Aphantasia, imagination and dreaming
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Aphantasia, imagination and dreaming Cecily M. K. Whiteley1
Accepted: 28 August 2020 The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Aphantasia is a recently discovered disorder characterised by the total incapacity to generate visual forms of mental imagery. This paper proposes that aphantasia raises important theoretical concerns for the ongoing debate in the philosophy and science of consciousness over the nature of dreams. Recent studies of aphantasia and its neurobehavioral correlates reveal that the majority of aphantasics, whilst unable to produce visual imagery while awake, nevertheless retain the capacity to experience rich visual dreams. This finding constitutes a novel explanandum for theories of dreaming. Specifically, I argue that the recent dream reports of aphantasics constitute an empirical challenge to the emerging family of views which claim that dreams are essentially imaginative experiences, constitutively involving the kinds of mental imagery which aphantasics, ex-hypothesi, lack. After presenting this challenge in the context of Jonathan Ichikawa’s recent arguments for this view, I argue that this empirical challenge may be overcome if the imagination theorist abandons Ichikawa’s account of dreaming in favour of a modified version. This involves the claim that dreams are essentially inactive and constitutively involve non voluntary forms of imagination. I conclude with a suggestion for further research which can test the viability of this alternative hypothesis, and move the debate forward. Keywords Aphantasia Imagination Dreaming Imagination model of dreaming
& Cecily M. K. Whiteley [email protected] 1
Department of Philosophy, Logic, and Scientific Method, London School of Economics, Lakatos Building, Portugal Street, Holborn, London, UK
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C. M. Whiteley
1 What are dreams? An emerging debate in the philosophy and science of consciousness concerns the nature and ontological status of dreams. Much discussion has focused on solving what Jennifer Windt (2015) calls the ‘‘conceptualisation problem’’: how, if at all, ought we to account for dreaming using the standard psychological terms (such as perception, hallucination, thought and emotion) used to characterise wakeful consciousness? According to one growing family of views, dreams are best understood in ontic terms as instances of imaginative experiences. The so-called ‘imagination model of dreaming’ has been influentially developed by Jonathan Ichikawa (2009, 2016), who argues that dreams constitutively involve both sensory and propositional forms of imagination. In addition to conceptual lines of argument, Ichikawa maintains that the imagination model of dreaming receives considerable support from various forms of neuropsychological evidence which suggest dream imagery and waking imagery share a common neural basis (Solms 1997; Foulkes 1999). Here, I present an empirical case against the imagination model of dreaming as presented by Ichikawa (2009, 2016). I analyse a series of recent neurological studies which identify a particularly pure c
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