Amy Kind and Peter Kung, 207-226. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

A post by Avshalom Schwartz 

The safest general characterization of the history of imagination is that it begins with Plato. Indeed, this is a rare point of agreement between scholars—from intellectual historians to analytical philosophers—about what is otherwise a contested and heavily debated concept. According to this standard account, Plato was the first to offer a philosophical investigation of imagination. This position was taken, for example, by Murray Wright Bundy in what is, to this day, the most comprehensive study of imagination in classical antiquity and the Middle Ages. Bundy’s claim that “the history of ‘fancy’ and ‘imagination’ as terms of reflective thought begins with Plato” is echoed in countless other historical and philosophical treatments of this concept (Bundy 1927, 11; cf. Kearney 1988, 87; Jørgensen 2017; Watson 1988, 1; Clifford and Buxton 2023, 4). Aristotle, as this common story goes, was the first to treat this concept systematically—“the first to give a careful delineation of the power of imagination as part of a complex theory of human and animal psychology,” as one commentator has put it (Sepper 2013; See also Schweitzer 1925, 77)—with others going as far as attributing to him the “discovery” of imagination (Castoriadis 1997).

Very few studies of the imagination have examined the pre-Platonic imagination or evaluated the background of his treatment of imagination and the resources on which he drew in developing his philosophical account of this mental faculty. Some have searched among Plato’s philosophical predecessors, focusing on pre-Socratic thinkers such as Thales, the Atomists, Heraclitus, and Parmenides (Ambrosi 1898, 5–9; Bundy 1927, 11–18; Sepper 2013, 107–14). Others took more mythical or aesthetic routes, treating the story of Prometheus and early practice of poetry—including ideas about inspiration and creativity—as pre-theoretical reflections on the human imaginative power (Kearney 1988, 79–80; Jørgensen 2017, 21; Sheppard 2015). But what about the more straightforward, linguistic origins of imagination?

Among classical scholars, it is well known and recognized that the ancient Greek term for imagination, phantasia, is derived from the noun phantasma (“appearance, image, ghost”), itself a secondary derivation from the verb phantazomai (“to make visible, to represent”). This group of phant- root words, in turn, is derived from the general verb phainō (“become visible, come into the light, show oneself, appear”), which can be traced back to phae, phaos, phōs, words that generally refer to “light” (Chantraine et al. 1999, 1168, 1170–71; Beekes 2009, 1545–46; Bundy 1927, 12). Eikasia, the second—and somewhat less central—ancient Greek term for imagination, has a parallel history. It is derived from eikō (“to be/seem like”), which is the root of later verbs such as eoika (“to resemble, to seem”) and eikazō (“represent by an image”) and the noun eikon (“image, representation”) (Chantraine et al. 1999, 354–55; Beekes 2009, 380–81; cf. Bundy 1927, 11–12). Although familiar to many scholars of imagination, the implications of this etymology for our understanding of the concept, its historical roots, and its developments have yet to be explored. This has left us with only a partial understanding of the origins of imagination, the reason behind its appearance in the middle dialogues of Plato, and the shape that it took in his writings and in the work of his successors.

Taking such a philological route to the study of the origins of imagination yields surprising insights. In sharp contrast to the contemporary emphasis on imagination’s role in producing mental images and representations, the words that form the linguistic backdrop for the later development of imagination often describe how things in the world appear to the human observer and the profound epistemological uncertainty surrounding some of these appearances. A modern reader might be even more surprised by the context in which these words are found. In both epic and tragic poetry—the two earliest literary sources to make use of this vocabulary of the “proto-imagination”—these words are used to describe encounters between humans and gods, the various forms the gods take when appearing to humans, and the radical epistemic uncertainty involved in these moments.

Let me briefly consider a few examples. In Book I of Homer’s Iliad, Athena appears to Achilles and intervenes moments before he draws his sword and strikes Agamemnon. “She stood behind him, and seized the son of Peleus by his fair hair, appearing (phainomenē) to him alone. No one of the others saw her” (1.195-200). The word used to describe Athena’s appearance, phainomenē, is a participle form of the verb phainō (“to appear”), which, as noted above, is the linguistic predecessor of phantasia. The Homeric poem also frequently employs variations of the verb eikō (“be like, resemble”), which is the basis of the second Greek term for imagination, eikasia. This is the case, for example, when Zeus sends a Dream to Agamemnon, which appears in the likeness (eoikōs) of Nestor (2.20-23). Greek tragedy echoes the Homeric use of this vocabulary and further expands on it. In Euripides’s Bacchae, for example, Dionysus appears (phanenta, e.g., 39-54), disguised, to the people of Thebes, and in one memorable scene creates a “phantom” (phasma) of himself out of thin air, which the young prince Pentheus desperately tries to stab with his sword. The same word is used by Euripides again in Iphigenia in Aulis to describe the marvelous scene in which, moments before being sacrificed, Iphigenia is replaced with a large deer on the altar, “due to some phantom (phasma) from the gods” (1584-6).  

These are only a few examples (there are plenty more where they came from!). But they can nonetheless provide us with some insights about the original questions, problems, and phenomena that gave rise to the discovery of imagination in classical antiquity. First, as noted above, it suggests that the original conception of the imagination arose from concern not with mental images or representations, but rather with how the world appears to the human observer. Second, it points to the profound epistemic uncertainty involved in some of these appearances. In short, the fact that the gods often appear in disguise—and take the likeness of other humans—puts humans in an awkward position of epistemic uncertainty, where they are constantly struggling to determine whether the person standing next to them, talking to them, or fighting alongside them is a human or an Olympian in disguise. It thus points to an ever-present potential gap between the world as it is and the world as it appears to the human observer, thus suggesting that this “proto-vocabulary” of imagination might be linked to one of the most difficult problems that later generations of philosophers have come to associate with the imagination.

Finally, taking such a philological route to the earliest history of imagination provides us with a promising new approach to studying the discovery of this mental faculty in Plato’s work. As classical philosophers know well, Plato was not writing in a vacuum. Even when he introduces novel concepts and radical ideas, he borrows from the philosophical, poetic, and political vocabulary that was available to him and his contemporaries, often making highly sophisticated and subtle interventions. Perhaps the best-known example of this is his use of the word theoria (“theory”) to describe the practice of philosophy. Borrowed from an ancient institution of religious pilgrimage, in which a theoros was sent to other city-states to behold religious festivals and cult practices, this term was appropriated by Plato to describe the philosopher’s intellectual pilgrimage to behold eternal truths about the kosmos, before descending back into the cave armed with his newly acquired knowledge (Nightingale 2004). Tracing the earliest linguistic sources for the words Plato has chosen to describe the newly discovered mental faculty of “imagination” has the potential for yielding equally surprising insights. Uncovering the terms, concepts, debates, and concerns he was responding to when introducing this concept can thus provide us with a new perspective not only on Plato’s “theory” of imagination—a notoriously difficult aspect of his metaphysics and epistemology and a source for endless scholarly debate—but also on the history of imagination and our contemporary treatment of this concept in philosophy.

References

Ambrosi, Luigi. 1898. La psicologia della immaginazione nella storia della filosofia. Società editrice Dante Alighieri.

Beekes, Robert. 2009. Etymological Dictionary of Greek (2 Vols.). Brill.

Bundy, Murray Wright. 1927. “The Theory of Imagination in Classical and Medieval Thought.” University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature 7: 2–3.

Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1997. “The Discovery of the Imagination.” In World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination, edited and translated by D. A. Curtis. Stanford University Press.

Chantraine, Pierre, Alain Blanc, Charles de Lamberterie, and Jean-Louis Perpillou. 1999. Dictionnaire etymologique de la langue grecque: Histoire des mots. 1st edition. Klincksieck.

Clifford, Emily, and Xavier Buxton. 2023. “Introduction.” In The Imagination of the Mind in Classical Athens. Routledge.

Jørgensen, Dorthe. 2017. “The Philosophy of Imagination.” In Handbook of Imagination and Culture, edited by Tania Zittoun and Vlad Glaveanu. Oxford University Press.

Kearney, Richard. 1988. The Wake of the Imagination. Routledge.

Nightingale, Andrea Wilson. 2004. Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy: Theoria in Its Cultural Context. Cambridge University Press.

Schweitzer, Bernhard. 1925. “Der Bildende Künstler Und Der Begriff Des Künstlerischen in Der Antike: ΜΙΜΗΣΙΣ Und ΦΑΝΤΑΣΙΑ.” Neue Heidelberger Jahrbücher.

Sepper, Dennis L. 2013. Understanding Imagination: The Reason of Images. Springer.

Sheppard, Anne. 2015. “Imagination.” In A Companion to Ancient Aesthetics, 1st ed., edited by Pierre Destrée and Penelope Murray. Wiley.

Watson, Gerard. 1988. Phantasia in Classical Thought. Galway University Press.

A post by Neil Van Leeuwen

In the background as I write this blog, the Superbowl is on. The Seahawks currently lead 6-0 in the second quarter, which makes me vaguely happy, since I dislike the Patriots (sorry, not sorry). But I’m not Seahawks fan, so my investment in the game is minimal enough that I can write.

Things are different, of course, for New England and Seattle fans. For them, this game will appear as one of the most riveting things they’ve seen in years. And all told, about 100 million people in the United States, along with about 25 million more around the world, are watching this game.

Of course, the Superbowl and sports in general aren’t the only long viewing people do. Estimates suggest that that average person watches about a movie a week, and then TV shows are in addition to that. Most movies and TV shows are fictional dramas, and plays and musicals fall in that category as well. So the amount of fictional drama that people watch is impressive as well.

Given all that, if you were to ask, “What do people like watching more, sports or fictional drama?” I would have a genuinely hard time answering. We could come at the question from multiple different angles, some of which might put sports on top and others of which might put fictional drama on top.

But there is a related question, concerning which I think the answer is abundantly clear: What do people like rewatching more, sports or fictions?

My impression is that few people—even New England and Seattle fans—will rewatch the whole Superbowl, though rewatching highlights is fairly common. But people certainly rewatch movies that they like in their entirety, with one source saying that the average American believes they’ve watched their favorite movie 38 (!) times. I frankly suspect that number is high, but to have watched one’s favorite movie a dozen times is easily a common thing. And people don’t just rewatch their top favorite; I have about 10 movies I periodically rewatch, and I doubt that’s uncommon.

So here’s the puzzle: given that initially viewing sports and initially viewing fiction are comparably likable [update: Seattle is now up 9-0!], why is it that the likability of rewatching is so different, with fiction dramatically (pun intended) outperforming sports?

We can heighten this puzzle in various ways. Note that many of the same things are supposed to constitute the enjoyability of watching either sports or fiction. There is conflict. There is suspense. There are characters and emotions. There are reversals, and thus both give us some kind of story. Both are, much of the time, visually impressive. So why does the enjoyability of all that get exhausted on first viewing in the sports case but not in the fiction case.

You might say that in the sports case, not knowing what happens in the end is what makes it interesting. But that just shifts the question without really answering the initial version of it. Why does knowing what happens in the end sap the enjoyability from a sports game in a way that it doesn’t for fictions? Of course, people often prefer not to know what happens in a fiction—“no spoilers!”—but the existence of such a preference is consistent with the claim that there’s a massive difference between (i) what knowing the end of a sports game does and (ii) knowing what the end of a movie, for example, does. Why is knowing a killjoy in one case but not the other?

I unfortunately don’t have a solution to this puzzle. But I am fairly confident that the central difference has something to do with how suspense works in fictional dramas versus sports. In a sports game, the suspense consists in the fact that, from the perspective of the viewer, each next play could be one that changes the course of the game: a homerun, a goal, a touchdown, a breakaway. It is not knowing whether the play will be game changing that keeps the game continually suspenseful—or continually suspenseful the first time. One is constantly hoping something will happen, and this makes it engaging. When I rewatch sports, that hope just isn’t there; it doesn’t feel like hoping for anything makes sense when the game has already happened.

But no matter how many times I watch a movie I love—even though I know how things will go—I still feel myself hoping certain things will happen or not happen. I hope that Miles won’t sabotage his budding relationship with Maya as if I didn’t know whether he will or won’t (even though I actually do know he does in the very next scene). I find myself hoping—every time I watch Star Wars—that Obi Wan will best Vader (even though we all know what happens…). So it seems that the tendency to hope for outcomes as if one doesn’t know is what keeps fictions engaging over and over again; it’s what keeps them suspenseful.

Thus, something about entering the frame of not-knowing-despite-knowing is what keeps movies engaging on rewatching [Seahawks are now up 19-7 in the fourth quarter] in ways that sports isn’t. But that just shifts the problem as well! For why is it that one can’t adopt the frame of not-knowing-despite-knowing in the sports case and thereby have an equally fun experience, or at least still a really engaging experience? It is as if one can’t adopt that frame in the sports case, but one just does without even trying in the fiction case. But why can’t one in the sports case? And why does one almost invariably do so on rewatching in the fiction case? I have to confess I have no answer—I just know it’s a good problem.

For completeness, I should mention one proposal from my friend Claudia, who happened to be walking through the lounge of our building where I’m watching and writing. Claudia is a psychotherapist, so I figured she would find the puzzle interesting and might have something to say. Her view is that the type of emotions that fictions elicit is deeper than the type of emotions that sports elicit. Sports emotions, on her view, are comprised more of moment to moment “euphoria” than of deeper feelings. I confess that something sounds right about that, and it may go some way to explaining why people rewatch in one case but not the other. Nevertheless, I think there’s a lot about this difference I’m talking about that still remains to be explained, even if she’s right. In particular, the differential suspense is still puzzling. Why does knowing the outcome kill it in one case but not the other? Even if sports only does give moment-to-moment euphoria, why can’t it do so a second time?

I’m looking forward to seeing proposed solutions in the comments! At this point, there are 39 seconds left in the game, and this is a blog I was supposed to submit three days ago. So: Congratulations to the Seahawks, who are sure to win. As for me, it’s time for me to go upstairs, pour a glass of bourbon, and start on my 38th iteration of 10 Things I Hate About You.

A post by Hannah Fasnacht

«Wie geht’s?» fragte die Trauer die Hoffnung.

«Ich bin etwas traurig», sagte die Hoffnung.

«Hoffentlich», sagte die Trauer.

—Franz Hohler

“How are you?” Sadness asked Hope.

“I’m a little sad”, Hope said.

“I would hope so”, said Sadness.

[my translation]

Grief is typically directed at or caused by an actual loss: the death of a person, the end of a relationship, the removal of a certain form of security, for example due to a war, the deprivation of abilities and things once possessed. One could call this kind of grief “past-oriented” and “directed at actual objects”. Mostly, grief is understood as a reaction to a loss – paradigmatically, the loss of someone close to us (Cholbi 2021; Ratcliffe 2020).

Grief seems to be a complex thing. It is not just sadness; rather, it is arguably a process with different emotions which can co-exist, contradict each other, shift into one another, have “stages” (Kübler-Ross 1969) or come in waves. Grief is not neat and contained, but can be raw and unfiltered:

It was poisonous, unnatural to let the dead go with a mere whimpering, a slight murmur, a rose bouquet of good taste. Good taste was out of place in the company of death, death itself was the essence of bad taste. And there must be much rage and saliva in its presence. The body must move and throw itself about, the eyes must roll, the hands should have no peace, and the throat should release all the yearning, despair and outrage that accompany the stupidity of loss.

—Toni Morrison, “Sula”

There might be a mixture of acceptance and raw hurt:

Sometimes, when I think about it, I still feel a dark hurt from some primal part of myself, and if I’m alone in my apartment when this happens I will hear myself making sounds that I never made before I went to Mongolia. I realize that I have turned back into a wounded witch, wailing in the forest, undone. Most of the time it seems sort of O.K., though, natural. Nature. Mother Nature. She is free to do whatever she chooses.

—Ariel Levy, “Thanksgiving in Mongolia”

What seems central to grief is a form of finality or a contestation or confrontation with exactly this finality.

… it is an act of resistance and refusal, grief telling you that it is over and your heart saying that it is not …

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “Notes on Grief”

Recently, the notion of grief has been expanded to include the phenomenon of anticipatory grief  (Allard et al. 2020; Evans 1994)—e.g. grief in light of a relative’s terminal illness or dementia. We anticipatorily grieve what we know is inevitable, what will come to pass.

I am here interested in yet another phenomenon: grieving the impossible, a form of grief that is directed not at an actual person or object or something in the past, but rather at an imagined (im-)possible future that will never come to be. Michael Cholbi argues that grief is not only directed at those who play an important role in our daily lives, but can also be aspirational and “… directed at those who play key roles in how we see ourselves and our lives, those in whom we have invested our hopes and in whom we thereby invested our practical identities.” (Cholbi 2021, 36)

I think this is possible also for people and things which never even existed, where the imagined object never was and never will be. We can not only grieve the loss of people close to us, relationships, experiences, things that were real. We can also grieve things we imagined and formed mental imagery about, things that never were, potential futures in which we mentally (and emotionally) invested, craved and longed for. Examples include grieving biological parenthood that is unattainable due to infertility, or grieving certain rights for which one has fought in a political movement but which seem to be permanently repressed. I will call this future-directed grief, one that involves the grieving of possibilities that were never realized.

We can examine how grief can be possible and appropriate when nothing “real” has been lost, when the grief in question is instead directed at something that will never come to be. Is this form of grief as weighty and important as other kinds? In what sense is the phenomenon of grieving the impossible distinct? Does it inform other forms of grief? If we take seriously this notion—namely that we can actually grieve something we imagined and hoped for—then it seems to me that propositional imagination and mental imagery play a constitutive role for this kind of grief.

Some philosophical questions that arise when thinking about grieving an impossible imagined future are similar to those that arise when thinking about the infamous “paradox of fiction” (PoF). Stacie Friend recently gave an excellent overview of the discussion regarding the PoF (Friend 2022). She argues that the dichotomous approach, which examines whether such emotions directed toward fiction are of the same kind as other emotions we experience in our ordinary life, is not helpful.

We could ask whether they are of the same phenomenal intensity, whether they are motivational, whether we experience physiological reactions, and whether evaluative components differ. (Friend 2022, 261; Adair 2019) Instead, Friend proposes to take into account all the variations and gradations the above components can have. This allows us a more nuanced picture, where we do not need to take such emotions to be exactly the same, but also not a totally separate kind.

I think this approach is useful for thinking about a grieving process which is directed at some imagined future, too. We might wonder, what is distinct in such cases, and maybe there are some really illuminating things to be found, but it seems that variations and gradations of the above components can be found in the paradigmatic “past-directed” form of grieving, and the “future-directed” form of grieving as well. The intensity, for example, with which one might be grieving a real person (say, one’s parent) and grieving a person who never existed (say, the wished-for child) is deeply personal and dependent on one’s particular circumstances.

Another thing similar to the PoF is whether we take the grieving about an imagined thing as appropriate. My intuition is that such a future-directed grief can be a real rational form of grief. There are probably distinctions to be made, and the rationality aspect can be disputed in certain examples, but it seems to me that there are at least cases where the grief in question can be apt for the future-directed case as well as the past-directed one.

I want to mention some potential distinctions and characteristics, nevertheless.

First, between PoF and the future-directed grief: We normally spend a limited time engaging with a work of fiction. But grieving an imagined future often follows big personal dreams and hopes and imagined lifepaths in which we invest quite some time imagining how they would be, maybe orienting our lives accordingly so it is more probable that such futures will come to be.

Second, that the thing we grieve was at least in theory possible for oneself is what differentiates that kind of phenomenon from other things that we can imagine and would be extremely happy about if they were to come true, but about which we only shrug if they don’t come to be actualized (e.g. the ability to fly unassisted).

Third, depending on the specific case, we might be taken by shock and surprise (e.g. after a diagnosis) if we expected and never doubted that the imagined object will come to be, or we might gradually anticipate our dream slipping away (e.g. due to time running out and certain things becoming more improbable). And depending on the dream/hope, we might have had more or less agency to pursue and achieve it. But all these aspects also factor in to varying degrees in the paradigmatic past-directed case of grief which is directed at something real.

Fourth, what seems different at first, though, is the interpersonal mourning process. There aren’t always clear rituals, procedures, condolences, burials, and culturally practiced norms that accompany the loss of an imagined future.

And finally, another differentiation is that the object of grief that never was and never will be is constituted through imagination. But even this might not be as clear-cut a distinction. One element we grieve when the people we care about die, seems to be the potential future they would have had and the future we would have had together. So, at the very least, in further thinking about grieving an impossible future, we might learn something about the paradigmatic case of grief, too.

 References

Adair, Heather V. 2019. ‘Updating Thought Theory: Emotion and the Non-Paradox of Fiction’. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 100 (4): 1055–73. https://doi.org/10.1111/papq.12294.

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. 2020. “Notes on Grief”. The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/culture/personal-history/notes-on-grief#rid=6212886d-fc32-47e0-8a70-34ecf4270788&q=adichie)

Allard, Emilie, Christine Genest, and Alain Legault. 2020. ‘Theoretical and Philosophical Assumptions behind the Concept of Anticipatory Grief’. International Journal of Palliative Nursing 26 (2): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.12968/ijpn.2020.26.2.56.

Cholbi, Michael. 2021. ‘Grief: A Philosophical Guide’. Princeton University Press.

Evans, A. J. 1994. ‘Anticipatory Grief: A Theoretical Challenge’. Palliative Medicine 8 (2): 159–65. https://doi.org/10.1177/026921639400800211.

Friend, Stacie. 2022. ‘Emotion in Fiction: State of the Art’. The British Journal of Aesthetics 62 (2): 257–71. https://doi.org/10.1093/aesthj/ayab060.

Hohler, Franz. Poem: https://www.karldergrosse.ch/programm/veranstaltung/winterreden-2026-franz-hohler

Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth. 1969. On Death and Dying .

Levy, Ariel. 2013. “Thanksgiving in Mongolia. Adventure and heartbreak at the edge of the world.” The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/11/18/thanksgiving-in-mongolia)

Ratcliffe, Matthew. 2020. ‘Towards a Phenomenology of Grief: Insights from Merleau-Ponty’. European Journal of Philosophy 28 (3): 657–69. https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.12513.

A post by Irene Lonigro

According to a venerable philosophical tradition, imagination builds upon experiences we have already had (Nagel, 1974; Paul, 2014). I cannot imagine what it feels like to taste a new kind of fruit like a durian until I have that very experience first-hand. We may call this limitation to our imagination the experiential constraint. Tasting a durian for the first time is therefore an ‘epistemically transformative’ experience that was previously inaccessible to us (Paul, 2014: 26).  

More recently, some scholars have questioned the experiential constraint. Following Amy Kind, there is no in principle difficulty in imagining new experiences. We can indeed access new experiences in imagination through ‘imaginative scaffolding’, the process of adding, subtracting and modifying our previous experiences to obtain novel re-combinations in imagination (2020: 137). We can perhaps imagine a new sensory experience like eating a durian by scaffolding out from experiences we have already had.

Now, try to imagine a new example: what it feels like to experience the joy of motherhood if you have never been a mother or to experience nostalgia for the first time. These examples present us with new experiences, this time of an emotional nature. Can we access these experiences via imagination? More generally, can we apply imaginative scaffolding to emotions as well? In this post, I explore whether and how the case of emotions presents a different kind of challenge for imagination compared to other experiences.   

When applying imaginative scaffolding to emotions, we encounter special difficulties that are not common to other mental states. First, while it is beyond dispute that we can imagine emotional states propositionally, the possibility of imagining emotions in a non-propositional way has been questioned (Currie and Ravenscroft 2002). That is, it is unclear whether and to what extent we can imagine them sensorily and in such a way as to preserve their distinctive phenomenology.

Even if we agree that we can imagine emotions in a phenomenally rich way (Dorsch, 2011, 2012; Engisch and Langkau, 2024), we still may ask whether we can imagine new emotions. The answer is complex for at least two reasons: first, it is not entirely clear what is meant by a ‘new’ emotion. Secondly, it is unclear how to define affective phenomenology in the imaginative context. Let us begin with the first issue.

What exactly do we mean by a ‘new’ emotion? We could simply mean a new token of the same emotion type (e.g., a new instance of joy, when we have experienced joy before), or we could mean a new type of emotion (e.g., the feeling of nostalgia, when one has never experienced nostalgia before).

The first case is similar to the example in Kind of tasting a particular strawberry when one has tasted other strawberries before (2020: 138) and it does not seem to involve a new kind of experience. However, we should not be too hasty in dismissing examples like these. In the case of emotions, the problem already observed by Kind, namely, that of determining the difference between experiences which are totally new and those that are not, is even more complex. We might ask whether instances of the same emotion type are always commensurable, even when their intentional objects are fundamentally different: is the joy of motherhood comparable to other instances of joy? 

Moreover, how do we classify cases involving cognitively sophisticated emotions? Is it sufficient to have experienced the primitive emotion of disgust to imagine moral disgust? Or should we consider them as two distinct emotion types? Prinz (2004) would say they are the same emotion with the same structure, but not everyone would agree. This suggests that it is difficult in the case of emotions to draw a sharp line between what counts as a fundamentally new experience and what does not.

I leave aside these concerns for now and focus on the second, more relevant case involving new emotion types. Cases of this kind are undeniably challenging since they involve experiences which qualify as epistemically transformative. We can read all about nostalgia, but it seems that we cannot know what it feels like until we experience that emotion ourselves. Can imagination assist us in this and similar cases?

Some authors have answered affirmatively. We can apply scaffolding to radically new emotions, by combining more primitive phenomenal experiences in the imagination (Werner, 2023: 179; Vendrell-Ferran, 2025). This route seems viable for complex phenomenal states with a mixed affective signature, like nostalgia. Following this path, we can imagine nostalgia for the first time by combining more primitive affective states (e.g., delight with a sense of loss and longing). Another interesting example of this kind is the one suggested by Susan Feagin of being ‘surprised into contemptuous amusement in the midst of anxiety’ (1997: 60). In this case too, the emotion has a complex structure, but one that can be traced back to simpler affective states.

One might object that complex emotions are not phenomenal states built out of simpler parts: that is just an oversimplified picture. True, but do we need a perfect level of accuracy for the scaffolding process to be successful? What is the criterion for accuracy in this context?

A natural solution is to adopt an isomorphic criterion, namely, our previous experiences and the new one must be sufficiently similar in their phenomenal character. We therefore select from our emotional repertoire only those experiences which are epistemically relevant, that is, that are isomorphic to the new state. What it means to be sufficiently similar for two affective experiences is something that must be established and depends heavily on which theory of emotions we want to support (therefore, on which aspects of the affective experience are defined as central and which are not).

This process of associating similar experiences in imagination somehow resembles the process by which our emotional sensitivities evolve, that is, by exploiting the similarity between situations that already elicit the emotion and new situations (Deonna and Teroni, forthcoming: 219; D’Arms and Jacobson, 2010). So, for instance, a new situation involving moral offence can elicit anger in virtue of its connection to more primitive situations (of physical offence) which are similar to the new one. If emotional growth requires a form of ‘aspectual perception’ (Deonna and Teroni, forthcoming), that is, the ability to see new situations in light of situations we have already experienced, here we may talk about ‘aspectual imagination’: the ability to imagine new emotional states in light of more primitive states we have already felt.

If scaffolding works for complex emotions like nostalgia, can it be applied to basic emotions as well? What about happiness, fear or disgust which do not contain other emotions as parts (Ekman et al. 1969)? The decisive question seems to be whether these states have a structure or not. Being (at least, minimally) structured is a precondition to imaginative scaffolding. Vendrell-Ferran has recently argued that basic emotions like disgust or fear can be analysed in terms of elementary feelings like ‘feeling bad, tense, threatened, diminished, and so on’ (2025: 244). However, several negative emotions can involve the feelings mentioned by Ferran: not only fear and disgust, but also sadness and shame, for instance. How can we distinguish between these different emotions? Maybe we just need to find the ‘right’ combination for each emotion, and this is something we can improve with practice.

This brings us to the second problem mentioned earlier, namely, how to define affective phenomenology in the imaginative context. More generally, we may wonder whether phenomenology alone is sufficient to identify an emotion type. In the literature, emotions are typically defined in light of their formal object, namely, the evaluative property the emotion represents and which determines the emotion’s correctness conditions (e.g., danger for fear). Can we come to know fear only by imagining its affective phenomenology? What if the same phenomenology is common to other emotional states? Fear and anger are said to share a similar phenomenology, for instance. If scaffolding gives us access to a phenomenology that is indistinguishable from that of other affective experiences, then the process is epistemically trivial. We want to imagine new emotions without losing their distinctive phenomenological profile.

We must therefore aim for a more fine-grained phenomenology. When scholars talk about affective phenomenology, they usually refer to the valence dimension of emotions, that is, the feelings of pleasure or displeasure associated with the emotion. A central aspect of affective phenomenology concerns bodily phenomenology, namely, the complex interaction of ‘somatic-visceral’ feelings (Todd, 2023). However, some scholars have noticed that bodily phenomenology is not sufficient by itself to account for the specificity of emotions and argued that cognitive and conative forms of phenomenology are more important (Kriegel, 2015). We must therefore draw on all these aspects of affective phenomenology in order to imagine emotions accurately.  

The problems discussed here are just some of the issues that would be worth addressing in future research. Another issue concerns the role of affective memory in scaffolding. If the scaffolding process depends on previous phenomenal experiences, the retrieval of these experiences by means of affective memory proves crucial. We therefore might ask whether affective memory can perform this role. Can we retrieve past emotions at will? And, if so, what if our memory is weak or biased (Levine, Lench and Safer, 2009)? These seem to be pressing issues for any advocate of imaginative scaffolding in the emotional context. For now, I hope I have highlighted at least some of the special challenges involved in imagining new emotions. 

References

Currie, G. and I. Ravenscroft (2002). Recreative Minds, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

D’Arms, J. and D. Jacobson (2010). Demystifying Sensibilities: Sentimental Values and the Instability of Affect. In: The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion, edited by P. Goldie, pp. 585-613. New York: Oxford University Press.

Deonna, J. and F. Teroni, (forthcoming). Imagination, Creativity, and Emotion. In: The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination and Creativity, edited by A. Kind and J. Langkau. New York: Oxford University Press.

Dorsch, F. (2011). Emotional Imagining and Our Responses to Fiction, Enrahonar 46: 153-176.

–––, (2012). The Unity of Imagining, Frankfurt: Ontos.

Ekman, P., E. R. Sorenson, and W. V.  Friesen (1969). Pan-cultural elements in facial displays of emotions. Science, 164: 86-88.  

Engisch, P. and J. Langkau (2024). Empathizing Across Sensibilities, Philosophical Explorations, 27(2): 184–196.

Feagin, S. L. (1997). Imagining Emotions and Appreciating Fiction. In: Emotion and the Arts, edited by M. Hjort and S. Laver, pp. 50-62. New York: Oxford University Press.

Kind, A. (2020). What Imagination Teaches. In: Becoming Someone New: Essays on Transformative Experience, Choice, and Change, edited by J. Schwenkler and E. Lambert, pp. 133–146. New York: Oxford University Press.

Kriegel, U. (2015). The Varieties of Consciousness. New York: Oxford University Press.

Levine, L. J., H. C. Lench, and M. A. Safer (2009). Functions of remembering and misremembering emotion. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 23(8), 1059–1075.

Nagel, T. (1974). What Is it Like to Be a Bat?, Philosophical Review, 83: 435-450.

Paul, L. A. (2014). Transformative Experience. New York: Oxford University Press.

Prinz, J. (2004). Gut Reactions. A Perceptual Theory of Emotion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Todd, C. (2023). Affective Memory, Imagined Emotion, and Bodily Imagery, Synthese, 202(152): 1- 24.

Vendrell Ferran, I. (2025). Can we empathize with emotions that we have never felt? In: Imagination and Experience: Philosophical Explorations, edited by I. Vendrell Ferran and C. Werner, pp. 232–253. New York: Routledge.

Werner, C. (2023). ‘Tell me, how does it feel?’. Learning what it is like through literature. In: Empathy’s Role in Understanding Persons, Literature, and Art, edited by T. Petraschka and C. Werner, pp. 174–196. New York: Routledge.

A post by Reza Hadisi

In one of his commentaries, al‑Shahrazūrī (d. ca. 1288) cites and elaborates on an enigmatic passage from Suhrawardī (d. 1191), the founder of the Ishrāqī philosophical movement:

“If you hear of the discussion of the ancients that there is a magnitudinous world in existence, which is not the sensory world nor the intelligible; its cities are countless without end; among them are Jābalqā and Jābarsā… Believe in it!” (trans. Lit 2017)

The passage is cryptic, but for Suhrawardī it is not poetic flourish. He is referring to the notion of the ‘world of image’ [ʿālam al‑mithāl] and its “cities,” which he identifies as a distinct set of mind-independent objects (alongside sensible objects, Platonic forms, and souls). These, for him, are the proper objects of imagination.

Now, not many of us believe in the existence of Jābalqā and Jābarsā, or any other “cities of the world of image.” At best, we might be persuaded by the idea of imaginative construction: that episodes of imagining can generate quasi mental objects, and that these objects can be shared if the “construction script” is sharable. But Suhrawardī and his Ishrāqī commentators mean something far stronger. They do not think we construct these objects. They think we can discover them.

In a recent paper (Hadisi, forthcoming), I try to make sense of this medieval conception of imagination. Some of the reconstruction there is tied to Suhrawardī’s broader metaphysics. Here, I focus on just one basic idea concerning the constitutive norm of imagination.

Here is a familiar claim: unlike belief, imagination does not have truth or veridicality as a default standard of correctness. To be sure, as Amy Kind and others have emphasized, we can impose a voluntary truth constraint on an episode of imagining, for example, when we imagine whether penguins can fly (Kind 2016; Munro 2021). But when we do not impose such a constraint, we may freely imagine penguins flying over the CN Tower, and nothing seems wrong with that episode of imagining qua imagining.

Suhrawardī rejects this picture. On his view, one’s attempt to imagine penguins flying over Toronto can err in two ways:

●     Error of apprehension: you might take what you imagine to be a mechanical bird rather than a penguin.

●     Error of consequence: you might infer that there must be a storm in Toronto because you take flying penguins to entail rainy weather.

But what is wrong with imagining that the flying penguins are mechanical birds, or that a storm is brewing because of flying penguins?

According to Suhrawardī, the error is not that real penguins do not fly, or that flying birds do not cause storms. His claim is not that imagination must, in every use, track the actual world. Instead, he holds that imagination has a direction of fit from mind to the world of image.

The “world of image” is a term often used to refer to Suhrawardī’s strong realism about all possible objects of imagination. He maintains that these objects stand in partially determinate sets of possible relations to one another, forming infinite complexes or “cities” of interconnected images. Suhrawardī’s own examples show that these “images” encode visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile, and other kinds of information. Navigating this imaginal space requires grasping these intricate relations. I will set aside his reasons for endorsing this ontological liberalism, although in the paper I note why some of these reasons may appeal to those sympathetic to Platonism about abstract objects. Suhrawardī calls the individual objects that occupy this aspect of reality “suspended images” [muthul muʿallaqa].

For Suhrawardī, every act of imagining is intentionally directed toward some set of suspended images. Accordingly, when you imagine penguins flying over Toronto, you may create a mental image, but that is not the proper object of your imagination. Even in such fantastical uses, the created mental image is a device we use to grasp a set of mind‑independent interconnected suspended images corresponding to penguins flying over Toronto, other things being equal.

The ceteris paribus qualification is important because it helps explain the errors of apprehension and consequence described above. When you intend to imagine penguins flying over Toronto, if you instead latch onto an image of mechanical birds or infer a storm, you have failed to track the suspended image you meant to access. In other words, when we try to imagine a penguin flying, we aim to access a set of interrelated images that differ from the actual world under the aspect that penguins can fly, but not under other aspects. We would be reaching for the wrong set of interrelated images if we apprehend a world in which penguins are mechanical birds or their flying causes rain. Suhrawardī maintains that such interrelated images also exist, but our intentional act of imagining is always directed at one or another specific set.

These errors also reveal that, for Suhrawardī, imagination is not governed solely by what we intend to imagine. Intention selects the suspended image we aim to access, but the internal structure of those images constrains whether our imaginative act succeeds. Some things we might try to imagine are internally impossible, and some combinations of images cannot coexist. Because suspended images are mind‑independent, the imaginal world cannot contain impossible objects. Imagination is therefore answerable to the internal and external structure of its objects, not just to our stipulations.

To make things a little less confusing, it is useful to look at Suhrawardī’s attempt to give a unified analysis of two different cases of imagining: extramental imagining and imagining “in the mind.” Both, he argues, involve using a sensible device to access an object in the world of images.

The extramental case: Suppose I am watching this scene from The Mirror:

Assuming that appreciating this scene requires imaginative engagement, we may ask: what is the object of imagination here? The shapes and colors on the TV screen are not themselves the objects of imagination. But neither is the object of imagination located on the film set, where there are cameras, crew, and equipment, none of which belong to the portion of the world of images we intend to access.

On Suhrawardī’s account, the pixels on the screen are a vehicle through which I access a structured complex of images (visual, auditory, affective, and so on) that hang together in determinate ways under some aspects and indeterminate ways under others. A given vehicle can allow access to only some suspended images. What determines which suspended images count as the proper targets of our imaginative access is always a matter of intention. Sometimes that intention lies with the audience, who directs their own imaginative act; sometimes it lies with another person who invites us to imagine alongside them. Suppose I want to engage the movie scene in a way that tracks Tarkovsky’s intention. In that case, if I imagine a phone in the woman’s pocket, I have accessed the wrong suspended image (“I have wandered into the wrong city!”). Of course, I could instead intend to access a different city altogether, one in which she does pull out a phone and scroll through Instagram. Suhrawardī’s account does not imply that this sort of imagining is necessarily nonveridical. What matters is simply that, in each case, there is a fact of the matter about which suspended image I am trying to reach and whether I succeed. After all, my imagination could be intentional under the description of watching the film in a way that conflicts with Tarkovsky’s intention.

The mental case: Now consider the ordinary case where I close my eyes and imagine penguins flying over Toronto. Here, Suhrawardī deploys the notion of a mental image, but in a way that reverses the usual picture. The mental image is not the object of imagination. Just as the object of imagination is not on the TV screen, the mental image is not the imaginative object. It is the interface or sensible device that enables access to the suspended image.

The account is therefore unified. Whether I am watching a film, reading a novel, daydreaming, or imagining my dinner, I am always doing the same thing: using a sensible vehicle, in an intentional form, to access an interrelated set of visual, tactile, auditory, and other images. And because these objects are mind‑independent, imagination inherits a norm of correctness that is not optional or voluntary. It is built into its very constitution.

In my paper I say more about Suhrawardī’s metaphysics of suspended images and his distinction between them and Platonic forms. Suhrawardī sometimes treats suspended images as archetypes and sometimes as vague entities, and I am still trying to see how these descriptions fit together. My next question is whether the standards of correctness that govern imagination, understood as being answerable to the mind‑independent structure of its objects, require this particular metaphysical profile or could rest on a different metaphysics. Clarifying what sort of entities suspended images are seems crucial for assessing both the coherence of Suhrawardī’s view and the promise it holds.

* * *

Author’s Note: I wrote this piece just before the most recent protests in Iran against the current criminal regime. Anyone who studies Iran’s intellectual and philosophical traditions owes a deep debt to those who are now defending the possibility of free thought and expression in Iran.

References

Hadisi, Reza (forthcoming). “Imagination and Its Object: Recovering Suhrawardī’s Suspended Images”. Philosophers' Imprint.

Kind, Amy. 2016. “Imagining Under Constraints.” In Knowledge Through Imagination, Ed. Amy Kind and Peter Kung, 145–59. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lit, L.W.C. van. 2018. The World of Image in Islamic Philosophy: Ibn Sīnā, Suhrawardī, Shahrazūrī and Beyond. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Munro, Daniel. 2021. “Imagining the Actual.” Philosophers’ Imprint 21 (17).

Shahrazūrī, Shams al-Dīn. ca.1286/2001. Sharḥ Ḥikmat Al-Ishrāq. Ed. Hossein Ziai. Institute for Humanities  and Cultural Studies.

A post by Ansley Avis

“It’s one banana, Michael, what could it cost, $10?”

-Lucille Bluth, Arrested Development

Imagine an elephant.

Got it? Perfect. How many toenails does it have?

Your elephant probably didn’t give you an answer. That’s okay, it would still be unfair to say that you failed to imagine an elephant. While their toenails are unique, they aren’t necessary to capture what makes an elephant an elephant. You could have thought about a long trunk, big ears and rough, grey skin, a trumpeting noise, or some other combination of features and gotten the gist of it. Even if you have aphantasia, you were presumably able to tell that you were thinking about an elephant, not something else.

Now imagine a trillion dollars. This is how much money Tesla shareholders recently voted to allocate to Elon Musk over the next ten years.

How did you do it? Could you be sure that you were imagining a trillion in a way that would meaningfully set it apart from a billion, or two trillion? If you switch from imagining 1 to 2 trillion, do the changes you make track the actual trillion dollar difference between these numbers?

We can’t imagine a trillion in the same straightforward way that we can an elephant. Our minds just don’t have the resolution necessary to do so. This holds even for legendary thinkers – 400 years ago, René Descartes wrote on the impossibility of imagining a chiliagon, a 1,000 sided polygon. Descartes noted he could at least conceive of a chiliagon; even if he couldn’t accurately picture it, with a little effort he could still understand it intellectually by drawing on his mathematical knowledge. But when we read a story like the one above, how do we intellectually grasp $1,000,000,000,000? This isn’t a shape with clearly defined parameters – it’s untold power. Our failure here is both imaginative and conceptual. If we want to understand the implications of numbers we encounter every day, we have to get creative.

This failure matters – we’re not just missing the toenails, we’re missing the entire point. In this post, I’ll explore how we may be able to turn to imagination to address this problem. But by developing certain imaginative habits, we can use the flexibility of our imaginative faculties to grasp big numbers in less straightforward ways. 

Big numbers are integral to the operation of various communities we belong to. They determine how aid is allocated to those in need, how resources are distributed to our schools, emergency services, police, roads and more, and set the scope of influence certain individuals wield over entire communities, even countries, via campaign contributions, advertisements, and investments. They appear on our ballots and in our newsfeeds, and we can only respond to them insofar as we can understand them. Thus, our failure to appreciate these figures poses a threat to our autonomy as political and moral agents.

We encounter very large numbers every day. I live in the US, along with about 340 million other people. Here are some of the headlines that made our national news for us this year: “US budget deficit hits $284 billion in October”; “Nearly 42 million Americans lose their food stamp benefits”; “Wisconsin group sues Elon Musk, alleging million-dollar check giveaways were voter bribes”; and, of course, “Tesla shareholders approve Elon Musk’s $1 trillion pay package.”

When we see numbers like this, we often continue on with a superficial sense of their gravity. But we don’t really get them. We might take our inability to comprehend them as evidence of their grandiosity, but vague awe isn’t enough for us to make comparisons and judgments, or recognize when something isn’t right.

We need intelligible context. If Tesla hits the projected growth needed for Musk to accumulate 1 trillion dollars over the next decade, he will make 275 million dollars per day. That’s two brand new Macbooks per second, or the median annual income in the US ($83,730) every 27 seconds. Imagine reheating a burrito and coming away with $200K. You probably wouldn’t be reheating burritos anymore. One trillion dollars could fund the US military for a year with billions to spare. Were he to be more frugal, Musk could match Russia’s annual military spending with only 9% of his net worth. Sure, the ultra-wealthy cannot liquidate all of their wealth at once, but this is hardly a limitation. Our failure to conceive of these magnitudes means a fraction of a billionaire’s wealth can be effectively portrayed as insignificant, despite still being in the millions or even billions.

How we interpret big numbers impacts our political beliefs and moral judgments. Middle class Americans can be convinced that a wealth tax is unfair and would kill entrepreneurship, even when one could theoretically still rack up hundreds of millions of dollars. Failing to conceptualize these numbers makes it more appealing to vote against our best interests. We might think of these fortunes as someone’s “hard earned money,” even if we don’t actually believe anyone could work hard enough to earn another person’s annual salary in under a minute. And if we can’t understand these figures, we can’t process just how many people could benefit from more efficient use of this money. Ultimately, our ability to measure harm against good is distorted.

When we fail to grasp big numbers, we’re vulnerable to being complicit in our own harm. We cannot hold those in power accountable. Our autonomy is undermined because we a) may endorse situations that we would not otherwise and b) allow individuals to buy influence in media and politics, accepting their ability to alter our access to information and sway the legislative process.

So, what can we do?

While we can’t directly imagine a trillion in the way we can imagine an elephant, we can practice using our imagination as a scaffold to make these numbers more meaningful and clear for ourselves and others.

Journalists occasionally do this by putting numbers in terms of a country’s GDP, for example, but this is not standard. It can also lead to other big numbers that need to be broken down. But at least by comparing an individual net worth to that of a country, we can try and imagine what they might be able to do: raise an army, for example. (Or, in Musk’s case, a robot army.)

I suggest we strive to make these sorts of conversions habitual and culturally ubiquitous in order to expand our autonomy. We can use the versatility and vividness of our imaginations to contextualize obscure statistics, transforming them into a more meaningful and secure hold on the world.

Reframing these figures in more salient terms can be eye-opening. A million seconds is about 11.5 days, while a billion seconds is almost 32 years. That’s the difference between a vacation and half a lifetime. 1 trillion seconds is 30,000 years – longer than recorded human history.

Websites like this one provide easily sharable material to conceptualize these relationships at scale. Designed by Matt Korostoff, this page represents $1,000 as a single pixel and uses a vertical scroll to situate large magnitudes of wealth as they relate to average people, particular individuals, and the estimated costs of a few striking policy initiatives. The numbers are a bit out of date (the 400 richest Americans now hold over $6.5 trillion dollars), but the impact remains. I can imagine this small group sitting in a relatively empty 747, vibrating with all kinds of potential.

It’s true that we already make connections like these on occasion, but stochastic understanding isn't enough. We should try and break this habit of glossing over big numbers. Of course, we can’t expect everyone to individually come up with these conversions, but we can try to make them accessible and commonplace enough that you don’t need a calculator to read the news. People with careers in public-facing communication can make it a point to emphasize salient and impactful analogies, and with a few readily available, we can make it habitual and lower effort to imaginatively tackle big numbers wherever we encounter them.

Personally, I often come back to the 11.5 days / 32 years conversion. It draws together a few common orders of magnitude in terms that are salient to me, more meaningful and distinct than a billion versus a million. I can also see how significant the increase from 1 to 2 billion is by thinking in terms of a human life instead of just doubling a big number – a lot can happen in 32 years. When I read about 40 million people losing their grocery assistance, I can imagine shaking a different stranger's hand every second for 440 straight days. And when I casually drop a million while rounding that number, I recognize that as 11 days of blistering hands in and of itself.

It would be an understatement to say that improving our imaginative ability won’t fix our political problems. But cultivating these habits would at least strengthen our autonomy and help us stay aligned with our own values. And maybe, at scale, it could make a dent. Using our imagination to contextualize otherwise unfathomable numbers provides one more layer of protection against complacency, and one more foothold in reality. We may never fully grasp big numbers toenails and all, but at least we can make them clear enough to engage with them.

References

Descartes, R., & Williams, B. (1996). Sixth Meditation: The existence of material things, and the real distinction between mind and body. In J. Cottingham (Ed.), Descartes: Meditations on First Philosophy: With Selections from the Objections and Replies (pp. 50–62). chapter, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Fore, P. (2025, October 23). Elon Musk defends $1 trillion pay package: “I just don’t feel comfortable building a robot army here and then being ousted.” Fortune. https://fortune.com/2025/10/23/billionaire-elon-musk-defends-trillion-dollar-tesla-pay-package-proposal-robot-army-world-richest-man-salary/

Income in the United States: 2024. (2025, September 9). Census.gov; US Census Bureau. https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2025/demo/p60-286.html

Isidore, C. (2025, November 6). Tesla shareholders approve Elon Musk’s $1 trillion pay package. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/06/business/musk-trillion-dollar-pay-package-vote

Kirsch, N. (2019, December 4). Why Elon Musk Is Cash Poor (For A Billionaire). Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/noahkirsch/2019/12/04/why-elon-musk-is-cash-poor-for-a-billionaire/

Korostoff, M. (2018). Wealth, shown to scale. Github.io. https://eattherichtextformat.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/

Peterson-Withorn , C., & Durot, M. (Eds.). (2025, September 1). Forbes 400. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/forbes-400/

Pringle, E. (2024, October 2). Bill Gates is open to losing $101 billion to the tax man—but not policies that replicate North Korea’s “unbelievable equality.” Fortune. https://fortune.com/2024/10/02/bill-gates-tax-rich-north-korea-entrepreneurialism-american-dream/

A post by Dorothy Wade

In my work as an intensive care psychologist, I frequently hear from patients about the vivid and frightening experiences they undergo. Bombarded by hallucinations and delusions, their visions and thoughts are inescapably real to them. Often involving bizarre elements such as aliens, medieval monks or cannibals, the episodes could be mistaken for scenes of a horror movie (Wade et al 2014).

Marilyn believed there was a baby factory in the hospital basement. She told me the nurses were manufacturing ‘Frankenstein babies’ with disabilities, as a scam to claim welfare benefits.  She had seen it for herself, and urged me to go and check the basement. Irene saw puffins jumping on the bed next to hers, shooting blood at her from plastic rifles and laughing day and night. She was scared, but didn’t tell staff or family about the gun-toting birds in case they thought she had lost her mind.

Like thousands of seriously ill people in hospital every day, Marilyn and Irene were suffering from an altered state of consciousness known as delirium. In the aftermath they were terrified, both from the experience, and the belief that they were going mad. Delirium is like imagination on steroids (often literally). There seems to be no limit to the ideas, emotions and extraordinary tales the mind can generate in this state. Delirium in ICU results from brain changes caused by illness, medications (sedatives, opioids or steroids) and a disorientating environment. Although usually temporary, the syndrome may leave people with significant cognitive problems and psychological scars.

While delirium is outside the ordinary experience of many of us, it is just one of our constantly changing states of consciousness. In fact, we spend most of our lives in altered mental states, the most obvious being sleep and dreams. Even when awake, a third to half of our time can be spent in mind-wandering or fantasising. In trying to understand my patients better and explain what might be happening to their minds, I became fascinated by facets of the imagination that emerge in altered states of consciousness.

What causes these shifting states? Can they be classified and studied? For the past year I have been interviewing experts and reading their research on imagination, day-dreams, dreams, hallucinations, delusions, delirium, psychedelic trips, meditation, hypnosis, trance and creativity. I have learned that science has only just begun to take altered states of mind seriously, that states of consciousness are studied in silos, and connections between them are not yet understood.

One question I had about delirium and other altered states is how the mind can spontaneously create mental images and weave them into believable narratives. It is as if the brain contains a fantastical dream machine that generates visions and stories without our conscious effort. Perhaps this is why artists are often attracted to altered states. Many find the early morning post-dream state conducive to creative composition.  Writers such as Mary Shelley and Isabel Allende, and film-makers Jean Cocteau and Akira Kurosawa all had ideas that came to them fully-formed in a dream. Other artists receive inspiration in awake hallucinations. Korean writer Juhea Kim had a vision of a tiger while running in a park, and immediately the whole plot of her novel Beasts of a Little Land unfolded in her mind.

While researching dreams, hallucinations, psychedelia and other altered states, I noticed one brain process was frequently mentioned - the default network. In the past 30 years, scientists have shown that anatomically separate areas of the brain are connected to each other to form networks. These brain networks work in harmony to create a variety of states of mind. The networks orchestrate a constant flow of information that arrives from inside and outside the body, as well as thoughts arising in the mind.

The default network is said to play a crucial role in our everyday lives – when our mind wanders or when we imagine, remember or think creatively. It constructs our inner world by linking brain areas related to emotions, memories, mental pictures, selfhood, understanding other people’s perspectives, and predicting our future (Andrews-Hanna et al 2014). Some have called it the ‘imagination network’.

Psychologists define imagination as thinking outside of normal time, place and circumstance (Taylor 2013), while philosophers characterise it as the way we represent things in our mind, without aiming at what they actually are at present (Liao and Gendler 2020). The imagination network, a group of mental processes whose purpose is to dream up alternatives to our present reality, fits in well with these definitions. But some researchers have warned me to be sceptical, because the default network has become the usual suspect to explain any altered brain state.

Certainly it is important to recognise that the default network does not work alone. It collaborates with other brain networks and connectivity between them is key. Another important brain pathway is the attention network, that is activated when we performs tasks. There is a dynamic relationship between the two networks: when activity in the attention network increases, default network activity generally decreases, and vice versa. This seesaw relationship is coordinated by a third player, the control network. In this way, our mind moves smoothly between the external and internal worlds. These accounts are simplified, because scientists are not sure exactly how many brain networks there are or what they all do. The latest research suggests there could be fifteen, including several attention networks and three default networks.

The dynamic framework of thought (Christoff et al 2016) models the interplay of networks as they create different states of mind. For example, in dreaming, the control networks shut down and the imagination network runs riot. When we daydream, our imagination wanders freely, but we stay in touch with the outside world. Creativity depends on cooperation between the imagination and control networks. The dynamic framework is now being updated to explain the effects of psychedelics and meditation.

Reading research on other altered states has made me reflect that delirium is seriously under-researched. Surely delirium is a pressing problem, because it is an involuntary altered state of consciousness affecting the most vulnerable patients. Even the phenomenology is barely known. According to psychiatrists, delirium involves reduced attention and awareness, and problems with mental function that develop quickly (Crone et al. 2025). A few small studies suggest that 50% of patients with delirium have hallucinations or delusions. The hallucinations are usually visual but may be auditory or tactile.

We do not know exactly what happens in the brain during delirium to produce these effects. The sophisticated communication between networks that is needed for the brain to function properly is severely disrupted in delirium. Numerous insults from illness and medication may prevent the brain from switching smoothly between the default and attention networks. An important cause may be inflammation, the body’s response when trying to overcome injury caused by infection, trauma or surgery. As a result of the network chaos, information from the senses or the body’s interior is badly processed and wrongly interpreted by the brain.

Treatment options for delirium are limited. Antipsychotic drugs are often given to delirious patients in ICU, but there is no proof that they work and they have serious side-effects. Holistic methods to address common triggers of delirium such as pain, infection or dehydration are preferred, but there is still little evidence to support them. As a psychologist working in ICU, I was sometimes unsure what our discipline had to offer patients with delirium. Our current dominant cognitive behavioural models (CBT) target thoughts and feelings accessed in a normal state of consciousness. A form of CBT for psychosis that helps people whose sense of reality is altered looked promising, but our trial of those methods did not demonstrate efficacy in ICU patients (Wade et al 2019).

My colleagues and I are going back to basics to map the phenomenology of delirium better, and scope psychological interventions previously used with delirious patients (Shaikh et al, 2024). We hope to develop new delirium therapies to help patients cope with the disturbing experience of the imagination going wild.

References

Andrews-Hanna, J.R., Smallwood, J. and Spreng, R.N. (2014), The default network and self-generated thought: component processes, dynamic control, and clinical relevance. Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci., 1316, 29-52. 

Christoff, K., Irving, Z., Fox, K. et al. (2016). Mind-wandering as spontaneous thought: a dynamic framework. Nat Rev Neurosci, 17. 

Crone, C., Fochtmann, L.J., Ahmed, I., et al (2025). The American Psychiatric Association practice guideline for the prevention and treatment of delirium. Am J Psychiatry, 182(9):880-884.

Liao, Shen-yi and Tamar Gendler (2020). Imagination. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2020 edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta.

Shaikh, M., Wade, D. et al. (2024). Psychological interventions for patients with delirium in intensive care: A scoping review protocol. PloS one, 19(12).

Taylor, M. (2013) Imagination. In P.D. Zelazo (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Developmental Psychology (Vol. 1): Body and Mind (pp. 791-831). Oxford University Press.

Wade, D. M., Brewin, C. R., Howell, D. C et al. (2015). Intrusive memories of hallucinations and delusions in traumatised intensive care patients: an interview study. Br J Health Psychol, 20(3), 613–31.

Wade, D. M., Mouncey P.R., Richards-Belle, A., et al. (2019). Effect of a nurse-led preventive psychological intervention on symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder among critically ill patients: A randomized clinical trial. JAMA, 321(7), 665-675.

A post by Joshua Myers and Johannes Mahr.

Imagination and episodic memory are intimately linked. Imagination draws on previous experience—when picturing yourself on a beach in Portugal sipping mango juice, you will draw on memories of other beaches you’ve visited and other mango juices you’ve had. Conversely, memory involves imaginatively filling in missing detail—when you remember your last trip to the beach you will likely draw on elements from other beach trips to populate the scene.

A popular way to explain the intimate relationship between memory and imagination has been to say that they both rely on a process of episodic construction that (re)combines elements of previous experiences (Addis 2020, Schacter & Addis 2007, Hassabis & Maguire 2007). But it is much less common to cash out the notion of episodic construction or (re)combination in any detail. According to what principles does this process unfold?

We propose that episodic construction should be thought of as a compositional process. More specifically, we defend Episodic Compositionality: the view that episodic construction generates complex episodic representations by combining basic representational elements according to syntactic rules. 

Episodic Compositionality contrasts with widely-endorsed approaches that deny that episodic construction—and the episodic representations that it outputs—have any interesting compositional structure. Most notable and influential among these competitors is Episodic Associationism, which is the view that episodic construction combines basic elements according to associative rather than syntactic relations. For example, Addis emphasizes that ”the modus operandi of the constructive simulation system is associative, with different associative processes occurring at different levels of the simulation process” (2020, 11).

Associations are causal links between mental representations formed purely as a function of repeated co-occurrence. Because association is a causal rather than semantic relationship between representations, it does not ‘say’ anything about the world. For example, while ‘apples are red,’ has truth-conditional content, an association between ‘apples’ and ‘red’ does not. It is merely a mechanism by which one representation tends to activate the other, without being combined into a meaningful semantic structure.

While episodic associationism is motivated by a variety of empirical results such as the holistic nature of memory retrieval (Horner & Burgess 2013), various false memory effects (Roediger & McDermott 1995), and hippocampal architecture (Marr 1971), it also runs into several challenges:

The Challenge from Accuracy: Memories and imaginings are evaluable for accuracy. However, associations are not evaluable for accuracy. So, episodic associationism cannot account for episodic content. The associationist might attempt to reverse-engineer accuracy conditions into their account. For example, they might hold that the associated elements are themselves accuracy-evaluable. But associations themselves are not accuracy-evaluable no matter how much accuracy-evaluable content one builds into their relata. Moreover, associationism is meant to explain how episodic construction produces complex contents. If the basic elements already express complex contents, then associationism lacks explanatory power.

The Challenge from Novelty: We can imagine contents that have never co-occurred in our previous experiences, such as pigs with wings. Novel content outstrips our stored associations. Associationists might attempt to account for novel content by appealing to associative inhibition. But to account for novel content such as flying pigs we need to not only explain why we fail to imagine contents that are associated with wings, such as birds, but also why we succeed at imagining content that isn’t associated with wings, such as pigs. Instead, the associationist might appeal to schemas, which are associative structures that abstract away from particular elements and instead encode general regularities (Ghosh & Gilboa 2014, Addis 2020). But abstraction is not the only kind of novelty present in episodic construction. It also involves the novel recombination of features, regardless of whether those features are generalized from previous experience.

The Challenge from Inference: Because associations are causal rather than rational relationships between mental states, Episodic Associationism predicts that episodic construction should be modulated by associative learning, but not by rational inference. However, episodic construction is rife with inferential effects. Consider the misinformation effect, which occurs when misleading information presented after an event causes witnesses to misremember the event (Loftus 1979). The more credibility a subject assigns to the misinformation source, the more susceptible they become to the misinformation effect (Gabbert, Memon, & Wright 2007, Skagerberg & Wright 2009). Associationism struggles to explain this result because the misleading information has the same associative strength regardless of source credibility. Instead, this result suggests that subjects are inferring the truth of the misinformation based on the reliability of the source. Other studies suggest that episodic construction is driven by causal inferences (Strickland & Keil 2011) and narrative coherence (Cohn-Sheehy et al. 2021, 2022) as opposed to mere association.

Our objections to episodic associationism all hinge on the idea that episodic construction does not merely associate basic elements, but instead composes those elements in ways that are meaningful. This provides the initial motivation for Episodic Compositionality, which is the view that episodic construction operates according to syntactic rules rather than mere associations.

What does it mean to say that episodic construction has a syntax? First, while any two elements can be associated with each other, a syntax will impose constraints on which combinations of elements yield well-formed representations. Second, it entails a syntactic hierarchy. Complex expressions are composed of simpler ones which are in turn composed of yet simpler ones, and so on. In language, for example, sentences are composed of phrases which are composed of words. Third, it entails role-filler independence: lexical elements are independent from the syntactic roles that they play and vice versa. For example, ‘Josh high-fives Johannes’ and ‘Johannes high-fives Josh’ both feature the same elements (‘Johannes’, ‘high-fives’, ‘Josh’), and the same syntactic roles (agent and patient), even though different elements play different roles in each.

There are a variety of motivations for Episodic Compositionality beyond just the failure of associationism:

The Argument from Compression: Experiences are informationally rich. This poses a problem for episodic cognition: how should this information be encoded to be retrievable at a later date? Encoding all information in a one-to-one fashion would be computationally intractable and neurally inefficient. Episodic Compositionality provides a way to address this problem: episodic construction relies on re-using and recombining representational primitives - objects, spatial relations, actions, etc. Rather than storing each episode in its entirety, the system encodes how these elements were bound together in a particular configuration. This achieves compression because the same primitives can be reused across many episodes: the system need not redundantly encode the full perceptual detail each time.

The Argument from Hierarchical Organization: There is empirical evidence that episodic representations are hierarchically organized (Andermane et al. 2021). The levels of episodic cognition range from representations of individual objects, to representations of small-scale, self-contained events involving those objects, to representations of large-scale narratives comprising several events. Moving up the hierarchy involves combining items at the lower level according to distinct, contentful relations. Importantly, these different levels involve different representational resources, different underlying brain regions, and different mechanisms for retrieval and forgetting. This vindicates a core prediction of Episodic Compositionality: that episodic representations form a hierarchical structure akin to a syntactic tree.

The Arguments from Productivity and Systematicity: Productivity and systematicity form the basis for influential arguments in favor of the compositionality of thought (Fodor 1975, Fodor & Pylyshyn 1988). We contend that these classical arguments can be extended to support Episodic Compositionality. First, episodic construction is productive: it exhibits an unbounded competence for constructing novel representations. As an example of episodic productivity: if you can imagine a circle inside of a square, then you can imagine a circle inside of a square inside of a circle, and a circle inside of a square inside of a circle inside of a square, and so on. Second, episodic construction is systematic: it produces representations that reuse the same parts and bear systematic relationships to each other. As an example of episodic systematicity: if you can imagine an apple to the left of an orange, then you can also imagine an orange to the left of an apple. Episodic Compositionality provides a compelling explanation of these phenomena. Episodic construction can yield an indefinite number of novel representations by iteratively applying syntactic combinatorial rules to a finite lexicon. Episodic construction can result in representations that are systematically related to each other by rearranging primitives within the same syntactic structure. There is empirical evidence to support this: Thakral et al. (2020) showed that in imagination, the hippocampus reinstates and recombines elements previously tokened in episodic memory.

Does this mean that episodic construction is necessarily ‘language-like’? No. Episodic Compositionality is the claim that episodic construction involves a lexicon and syntax. It is compatible with various more specific accounts of what such a lexicon and syntax might look like. Indeed, many hold that pictures and other non-linguistic representations are compositional (e.g. Kulvicki 2020, Lande 2024). Similarly, Episodic Compositionality is compatible with associative effects on retrieval in episodic memory and imagination. Just as the compositional nature of sentence-construction is compatible with associative effects governing word-choice, so too is Episodic Compositionality compatible with the idea that association regularly governs which episodic elements are being retrieved as inputs to construction. Indeed, much of the empirical evidence commonly cited in favor of Episodic Associationism is better construed as evidence for associative episodic retrieval.

Episodic Compositionality provides a useful framework for formulating hypotheses about the nature, syntax, and semantics of the episodic construction system—a framework that views episodic construction as not merely recapitulating co-occurrence statistics, but as making rational inferences over contentful representations.

 References

Addis, D. R. (2020). Mental time travel? A neurocognitive model of event simulation. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 11(2), 233-259.​​

Andermane, N., Joensen, B. H., & Horner, A. J. (2021). Forgetting across a hierarchy of episodic representations. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 67, 50-57.

Cohn-Sheehy, B. I., Delarazan, A. I., Reagh, Z. M., Crivelli-Decker, J. E., Kim, K., Barnett, A. J., ... & Ranganath, C. (2021). The hippocampus constructs narrative memories across distant events. Current Biology, 31(22), 4935-4945.

Cohn-Sheehy, B. I., Delarazan, A. I., Crivelli-Decker, J. E., Reagh, Z. M., Mundada, N. S., Yonelinas, A. P., ... & Ranganath, C. (2022). Narratives bridge the divide between distant events in episodic memory. Memory & Cognition, 50(3), 478-494.

Fodor, J. (1975). The language of thought. Harvard University Press.

Fodor, J. A., & Pylyshyn, Z. W. (1988). Connectionism and cognitive architecture: A critical analysis. Cognition, 28(1-2), 3-71.

Gabbert, F., Memon, A., & Wright, D. B. (2007). I saw it for longer than you: The relationship between perceived encoding duration and memory conformity. Acta psychologica, 124(3), 319-331.

Ghosh, V. E., & Gilboa, A. (2014). What is a memory schema? A historical perspective on current neuroscience literature. Neuropsychologia, 53, 104-114.

Hassabis, D., & Maguire, E. A. (2007). Deconstructing episodic memory with construction. Trends in cognitive sciences, 11(7), 299-306.

Horner, A. J., & Burgess, N. (2013). The associative structure of memory for multi-element events. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 142(4), 1370.

Kulvicki, J. V. (2020). Modeling the Meanings of Pictures: Depiction and the philosophy of language. Oxford University Press.

Lande, K. J. (2024). Pictorial syntax. Mind & Language, 39(4), 518-539.

​​Loftus, E. F. (1979). The malleability of human memory: Information introduced after we view an incident can transform memory. American scientist, 67(3), 312-320.

Marr, D. (1971). Simple memory: a theory for archicortex. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. B, Biological Sciences, 262(841), 23-81.

Roediger, H. L., & McDermott, K. B. (1995). Creating false memories: Remembering words not presented in lists. Journal of experimental psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 21(4), 803.

Schacter, D. L., & Addis, D. R. (2007). The cognitive neuroscience of constructive memory: Remembering the past and imagining the future. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 362(1481), 773-786.

Skagerberg, E. M., & Wright, D. B. (2009). Susceptibility to postidentification feedback is affected by source credibility. Applied Cognitive Psychology: The Official Journal of the Society for Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 23(4), 506-523.

Strickland, B., & Keil, F. (2011). Event completion: Event based inferences distort memory in a matter of seconds. Cognition, 121(3), 409-415.

Thakral, P. P., Madore, K. P., Addis, D. R., & Schacter, D. L. (2020). Reinstatement of event details during episodic simulation in the hippocampus. Cerebral Cortex, 30(4), 2321-2337.

A post by Eric Peterson

In a recent post on this wonderful blog, Nick Wiltsher discusses three interrelated claims of which he is increasingly sympathetic towards.  These are:

(1) Imagination has no distinctive epistemic ends.

(2) The epistemic ends that can be pursued using imagination are better achieved by other means.

(3) There is, all the same, value in using imagination to pursue (some) epistemic ends.

As he states, claim (3) only matters if (1) and (2) stand up, and he provides some hunches that can be the beginnings of arguments for each standing up.  In this post, I want to explore whether a particular kind of knowledge might put pressure on (1) and (2).

In some recent work, Matthew Benton (2017, 2025) argues for and develops an epistemology of interpersonal relations.  He provides interesting arguments to think that knows_i  (read as interpersonally knows) is distinct from both the propositional sense of "knows" and the objectual/qualitative sense of "knows". Suppose that Benton is correct. Then on a plausible connection between imagination and interpersonal knowledge, it would follow that some imagining has a distinctive epistemic end and that this end is not better achieved by means other than imagination.

In what follows, I will briefly explain Benton’s notion of interpersonal knowledge and how he thinks it is distinct from propositional or qualitative knowledge. I will then make a plausible argument for the relation between imagination and interpersonal knowledge.  

To see an intuitive distinction between propositional knowledge and interpersonal knowledge, consider this case from Benton (2017, 820-821)

Juan and Julia go to the same large committee meetings over many years. They know each other’s names and institutional roles, and know many other facts about each other; but they know all this from other sources, or by overhearing conversations each is having with other people. They hear each other offer suggestions in meetings, but they’ve never addressed each other individually in conversation. They have much first- and second-grade knowledge (propositional, qualitative, objectual) of each other. But intuitively, Julia and Juan do not know each other personally.

Such a case seems unexceptional and I suspect it strikes many people as capturing a distinctive way of knowing. That is, it seems plausible to make a distinction between propositional knowledge and interpersonal knowledge.  According to Benton, interpersonal knowledge is a state of mind requiring second-personal encounters with someone (2017, 822). He claims that these conditions are captured by the following necessary conditions (recall that “know(s) with the subscript i should be read as “interpersonally knows”):

ENCOUNTER: S knows_i R only if (i) S has had reciprocal causal contact with R, in which (ii) S treats R second-personally, and (iii) R treats S second-personally. (822)

According to Benton, second-personal treatment minimally requires treating the other as a subject, in the language of address, or in joint attention to objects or topics of conversation (821).  Now it is quite easy to see that Juan and Julia do not know each other personally in part because they do not meet any of the conditions of ENCOUNTER. Benton also argues that interpersonal knowledge is characterized by symmetry:

SYMMETRY: S knows_i R only if R knows_i S (826).

Elsewhere, he argues that interpersonal knowledge can be characterized by AUTONOMY and OPACITY:

AUTONOMY: One can know all manner of propositions about R without yet knowing_i R; and one can know_i R without knowing any particular set of truths about them (and without any specific qualitative knowledge of them). (2025, 100)

OPACITY: One can know_i someone R while failing to believe that one knows_i R (under the relevant guise), and even while falsely believing (under a certain guise), that they do not exist. (2025, 100)

This overview of Benton should suffice for this short post. In fact, I think it reveals enough to show that interpersonal knowledge can be its own epistemic end (at least insofar as it is a distinct kind of knowledge that we value and pursue as an end). The next question, then, is how imagination relates to such knowledge. 

Does interpersonal knowledge require imagining? I would argue that is does. One way of seeing this is by seeing the connection between interpersonal knowledge and empathy. Following Bailey (2020), we can take empathy to involve “using one’s imagination to ‘transport’ oneself, such that one considers the other’s situation as though one were occupying the other’s position.” (3) Bailey argues that empathy has a unique value in providing a certain kind of understanding, what she calls humane understanding. She claims that “[t]o humanely understand another’s emotions is to have a first-hand appreciation of the emotion’s intelligibility.” (8) It is important to realize that empathy and humane understanding can come in a second-personal variation. Central to the second-personal is this irreducible ‘I-You’ relation. One can empathize with and even humanely understand another without that other knowing or being aware of such empathy (of course, the empathizee could be a fictional character who doesn’t exist). However, second-personal empathy and humane understanding requires a shared stance and joint attention to for instance the intelligibility of the emotional experience. While you can be empathetic towards someone without it amounting to interpersonal knowledge, I do not think it is plausible for the reverse to hold. Interpersonal knowledge requires empathy. Benton (2025) acknowledges this arguing that there is a sort of “empathetic entanglement” in healthy relationships. However, if Bailey is right that empathy is a kind of imaginative transportation, then it follows that imagination (of certain kind) is essential to interpersonal knowledge. Now it is important to acknowledge that Wiltsher does raise and set to the side the potential connection between empathetic imagining and a certain epistemic end such as empathetic understanding. I think he is correct insofar as empathetic understanding need not result or lead to interpersonal knowledge. However, once we see interpersonal knowledge as a distinct epistemic end, it arguably is much harder to bracket off empathetic imagining—some empathetic imagining leads to a great epistemic end. If this is correct, then, it follows that imagination has at least one distinct epistemic end (interpersonal knowledge) and that there is not a better means of achieving it than imagination. 

As with all of my posts, these ideas are tentative and in need of development. Perhaps empathetic help might come from this blog community. 

References

Bailey, Olivia. (2020). Empathy and the Value of Humane Understanding. Philosophy and Phenomenal Research, 00:1–16. https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.12744

Benton, M. A. (2025). The epistemology of interpersonal relations. Nous, 59(1), 92-111.

Benton, M. A. (2017). Epistemology personalized. The Philosophical Quarterly, 67(269), 813-834.

Wiltsher, Nicholas. (April 30th, 2025). The Value of Epistemic Imagining. Blog post on The Junkyard.

A post by Raquel Krempel

Imagine an apple. Nothing happened? You probably have aphantasia.

This is a common way of introducing and thinking about aphantasia. On the web, images such as Figure 1 (below) often serve to illustrate aphantasics’ inability to visualize, represented by the depiction numbered 5.

Aphantasia is characterized as the absence or near absence of mental imagery, most typically visual, but, in many cases, all forms of sensory imagery can be affected (Zeman et al. 2025, Dawes et al. 2024). Global aphantasics report a lack of imagery in all senses, in that not only can they not “see” an apple in their mind’s eye, they also can’t “taste” it, “smell” it, and so on. Various forms of involuntary imagery are also commonly affected in aphantasia, such as imagery formed while reading (Krempel and Monzel 2024). We thus tend to think of aphantasia as a blank mind, often characterizing it in purely negative terms.

Most of the growing body of research on aphantasia concerns the assessment of aphantasics’ performance on behavioral tests, many of them related to episodic and working memory (cf. Monzel et al. 2024, Dawes et al. 2022, Keogh et al. 2021). This interest in the possible impact of aphantasia on memory is not surprising. Given the common belief that imagery plays a crucial role in memory (Nanay 2021a), aphantasia provides a great place to assess this view. The data so far indicate that aphantasia impacts the number of details recalled from a particular past event, but, perhaps surprisingly, aphantasics tend to do well on working memory tasks. A current open question is how aphantasics do that, some suggestions being that they use non-imagistic strategies and that they use unconscious imagery (Zeman 2025, Nanay 2021b).

However, little attention has been directed at trying to better understand aphantasics’ own internal experiences. Is it really true that, when trying to imagine or remember something, aphantasics’ minds are just blank? Surely something must be going on?

A common idea is that aphantasics have some sort of abstract knowledge of the object they try to imagine. Individuals are typically classified as aphantasics on the basis of their score on the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ, Marks 1973). The questionnaire instructs participants to think of various things, such as a friend or a rising sun, and then rate the visual image that comes to mind from 1 (“no image at all, you only know that you are thinking of the object”) to 5 (“perfectly clear and as vivid as normal vision”). Extreme aphantasics mark option 1 on all items. We might thus be led to think that aphantasics’ inner experience consists only of a certain abstract knowledge of the object they are supposed to imagine. However, it might well be that aphantasics mark this option because it is the one that best describes their lack of visual images, and not because their experience consists in simply knowing the object. 

In an attempt to better understand the experience of aphantasics, my collaborators and I (Blomkvist, Walsh, Boere and Krempel, under review) have asked aphantasics (n=62) and controls (n=59) to describe, in their own words, their experiences both when they try to imagine and when they try to remember something. Not surprisingly, we see a big difference in the use of visual images between aphantasics and controls. Most individuals who can form visual images use them in memory and in imagination. One participant, for instance, says that “I imagine in pictures and videos like it’s a movie”. Most aphantasics, on the contrary, explicitly deny the use of visual images both in imagination (“I cannot imagine in pictures at all”) and in memory (“I don’t remember in pictures”).

But although visual images are generally lacking in aphantasia, aphantasics also described their experiences in more positive terms. Unlike controls, aphantasics show a tendency to use words both in remembering and in imagining something. One participant reports that “I remember in words. I will get descriptions in varying amounts of detail of the thing or event I’m trying to remember”, another notes that “As with remembering, I imagine in spoken word. When I imagine something in everyday life, it is basically me just telling myself that I will carry out the event. I am literally just talking to myself in my mind.” This indicates that inner speech is an important element of the experiences of many aphantasics, but inner speech itself may come in different forms. While some may have the sense of hearing an inner voice, for others this auditory element may be lacking (Krempel 2025). Some aphantasics also indicated that they do not remember or imagine in words.

Some aphantasics report emotions and feelings to be an element in their experience of imagining (“I feel as though Imagination is more of a ‘feeling’, without any visuals, I still know what I’m thinking of. I will close my eyes to imagine a space, however I am not seeing anything, but feeling it.”), as well as of remembering (“I remember mainly through the thoughts and feelings I had at the time of the memory, the pictures don’t come to me and I remember partially in words but they are very vague”). Words and feelings are not mutually exclusive, though, and some participants report both as central elements in their experiences (e.g. “I remember with words and how I felt at the time of the event”).

Option 1 on the VVIQ, which emphasizes the knowledge of thinking of an object is thus insufficient to capture the experience of aphantasia. But it is not completely off the mark. Several aphantasics did report knowing what they are remembering or imagining, or having a conceptual representation of the thing, while being unable to see it. One participant notes that “If I imagine something, I know what I am imagining, I could draw what I imagine but I can’t “see” it.” Another observes that “I know the object but I don’t see the object when I close my eyes.” Often, this knowledge is related to other forms of experiences, such as words (“I have a ‘knowing’ of something. I think I’m using words in my inner monologue to describe people, places, actions”) or feelings (“I remember in feelings and facts. I’ll feel the emotion that I was experiencing in the memory and I will know the details about what was happening as facts.”). 

Interestingly, some aphantasics report what we may call “inaccessible images”. Even though they claim not to see anything in their mind’s eyes, they have a sense that an image may be there. In describing their memories, one aphantasic says that “it feels like the pictures might be there but I can’t actually see them. As if another part of my brain has access to them but my consciousness does not”. In describing their imaginings, another participant says that “I feel like imagining is done in some part of my brain that I’m not privy to and the answers are then handed to the conscious part of my brain. I can’t see any images, but sometimes I sense the images are somewhere out of sight.”

These reports show that aphantasics’ minds are not just blank or empty when remembering or imagining something. Rather, they may have a variety of non-visual inner experiences, which can vary from person to person (e.g. some may have inner speech while others don’t), as well as within the same person (e.g. feelings and a more conceptual sense of knowing at one time, inner speech at another). It is frequently recognized that aphantasia is a heterogeneous condition, in that some aphantasics may lack visual imagery but have auditory imagery, while others lack all sensory imagery (something that we also saw in our study). Some may have imagery in dreams while others do not (Zeman et al. 2020, Dawes et al. 2024, Nanay 2025). But this recognition has so far focused on varieties of imagistic experiences in aphantasia, neglecting that there can be relevant differences in non-imagistic domains as well.

Aphantasics’ descriptions of their experiences deepen our understanding of the heterogeneity involved in aphantasia, providing us with helpful information for further theorizing. For example, it is often said that aphantasics use non-imagistic strategies to solve various tasks, but the precise strategies are often left unspecified. As indicated by our data, these strategies may vary from person to person, but verbal strategies may be common. Also, the view that aphantasics have unconscious imagery may well have a point, at least for some aphantasics, given the reports of inaccessible imagery (although one may question whether these images are really unconscious, given that aphantasics report their presence).

The upshot is that, in theorizing about aphantasia, we should resist two common temptations: assuming that aphantasics’ minds are empty, and assuming that aphantasics minds are all alike. Imageless experiences may be imageless in many different ways.

References

Dawes, A. J., Keogh, R., Robuck, S., & Pearson, J. (2022). Memories with a blind mind: Remembering the past and imagining the future with aphantasia. Cognition, 227, 105192. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105192

Dawes, A. J., Keogh, R., Pearson, J. (2024). Multisensory subtypes of aphantasia: Mental imagery as supramodal perception in reverse. Neuroscience Research, Volume 201, Pages 50-59

Keogh, R., Wicken, M., & Pearson, J. (2021). Visual working memory in aphantasia: Retained accuracy and capacity with a different strategy. Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior, 143, 237–253. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2021.07.012

Krempel, R., & Monzel, M. (2024). Aphantasia and involuntary imagery. Consciousness and cognition, 120, 103679. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2024.103679

Krempel, R. (2025). Aphantasia, Unsymbolized Thinking and Conscious Thought. Erkenntnis 90, 605–624. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-023-00706-2

Marks, D.F. (1973). Visual imagery differences in the recall of pictures. British Journal of Psychology, 64: 17-24. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8295.1973.tb01322.x

Monzel, M., Leelaarporn, P., Lutz, T., Schultz, J., Brunheim, S., Reuter, M., & McCormick, C. (2024). Hippocampal-occipital connectivity reflects autobiographical memory deficits in aphantasia. eLife, 13, RP94916. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.94916

Nanay, B. (2021). “Mental Imagery”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2021/entries/mental-imagery/>.

Nanay, B. (2021). Unconscious mental imagery. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 376: 20190689. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2019.0689

Nanay, B. (2025). Varieties of aphantasia, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Volume 29, Issue 11, 965 – 966.

Zeman, A., Milton, F., Della Sala, S., Dewar, M., Frayling, T., Gaddum, J., Hattersley, A., Heuerman-Williamson, B., Jones, K., MacKisack, M., & Winlove, C. (2020). Phantasia-The psychological significance of lifelong visual imagery vividness extremes. Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior, 130, 426–440. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2020.04.003

Zeman, A., Monzel, M., Pearson, J., Scholz, C. O., & Simner, J. (2025). Definition: Aphantasia. Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior, 182, 212–213. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2024.07.019

A post by Julia Minarik

And someday there will be a more complete machine. One’s thoughts or feelings during life – or while the machine is recording – will be like an alphabet with which the image will continue to comprehend all experience…Then life will be a repository for death. 

– Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel.

Do machine-made images have less content than images created by human hands? I think they do, at least insofar as these machines are imaginatively impoverished: they have access only to words and images, far less sensory and emotional modalities than we do. Contemporary image generators – Midjourney, DALL-E and their kin – produce images via generative diffusion conditioned on text or images. To grasp what this limitation means for the content of their art, we must first understand how art arises from and leads the human imagination.

With art we aim to steer the imaginations of others (Walton 1990). Let’s take words in a short story first:

Imagine a seagull in the sand on the beach, he’s at the top of your blanket eagerly awaiting an opportunity to steal a grape from your cooler.

With those words (if you’re not aphantasic), I can get you to produce an image in your mind of a scheming gull. Let’s now start from images:

With this image, I can get you to see a house and some trees from an unnatural angle. The image dredges up these concepts, and we associate them with their labels ‘house’ and ‘tree’ and so on. Since both images and words give rise to the other in imagination, WJT Mitchell claims that “…all arts are ‘composite’ arts (both text and image); all media are mixed media” (1995, 95) as words cause us to conjure images, images cause us to conjure words. That’s not to say what art literally is, nor to say that I cannot psychologically bring up only images or only words, but it is to say that the arising of multi-modal associations motivates the work’s creation and presumed to be part of the effect of an artwork on its observer.   

We might take prompting an image generator to be analogous to steering its imagination. The text prompt guides the machine’s ‘imagination’ around its internal imaginative space. Of course, text and images are not directly translatable (Mitchell 1995, 5; Goodman 1976). Take a sentence such as ‘I sat on a beach in July’, this sentence can be visualized in thousands of different ways. Take any one of those images and try to describe it, ‘I sat on a beach in July’ is only one way out of those thousands. What text does is constrain the possible images produced. One might analogize the addition of these textual associations to the addition of a proposition to the common ground in a conversation; it closes off some possible images and redirects one’s attention to others. Once prompted, the machine produces, roughly, a randomly selected image which corresponds to the prompt. The more specific the prompts, the less variation in the image, as we can see by comparing the low variation between figures 2 and 3 with the higher variation between figures 4 and 5:

Given this incommensurability and randomness, guiding the machine as a human can be deeply irritating, words are a coarse brush, and what I see in my imagination never quite matches up to what comes out (this should be further explored as a limitation on the content of these machines, especially in light of what I say below).

Alright, so art arises from our imagination from which we produce things to guide the imagination of others, and the machine does something similar. But the nature of images and words as composite doesn’t stop at words and images for humans. An image of a rose by any other name does not smell as sweet: call it The Sweetest Flower and it comes on like honey but rename it Intestinal Bloom and feel your nose twitch back in disgust at the visceral folds. In a human creator/observer, with a multimodal imagination (Nanay 2018), and an emotional landscape, representations from other sensory modalities and feelings come into play too. The words and images of art dredge up other conceptual, perceptual, and emotional associations: the story of the gull brings up the smell of the sea, the sound of the gull.

When we create, we manipulate words, images, and the like to evoke precise imaginative effects; we choose them because of this power. Roland Barthes says in Rhetoric of the Image: “the linguistic message…[constitutes] a kind of vice which holds the connoted meanings [of the image] from proliferating…it limits, that is to say, the projective power of the image.” (1977, 39) I take the image of the house we saw earlier and name it ‘Grandmother’s House’ (figure 6) to bring out its eerie tone, evoke the big bad wolf and the smell of moth balls, make you feel the cold air of night.

I can also illustrate the word by bringing an image to it, as I do with The Thief (figure 7), meant to illustrate the short story about the gull above:

 In the image, the sun is warm, the grapes of the story are soft, the seagull and you are in a complex battle of wits.

When we create art as humans, we create with all these imaginative associations in mind. I prompt myself to paint an apple. The word ‘apple’ brings up associations, images, textures, tastes. I paint the image of the apple, but when I paint the texture, I think of how the image triggers a tactile association in the viewer. I make the apple smooth so that I (and then you) can feel its smoothness. If I see the image and don’t imaginatively feel its smoothness, I change it. Images are not made with merely visual thoughts in mind. Each evokes multi-modal perceptual, conceptual, and emotional associations in us. These associations alter our imaginative engagement with the image: they recontextualize it for us, give it a depth of content and meaning. Even a simple title like ‘Seagull’ seems to direct our engagement with the image: it focuses our attention on the gull rather than the compositional role the sign in the back is playing.

These imaginative motivations are why titles like Intestinal Bloom for the flower are, as Jerrold Levinson (2011), argues aesthetically relevant features of artworks that come to partially determine the works content. This idea is also implicit in Arthur Danto’s introduction to the Transfiguration (1981): perceptually indistinguishable red squares - Kierkegaard's Mood and The Red Tablecloth – have distinct content and evoke distinct responses once their titles are known. Even when works appear identical to us, knowledge of the author’s imaginative intentions fills the works out with distinct contents. Or if, like me, you favor a performance view of artworks (Davies 2003), then the work itself is the performance that generates a focus of appreciation, in which case, the imaginative motivations are a part of the work.

So, what does this mean for images produced by an image generator? Do they have less content than visually identical images produced by a commissioned human? Based on the analogy above, these machines create by producing a ‘snapshot’ of part of their imaginative space. But this space is comparatively vacant: the machine’s imagination contains only words and images. When machines imagine these are the only contents available to them; other sensations and emotions cannot motivate their choice of the image, nor can they wish to transfer these feelings to another. Even the machine’s interpretation of ‘somber’ in the apple image is a mere pictorial and conceptual association with it, it cannot be motivated by being felt. At best the machine was led by visual proxies for that content. Of course, there are complexities here: this view favors a form of artistic intentionalism, and perhaps the machine, even if it can’t feel things, might intend to evoke them in us – though I think there’s a big question about whether this is enough to get it into the work. This is also not to say that a human can’t prompt an AI with their own imaginative intentions and add content to it through their choice. But this content is the human’s, it does not emerge from the machine alone.

References:

Barthes, Roland. 1977. Image, Music, Text. Fontana Press.

Danto, Arthur Coleman. 1981. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art. Vol. 40. Harvard University Press.

Davies, David. 2003. Art as Performance. Wiley-Blackwell.

Goodman, Nelson. 1976. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. 2nd ed. fourth printing 1981. Hackett PubCo.

Levinson, Jerrold. 2011. “Titles.” In Music, Art, & Metaphysics. Oxford University Press.

Mitchell, W. J. T. 1995. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. University of Chicago Press. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo3683962.html.

Nanay, Bence. 2018. “Multimodal Mental Imagery.” Cortex; a Journal Devoted to the Study of the Nervous System and Behavior 105 (August): 125–34. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2017.07.006.

Walton, Kendall L. 1990. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Harvard University Press.

A post by Jianghao Liu

Please imagine a red Gala apple. Is it darker or lighter than a cherry? Most of us can easily conjure a mental image, a perceptual-like experience that feels almost as if we were seeing it. For centuries, mental imagery has long been considered a core component of consciousness in both philosophy of mind and neuroscience (Nanay, 2023). Yet, emerging evidence from individuals of aphantasia, who report no voluntary imagery (Zeman, 2024), raises a striking question: can there be unconscious mental imagery (Nanay, 2021; Michel et al., 2024)? In this post, I present the attention model (Liu, 2025) of the neural basis of conscious imagery and aphantasia, thereby aiming to bridge empirical neuroscience and philosophical accounts of imagination and awareness.

Traditional empiricists such as Hume viewed imagination as composed of faint “copies” of sensory impressions or mental pictures derived from experience. Following this view, Kosslyn (1980) famously proposed that quasi-perceptual imagery arises when higher-level representations reactivate a “visual buffer” (a kind of internal screen) in the primary visual cortex. This perspective has profoundly influenced subsequent theories of imagery, which typically conceive imagination as vision in reverse (Pearson, 2019). But is this sensory reactivation enough to produce the subjective feeling of imagery? Aphantasia provides a natural experiment in which imagery experience is entirely absent or severely diminished. In this post, I explore how this condition reshapes our understanding of the neural and phenomenological basis of imagery.

In our studies, we first asked individuals with congenital aphantasia to compare different visual properties of objects including colours, shapes, faces, written letters, even a map of France (Liu & Bartolomeo, 2023). These participants consistently denied any visual experience, yet they could accurately recall visual details from memory—a paradox revealing preserved access to visual knowledge without phenomenology. Using high-resolution 7T fMRI, we observed specific reactivation in higher visual areas when aphantasic participants attempted to imagine—the very same regions active when they actually saw those images, e.g., areas activated when participants saw pictures of faces (Liu et al., 2025). This preserved activity may explain their access to visual knowledge despite lacking visual experience, a phenomenon that cannot be fully explained by nonvisual strategies such as verbal labels or sensorimotor coding (Reeder et al., 2024). 

However, a closer look revealed two key neural differences in aphantasia (Liu et al., 2025). First, in aphantasics, neural patterns in the visual cortex during imagery diverged from those during perception. In contrast, stronger pattern similarity between imagery and perceptual representations predicted higher vividness in typical individuals. This absence of representational overlap challenges the notion of unconscious mental imagery, as it suggests a lack of perceptual-like activation that is necessary for genuine imagery (Scholz et al., 2025). Second, aphantasic individuals showed markedly reduced communication (i.e., long-range functional connectivity) between the visual cortex and a left prefrontal region known to regulate the threshold of conscious access and metacognition (Liu & Bartolomeo, 2025). Together, these findings suggest that people with aphantasia may form unconscious visual representations that fail to cross the threshold of awareness.

If mere sensory reactivation in imagery generation is insufficient, what additional processes allow imagery to become conscious? The attention model (Liu, 2025) offers the first attempt to establish a neuromechanistic framework for how conscious imagery arises from unconscious sensory reactivation. This model outlines a hierarchical architecture across three successive stages: (i) generation, where top-down signals initiate weak reactivations in sensory areas; (ii) integration, where the visual cortex binds conceptual knowledge with visual features to assemble coherent preconscious perceptual-like content; and (iii) amplification, where top-down attention and prefrontal recurrence boost this content into global awareness. In short, after initial reactivation, fragmented sensory traces are locally combined in the visual cortex into preconscious images, which are then amplified through higher attention systems, thus crossing the threshold into awareness. This process unfolds through a frontoparietal-visual imagery network (Liu, 2025), shaped by interacting dorsal and ventral attention networks that guide information from unconscious processing to conscious experience (Liu et al., 2023).

Crucially, the attention model predicts subtypes of aphantasia, each reflecting a specific breakdown in one or multiple stages before conscious imagery. Returning to our “red apple” example, we can now distinguish “knowing about an object” from “feeling it in the mind” (Figure 1). On this model, congenital aphantasia reflects intact generation but disrupted integration or amplification, due to weakened top-down modulation associated with attention networks. In contrast, acquired aphantasia (from brain injury) often involves the loss of visual knowledge itself, suggesting damage to brain areas associated with the imagery generation stage (Bartolomeo, 2002; Liu et al., 2022; Thorudottir et al., 2020). More provocatively, the model suggests we might temporarily induce aphantasia in typical individuals by interrupting integration or blocking access to internally generated content, a kind of induced aphantasia (Liu, 2025). Testing such predictions using specific tasks or neuromodulation techniques could open a new empirical path toward the neural mechanisms of imagination and consciousness.

For decades, both philosophers and neuroscientists studying consciousness have focused mainly on perceptual awareness, often overlooking inner phenomena such as imagination. This neglect stems from the assumption that mental imagery is necessarily conscious—an idea now challenged by aphantasia. The attention model provides a bridge between the fields of imagery and consciousness, offering testable accounts of both conscious and unconscious internal representations, and inviting renewed dialogue between empirical science and phenomenology. The phenomenon of aphantasia further illuminates this complex and largely unexplored landscape, with the potential to reveal the invisible scaffolding that underlies consciousness of internal representations. As Sartre (1940) argued in L’Imaginaire, imagery is not a “picture” inside the mind but an intentional act directed toward the absent in consciousness. The attention model offers a neural complement to this insight by explaining how intentional direction might fail when neural amplification breaks down. Studying unconscious imagery may therefore uncover a hidden dimension of consciousness—one that turns inward, revealing how the mind perceives its own thoughts and exposing a phenomenological structure fundamentally distinct from perception.

References:

Bartolomeo, P. (2002). The Relationship Between Visual Perception and Visual Mental Imagery: A Reappraisal of the Neuropsychological Evidence. Cortex, 38(3), 357–378. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0010-9452(08)70665-8 

Kosslyn, S. M. (1980). Image and Mind. Harvard University Press. 

Liu, J. (2025). An attention-based neural model of subjective imagery and aphantasia. Under revision. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/yrkd6

Liu, J., & Bartolomeo, P. (2023). Probing the unimaginable: The impact of aphantasia on distinct domains of visual mental imagery and visual perception. Cortex, 166, 338–347. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2023.06.003 

Liu, J., & Bartolomeo, P. (2025). Aphantasia as a functional disconnection. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2025.05.012 

Liu, J., Bayle, D. J., Spagna, A., Sitt, J. D., Bourgeois, A., Lehongre, K., Fernandez-Vidal, S., Adam, C., Lambrecq, V., Navarro, V., Seidel Malkinson, T., & Bartolomeo, P. (2023). Fronto-parietal networks shape human conscious report through attention gain and reorienting. Communications Biology, 6(1), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-023-05108-2 

Liu, J., Spagna, A., & Bartolomeo, P. (2022). Hemispheric asymmetries in visual mental imagery. Brain Structure and Function, 227(2), 697–708. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00429-021-02277-w 

Liu, J., Zhan, M., Hajhajate, D., Spagna, A., Dehaene, S., Cohen, L., & Bartolomeo, P. (2025). Visual mental imagery in typical imagers and in aphantasia: A millimeter-scale 7-T fMRI study. Cortex, 185, 113–132. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2025.01.013 

Michel, M., Morales, J., Block, N., & Lau, H. (2024). Aphantasia as imagery blindsight. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, S1364661324002936. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2024.11.002 

Nanay, B. (2021). Unconscious mental imagery. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 376(1817), 20190689. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2019.0689 

Nanay, B. (2023). Mental imagery: Philosophy, psychology, neuroscience. Oxford University Press.

Pearson, J. (2019). The human imagination: The cognitive neuroscience of visual mental imagery. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 20(10), Article 10. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-019-0202-9 

Reeder, R. R., Pounder, Z., Figueroa, A., Jüllig, A., & Azañón, E. (2024). Non-visual spatial strategies are effective for maintaining precise information in visual working memory. Cognition, 251, 105907. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2024.105907 

Sartre, J.-P. (1940). L’imaginaire: Psychologie phénoménologique de l’imagination. Paris, France: Gallimard.

Scholz, C. O., Monzel, M., & Liu, J. (2025). Absence of shared representation in the visual cortex challenges unconscious imagery in aphantasia. Current Biology, 35(13), R645–R646. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2025.05.009 

Thorudottir, S., Sigurdardottir, H. M., Rice, G. E., Kerry, S. J., Robotham, R. J., Leff, A. P., & Starrfelt, R. (2020). The Architect Who Lost the Ability to Imagine: The Cerebral Basis of Visual Imagery. Brain Sci, 10(2). https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci10020059 

Zeman, A. (2024). Aphantasia and hyperphantasia: Exploring imagery vividness extremes. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 28(5), 467–480. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2024.02.007 

A post by Maria Fedorova

In a series of interviews conducted by T. C. Swift and his colleagues on psilocybin (the psychoactive compound in “magic” mushrooms) experiences of cancer patients suffering from depression and anxiety, two patients, Brenda and Victor, reported the following experiences:

Brenda: At one point during her session, she experienced herself floating toward a brick crematorium and concluded that she must have died. After “bouncing off ” the crematorium she found herself under the ground in rich soil:

I felt like this was really dealing with death…I’m in the forest and there’s this beautiful, loamy, woodsy, green, lush kind of woods, and I’m down below the ground…And it felt really, really good, and I thought, “That’s what happens when you die. I am going to be reconnected with this beautiful world. This earthy world that we live in.”...It was just simple. It was gorgeous. (Swift et al. 2017: 500)

Victor: Until this point in the experience, I did not have a body. I was just this kind of soul, this entity…I was shopping for a body, and the only body I could choose was my body. And this is meaningful because I had a lot of body issues associated with being sick with what chemo did to my body and how it changed. And so I was circling my body, and I saw everything that has happened to my body, all the food I have eaten, the drugs I have taken, the alcohol, the people I have had sex with, the chemo, the exercise, everything that has ever happened to my body. I took it in at once. (Swift et al. 2017: 501)

Both of the reports contain references to psychedelic visions. In most general terms, psychedelic visions can be defined as closed-eye visual experiences induced by psychedelics. Such visions usually involve vivid mental imagery, are somewhat narratively structured and emotionally charged.

Subjective accounts of psychedelic visions have been fairly well-documented (see especially Houston and Masters 1966, Grinspoon and Bakalar 1979). These experiences appear to be almost as common in psychedelic states on moderate-to-high doses of a psychedelic substance as experiences of altered self-awareness, for which psychedelics are renowned. Growing empirical evidence also suggests that psychedelic visions can be therapeutically significant (see, e.g., Swift et al. 2017, Belser et al. 2017, Noorani et al. 2018). Yet the nature of these visions remains relatively unexplored. What are psychedelic visions, anyway? Drawing on Jennifer Windt’s (2015a, 2020) work on dreaming, I argue that psychedelic visions are immersive mental simulations: quasi-perceptual in terms of their phenomenology and imaginative with respect to their cognitive origin.

To start, my appeal to dreaming here isn’t accidental. I take a cue from psychedelic researchers who explicitly compare psychedelic experiences to dreams:

There are good reasons for applying the term ‘oneirogenic,’ producing dreams, to psychedelic drugs. In its imagery, emotional tone, and vagaries of thought and self-awareness, the drug trip, especially with eyes closed, resembles no other state so much as a dream. (Grinspoon and Bakalar 1979: 132, cited in Kraehenmann 2017: 1037, my italics)

This observation is about the phenomenology of psychedelic experience. Psychedelic experience supposedly feels like a dream. In the case of psychedelic visions, the question is: in what sense does the phenomenology of psychedelic visions resemble the phenomenology of dreams?

Naturally, to answer this question, we first need to determine what it’s like to dream. Some philosophers believe that dreaming mimics the phenomenology of waking perception (see, e.g., Revonsuo 2006, Metzinger 2009, see Windt 2015a for an overview; see, e.g., Ichikawa 2008, 2009 for a contrasting view). On this view, dreaming is quasi-perceptual. This claim, however, as Windt points out, can be interpreted in two different ways. A strong version of the claim says that dreaming replicates the phenomenology of waking perception in its entirety. A weak version says that dreaming resembles perceptual experience in some respects but not others (Windt 2020: 663).

Since the strong version of the claim appears to be empirically implausible (Windt 2015a: 248), I won’t dwell on it here. The weak version of the claim, by contrast, is instructive. It helps illuminate what Windt takes to be the “phenomenal core of dreaming” (Windt 2015a: 522). Dreaming is immersive (Windt 2015a: 523, 2020: 663). It involves a sense of presence in a dream world (see also Lawson and Thompson 2024). In this way, dreaming feels like perceiving in the sense that we experience our dreams from a particular phenomenal “spatio-temporal self-location” (Windt 2015a: 522) or, to put it very simply, from a particular experiential point of view. 

Might psychedelic visions share the phenomenal core of dreaming so construed? Subjective accounts of psychedelic visions lend partial support to the view that psychedelic visions are indeed relevantly immersive (See also Camlin et al. 2018, Schenberg et al. 2017 for descriptions of ibogaine-induced psychedelic visions as immersive experiences.).  Like a dream, a psychedelic vision seems to involve a sense of presence in the vision’s world. As Swift and his colleagues put it:

The present study revealed that the psilocybin sessions were generally described as immersive and experiential in nature, with insights and visions not merely imagined or thought but felt as lived experiences for the participants. (2017: 509, my italics)

It is nevertheless worth noting that psychedelic visions might not be quite as immersive as dreams. Rainer Kraehenmann (2017) rightly observes that psychedelic experience is typically marked by a certain degree of lucidity. In most cases, we’re aware that we’re having a psychedelic experience. This contrasts with experiences of non-lucid dreaming, in which we don’t realise that we are dreaming. Kraehenmann then goes on to suggest that psychedelic experiences most closely resemble lucid dreams (Kraehenmann 2017: 1037).

But psychedelic experience, in general, and psychedelic visions, in particular, don’t merely differ from dreams with respect to their lucidity. Another obvious difference, which applies to both lucid and non-lucid dreams, lies in the degree of perceptual decoupling (Girn et al. 2021: 4). However captivating, your psychedelic vision won’t be fully immersive simply because you’re awake and can therefore be distracted by things happening in the outside world. This is the feature that psychedelic visions arguably share with ordinary daydreams (see Lawson and Thompson, 2024: 23). Interestingly, this phenomenological similarity between psychedelic visions and daydreams might not exhaust all of their similarities. Another similarity might lie in the cognitive sources of these experiences, which both seem to share with dreams as well.

Some researchers have recently proposed to situate mind-wandering, daydreaming, and dreaming all together on the spectrum of spontaneous thought (Christoff et al. 2016), which functions by way of association and draws heavily on our memories and ongoing concerns (Fox et al. 2013, cited in Windt 2020: 669, see also Irving 2016). Let me briefly illustrate. Think about the last time your mind has wandered to that lecture of yours or to that email you keep forgetting to respond to. Or recall forgetting yourself on a commute to work whilst joyfully daydreaming about that upcoming holiday. Or consider a recent particularly vivid dream of mine in which I failed to submit this blog post on time. That dreams appear to have the same cognitive origin as mind-wandering (and, by extension, daydreaming) has led some researches to conclude that dreaming is an intensified form of mind-wandering (Fox et al. 2013, cited in Windt 2020: 669).

To that end, some psychedelic theorists have also examined thoughts experienced while on psychedelics in terms of “disorganised” or “intensified” mind-wandering (Wießner et al. 2022). Likewise, Manesh Girn and his colleagues (2021) use the aforementioned framework of spontaneous thought (Christoff et al. 2016) to characterise psychedelic-induced thinking. Applying these considerations to psychedelic visions, we can put forward the following hypothesis: though psychedelic visions are experienced as quasi-perceptual, their cognitive origin might be largely imaginative. Our memories and ongoing concerns might serve as one of the main cognitive sources of psychedelic visions1, which psychedelic visions then transform, like dreams do (Windt 2020: 669), into their own thing.

Presumably, this hypothesis can be tested empirically in the future. But already now we can observe that in clinical contexts, the visions that patients experience under the influence of psychedelics largely revolve around patients’ mental health concerns and tend to incorporate patients’ memories (see Swift et al. 2017, Belser et al. 2017, Noorani et al. 2018). This tentatively allows us to locate psychedelic visions alongside other manifestations of our simulational capacity, such as dreams, daydreams, and mind-wandering. All of these manifestations (with psychedelic visions being, of course, chemically induced) plausibly lie on the same spectrum with barely immersive simulations on one side of the spectrum and fully immersive ones on the other (cf Lawson and Thomspon 2024).

The current renaissance of psychedelic research warrants cautious enthusiasm not just about the therapeutic potential of psychedelics but also about their potential to teach us something about the nature of the mind. Some theorists believe that psychedelics can help us understand the nature of consciousness and selfhood by disrupting our experience of the self (see, e.g., Deane 2020, Letheby 2020). Similarly, if my proposal that psychedelic visions are immersive mental simulations is on the right track, psychedelic visions, too, may offer us a window into a deeper understanding of our capacity for simulating alternate realities.

Thanks to Paulina Sliwa and Emily Williamson for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Endnotes

1.  The question of whether psychedelic visions draw on our memories and ongoing concerns should be distinguished from the question of the conditions under which such visions occur. Presumably, the neurocognitive effects of psychedelics as well as some other distinctive features of psychedelic experience, such as altered self-awareness, play an important role in how psychedelic visions come about and unfold.

References

Belser, A. B., Agin-Liebes, G., Swift, T. C., Terrana, S., Devenot, N., Friedman, H. L., Guss, J., Bossis, A., & Ross, S. (2017). Patient experiences of psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy: An interpretative phenomenological analysis. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 57(4), 354-388.

Camlin, T. J., Eulert, D., Horvath, A. T., Bucky, S. F., Barsuglia, J. P. & Polanco, M. (2018). A phenomenological investigation into the lived experience of ibogaine and its potential to treat opioid use disorders. Journal of Psychedelic Studies, 2(1), pp. 24–35.

Christoff, K., Irving, Z. C., Fox, K. C., Spreng, R. N., & Andrews-Hanna, J. R. (2016). Mind-wandering as spontaneous thought: A dynamic framework. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 17(11), 718–731.

Deane, G. (2020). Dissolving the self: Active inference, psychedelics, and ego-dissolution. Philosophy and the Mind Sciences, 1(I), 2.

Fox, K. C., Nijeboer, S., Solomonova, E., Domhoff, G. W., & Christoff, K. (2013). Dreaming as mind wandering: Evidence from functional neuroimaging and first-person content reports. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 7, 412.

Girn, M., Mills, C., Roseman, L., Carhart-Harris, R. L., & Christoff, K. (2020). Updating the dynamic framework of thought: Creativity and psychedelics. NeuroImage, 213, 116726.

Grinspoon, L., & Bakalar, J. B. (1979). Psychedelic drugs reconsidered. Basic Books.

Irving, Z. C. (2016). Mind-wandering is unguided attention: Accounting for the “purposeful” wanderer. Philosophical Studies, 173(2), 547–571.

Ichikawa, J. (2009). Dreaming and imagination. Mind and Language, 24(1), 103–121.

Ichikawa, J. (2008). Scepticism and the imagination model of dreaming. Philosophical Quarterly, 58(232), 519–527.

Kraehenmann, R. (2017). Dreams and psychedelics: Neurophenomenological comparison and therapeutic implications. Current Neuropharmacology, 15(7), 1032–1042.

Lawson, E., & Thompson, E. (2024). Daydreaming as spontaneous immersive imagination: A phenomenological analysis. Philosophy and the Mind Sciences, 5.

Letheby, C. (2020). Being for no-one: Psychedelic experience and minimal subjectivity. Philosophy and the Mind Sciences, 1(I), 1-26.

Masters, R. E. L. & Houston, J., 1966. The varieties of psychedelic experience. 1st ed. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Metzinger, T. (2009). The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self. New York, NY: Basic Books (AZ).

Noorani, T., Garcia-Romeu, A., Swift, T. C., Griffiths, R. R., & Johnson, M. W. (2018). Psychedelic therapy for smoking cessation: Qualitative analysis of participant accounts. Journal of Psychopharmacology, 32(7), 756–769.

Revonsuo, A. (2006). Inner Presence: Consciousness as a Biological Phenomenon. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Schenberg, E. E., de Castro Comis, M. A., Alexandre, J. F. M., Tófoli, L. F., Rasmussen Chaves, B. D. & da Silveira, D. X. (2017). A phenomenological analysis of the subjective experience elicited by ibogaine in the context of a drug dependence treatment. Journal of Psychedelic Studies, 1(2), pp. 1–10.

Swift, T. C., Belser, A. B., Agin-Liebes, G., Devenot, N., Terrana, S., Friedman, H. L., Guss, J., Bossis, A. P., & Ross, S. (2017). Cancer at the dinner table: Experiences of psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy for the treatment of cancer-related distress. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 57(5), 488–519.

Wießner, I., Falchi, M., Palhano-Fontes, F., Oliveira Maia, L., Feilding, A., Ribeiro, S., Bezerra Mota, N., Araujo, D. B., & Tófoli, L. F. (2022). Low-dose LSD and the stream of thought: Increased discontinuity of mind, deep thoughts and abstract flow. Psychopharmacology, 239(6), 1721–1733.

Windt, J. M. (2015a). Dreaming: A conceptual framework for philosophy of mind and empirical research. MIT Press.

Windt, J. M. (2020). Dreaming: Beyond imagination and perception. In A. Abraham (Ed.), The Cambridge handbook of the imagination (pp. 659–675). Cambridge University Press.

A post by Luke Roelofs

There’s a common idea that sometimes the best aesthetic choice is to “leave something to the imagination”, where that primarily means not presenting it explicitly.

Sometimes this is a claim about horror — that the monster is scarier if it stays mostly hidden, and showing it clearly is often a let-down (Lovecraft 1927 famously said that “the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown”). Sometimes it’s a claim about sexiness – that the most arousing outfit isn’t necessarily the most revealing one, that eroticism can be better served by suggestive hints than graphic depiction. And I think similar dynamics can come up with other emotions: someone’s tragic backstory might seem more tragic if given only through vague suggestions, a perfect day might seem more perfect if we’re not fully shown what happened. And so on.

But what are we actually doing — what is the “imagination” that things are being left to? Setting aside the question of when and why it’s a good technique, I want to focus on the more basic question of what it even means to leave something to the imagination. We can’t just take the faculty or process that we call “imagination” in other contexts and plug that in here. That won’t work, for at least two reasons.

First, whenever we engage with fiction, we’re plausibly using the imagination (see, famously, Walton 1990). But “leaving it to the imagination” often happens within fiction – e.g. a horror writer leaving to the imagination exactly how their monster is killing its victims offscreen But if the imagination is being employed whether the killing is shown or not, then leaving to the imagination must go beyond simply using the imagination.

We might respond by invoking some standard distinction, like voluntary vs. involuntary imagination, or imagination governed by rules and props vs. not. Maybe when the horror director leaves things to “the imagination”, that means leaving it to the viewer’s unconstrained imagination, rather than directing them to imagine something specific.

But (second) I don’t think this works either. If we do focus on the thing left to the imagination and make a point of imagining it, there’s a decent chance that we’ll destroy whatever special allure it had. Trying to picture it, fully and concretely and explicitly, means no longer leaving it to the imagination, but rather spelling it out – even if we are spelling it out in our imagination.

And sure, sometimes we’re very satisfied with how we explicitly imagine something. Sometimes it becomes scarier, sexier, sadder, or whatever when we actually spell it out. But sometimes it doesn’t: often, no explicit image that we can come up with can match the intensity or power of what is “left to the imagination.”

(When the person leaving things to our imagination is a professional author, director, or other artistic creator, I think we can reasonably expect that this should often be true. If we could easily come up with a better specific thing to imagine than the creator can, what are we paying them for?)

For these two reasons, it seems like we need a more specific characterization of the sort of imagination to which things are sometimes best left, to differentiate it from other sorts.

We might consider the literature on mind-wandering, which has the right sort of undirected, inexplicit, free-ranging character (see e.g. Irving and Thompson 2018, Irving et al. 2020). But I don’t think mind-wandering is quite what we’re leaving things to. For one thing, mind-wandering tends to take time – the mind has to be allowed to wander, and given free space to do so. Moreover, the common result of letting one’s mind wander is that at least some more-or-less fleshed out visions or ideas do actually come up and pass before the minds’ eye.

It seems like things that are left to the imagination can sometimes prompt this kind of mental exploration, but not always. Often our attention stays on what is shown (the half-hidden shape of the monster, the sexy outfit, or whatever), and the further stuff that’s left to the imagination serves to imbue that with greater significance without competing with it for time or attention

We also might consider the literature on perceptual co-presentation, which some analyze in terms of imagination (see e.g. Nanay 2010, Roelofs 2018). Everyday perceptual experience shows us complete objects, but presents them as having both revealed aspects, which we directly perceive, and concealed aspects, like their rear surfaces and occluded parts. This lets the unperceived be present in perception, and one account is that the mind does this “filling in” of unperceived elements through unconscious mental imagery or low-level imagining.

Might this be what’s going on when we leave things to the imagination? Well, clearly it’s sometimes involved. If only one part of a creature extends into the light, or only half of a body part is exposed by a garment, the mind tries to complete the shape as best it can. But it seems neither necessary nor sufficient. It’s not sufficient because perceptual co-presentation is so pervasive: every object we see or imagine is likely to have both revealed and concealed aspects. And it’s not necessary because some cases of leaving things to the imagination don’t involve anything as concrete as the unity of a perceived object (e.g. remarks that gesture at a tragic backstory, or hint suggestively at unspecified sexual prospects).

I’m attracted to the thought that leaving things to the imagination involves a sort of combination of co-presentation and mind-wandering. The thought runs: in perceptual co-presentation the mind makes something like a probabilisitc inference, completing an object in the most likely way based on past perceptions, and then incorporates that inference into the phenomenology of perception. It predicts likely future perceptions and infuses them into the actual perception.

If this sort of infusing is possible, perhaps something like mind-wandering – the free, unconstrained, play of associations – could also be infused into a percept. The one tentacle that reaches out from the shadows might be experienced as imbued not only with the fairly mechanical completion of the shapes that likely continue into the dark, but also the open-ended and basically speculative range of bizarre and sinister possibilities it brings to mind.

Note that we could express this idea without linking it to either mind-wandering or perceptual co-presentation. When we leave something to the imagination, that means that something actually perceived or imagined somehow “half-activates” multiple associated ideas and images. By “half-activate” I just mean bringing them to mind enough to influence our pheneomenology but not enough to experience them distinctly.

Observe three things about this idea of simultaneously half-activating many associations:

1. It explains why leaving things to the imagination is sometimes so powerful. By activating all of these different ideas and images at once, we can build up a greater intensity of feeling than they would yield individually, without putting undue demands on our time and attention.

(This is compatible with thinking there might be other mechanisms at play in particular cases, e.g. something being unknown might itself be a scary-making feature, compounding with this more general effect.)

2. It can explain why spelling things out is often disappointing. Half-activated ideas don’t need to be consistent with each other, so we can have lots of disparate or actively conflicting associations all working together. But committing to one of them banishes this happy camaraderie, and suddenly most of the ideas are being ruled out and, very often, the one idea we commit to is less potent than all the half-activated ideas were together.

3. It provides a data point on the folk concept of the imagination. Someone might accept the sort of psychological architecture sketched above, but deny that it has anything to do with the imagination. We can talk about ‘automatic half-activation of associated content that infuses a particular experience’ without the word “imagine”, and if we think of imagination as essentially an active or intentional or conscious process, we would actively deny that this half-activated penumbra involves imagining.

But in fact this everyday phrase does use the specific word “imagination”. That seems to suggest that, insofar as there is a folk concept of imagination, it can cover automatic and unconscious, or semi-conscious, processes, if they have the right characteristics. That doesn’t necessarily show that such a concept must correspond to a real or natural kind, but it might lend some support to such a supposition.

Of course it may be that I’m reinventing the wheel here, and this is something that’s already been spelled out somewhere. If so, I hope someone tells me! And I also hope that it’s valuable to draw out the significance of this topic for thinking about “the imagination” in other contexts.

References

Irving, Zachary, Glasser, Aaron, Gopnik, Alison, and Sripada, Chandra Sripada (2020) "What Does ‘Mind-Wandering’ Mean to the Folk? An Empirical Investigation" Cognitive Science. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12908

Irving, Zachary, and Thompson, Evan. (2018) "The Philosophy of Mind-Wandering" in Christoff and Fox (Eds.) Oxford Volume on Spontaneous Thought And Creativity. Oxford University Press.

Lovecraft, Howard Philips. (1927). “Supernatural Horror in Literature.” The Recluse 1: 23–59.

Nanay, Bence. 2010. “Perception and Imagination: Amodal Perception as Mental Imagery.” Philosophical Studies 50: 239-254.

Roelofs, Luke. (2018). “Seeing the Invisible: How to Perceive, Infer, and Imagine Other Minds.” Erkenntnis 83 (2): 205–229.

Walton, Kendall. (1990). Mimesis as Make-Believe. Harvard University Press.