Dr. Susan Blackmore is convinced that there is no spirit in the complex machine called man. Blackmore, who teaches psychology of awareness, explains why culture - the essence of the human spirit - is only a collection of "elements" that have managed to survive, and why she is certain that there is no "I"
In the middle of the twentieth century, in one of the most terrible wars in the history of history, four great ideologies came into a head-on collision with each other in the struggle to gain physical and cultural control over human society. Nazism against liberalism, capitalism against communism - systems of abstract ideas, "isms", that the people who believe in them were ready to die in order to inculcate them or force them on others.
The claim that ideas struggle with each other just like animals in nature is not new. Already John Stuart Mill described liberalism as a struggle of ideas that it is our duty, humans, to allow them to be born and grow, so that they stand the test of public debate and prove their correctness. But only at the end of the twentieth century, under the influence of Darwin's theory and the discovery of genetic inheritance processes, scientists and philosophers began to try and build models of "cultural selection" according to the principles of Darwinism.
Memetics is a theory of cultural evolution through reproduction and inheritance, in which humans do not promote cultural ideas, but serve as machines that carry and spread these ideas. The deepest meaning of the memetic approach is that, as in biological evolution, human culture has no definite direction and continues to move in a kind of chance and randomness, adapting to the environment in which it operates. Richard Dawkins was the first to propose the idea in his famous book The Selfish Garden, and Susan Blackmore developed it brilliantly. With the publication of her book "The Meme Machine" in Hebrew, I spoke with Blackmore about memetics and the consequences arising from it for the theory of cognition, the definition of the "I" and freedom of choice.
Maybe we'll start with a basic explanation: what are memes?
The idea is based on the theory of Darwinism. Darwin's basic brilliance in his book "The Origin of Species", published exactly 150 years ago, is that if there is a large amount of animals that are only slightly different from each other, that can reproduce among themselves and pass on traits to their offspring, and given that all of these live in an environment and in conditions of scarcity that do not allow all The details in the group to exist, we will receive over time, seemingly out of nowhere, details that are more and more sophisticated and adapted to the environment. This is, quite simply, evolution.
The fascinating thing is that these surprising mechanics and dynamics do not necessarily apply only to inheritance by genes. They can also operate on other levels. This is what Richard Dawkins tried to explain in the book "The Selfish Garden". He said he asked us to fixate on the idea that Darwinian evolution exists only on the biological level, and that there may be other types of "elements" on which the selection mechanism operates and they reproduce and are copied.
Dawkins pointed to the field of human culture. He said that in the "primitive soup" of culture there are countless ideas, stories, songs, inventions - basically everything that is copied from person to person. He wanted to call these cultural elements a name that resembles "garden" and at the same time implies copying (on the basis of the ancient Greek word "mimesis" - imitation). And so the "meme" was chosen. In the Oxford dictionary, a meme was defined as "an element of culture that can be considered to be propagated by non-genetic means, especially through imitation".
A meme, then, is anything that passes from person to person. The works, the customs, the methods of operation, the technology. A drawing is a meme, if someone copied it. A conversation is a meme, if someone repeated it. Belief in God is a meme, rock and roll is a meme, the idea of a meme is a meme. Memes pass between generations and within a generation through imitation and copying.
Dawkins claims that just as genes are "interested" mainly in themselves and not in the organism that carries them, so are memes. They "strive" to preserve themselves, and this preservation is not related to what we, humans, want.
exactly. Obviously, without our brains there would be no memes. Just as without DNA there would be no genes. The best way to think of it is as a simple three-step algorithm: diversity, selection, inheritance. This is true of biological beings, and it is also true of every area of our culture. Mematics claims that culture, like biological evolution, has no direction and no goal. Daniel Dent says that "the replication of memes, like the replication of genes, is not necessary for the benefit of anything... There is no connection between the replication power of the meme and its competence, from his own point of view, and its contribution to our competence". Memes have a life of their own independent of us.
What sets this idea apart from other theories that explain the development of human culture?
I think this view presents a completely different picture than the one we are used to regarding the origin of planning in our culture. We usually think to ourselves like this: "We are very smart animals, and we invent our culture for ourselves." That is, we are responsible for the entire cultural structure. In pre-Darwin biology, God created the animals. Darwin caused a revolution and it turned out that genes are responsible for our development...
And the memetics performs a similar reversal and states that the memes (and not us, the humans) create the cultural evolution? Everything that happens on the cultural level is a product of meme choice?
Yes. From the perspective of memetics, humans are the products of two replicators: genes and memes. There is a double choice. This means that culture develops using machines (humans), which can reproduce from water and spread it in the world. From this point of view, the driving force of the development of culture comes from that simple algorithm, which runs on human meme machines and uses all the cultural means at its disposal to replicate and perfect itself.
If so, culture does not work in the service of man and is not goal-oriented. It is based on the success of memes in a survival competition. Can it change the way we perceive the world? Can it make us see reality in a new way?
As far as I'm concerned, this is exactly what happened, and I know that there are quite a few who have undergone a similar transformation of consciousness. I am sitting now in my beautiful study, where there are chairs, a table, books, flower pots and a heater, and I look at these things and say to myself: they are only here because they won a competition for many years. They managed to get me and others to copy them. I can also perceive myself as a machine replicating memes, which makes every moment decisions that affect the evolution of everything around me, without being intentional and planning, without being the one who controls the mechanism. This is a completely different way of understanding reality.
You claim that mathematics allows us to look at the "self" in a new way. In what way do you now understand the "self"?
The "self" is such a mystery in philosophy and psychology. It seems to me that most people feel as if they are not the body, but something that resides inside the body. This feeling seems to start in early childhood, and this is how we continue to grow naturally: we perceive ourselves as a kind of spirit or soul held in a body. There is such a kind of "inner self", in which even those who do not want to believe in the soul believe. That's how it feels to us. Mematics sharpens the understanding that this is not possible.
Everything we know about the brain, about evolution and the like, leads to the fact that there is no small person inside the head. So why do we feel this way? A possible answer is that the memes take care of that. The word "I" is a very powerful meme. With puberty we start talking about ourselves as someone who owns the body, who owns certain property, who has beliefs and thoughts. But maybe all this is a trick of that powerful meme that is the idea of the "I", and every time we use this word, we convince ourselves of its existence as an internal object.
And here we come to the subject of consciousness. In the last 15 years, a real renaissance has been taking place in this field: philosophers and scientists are seriously looking into the brain and trying to understand what consciousness is and how it works.
The last 15 years have been really exciting. When I was a student it was impossible to even talk about "consciousness" - it was simply considered meaningless. Today you will hear it everywhere. I think the source of this is the well-known "body-mind" problem: we can observe the body, we can understand more and more how the brain works, how the visual system works, etc., but what about the mind? What is the essence of the experience of seeing the color red, loving or feeling a pinch and pain in the hand? How can consciousness be explained? Through electrical activity of neurons in the Anterior Cingulate Cortex of our brain? This question is the so-called "hard problem" of the study of consciousness: how subjective experiences can be created by the objective conditions in the brain. This was the driving force behind the study of consciousness.
And someone solved the difficult problem?
Definitely not... but many people say they are solving it and there are developments. I will give you an example of an area where, in my opinion, things are beginning to become clear: almost forty years ago I had a wonderful out-of-body experience, during which I felt as if I had stepped out of my body. In recent years we seem to understand more about how such phenomena occur. There is a part within the temporal lobe of the brain called the temporo-parietal junction, and if this area is stimulated or damaged, out-of-body experiences can be produced.
There are many different dimensions to our selves. We talked about the conceptual side of the matter, but more fundamentally, it is the internal compass according to which we place ourselves: where we are and what is the state of our body. Now, for example, I'm sitting on the chair with my feet on the desk, and I feel my body and recognize it as my body, and I feel like I'm inside my head, peeking out. This is exactly the work that is done at the temporo-parietal junction. This part of the brain receives information from the various senses, from the nerves that network the entire body, and on the basis of this information a map, or actually a map, of the body is built there. When we interfere with this process, the illusion can simply crumble, or sometimes "float out", and then the person does not really know where he is and struggles to build a new picture of reality. This is how he creates for himself a separation between body and soul - an "out-of-body experience".
But most of us are sure that the "self" is more than an illusion, that we have an identity - a real, continuous, undivided and unchanging focus, which is the owner of the body and the soul.
This is indeed how most people feel, but this is a simplistic view. I think that in fact our "self" is made up of many layers. The German philosopher Thomas Metzinger wrote about this, among others. We have the emergence of the body and the mind, we have the idea of the "self", we have the memory, and all these are combined in different forms. But because we normally experience all the components at the same time, we think we are "one thing". In fact, we are many things.
Metzinger's theory reminds me of things you wrote once, about how modern neuroscience is discovering, in fact, what Buddhism discovered 2,500 years ago - that we don't have an "I".
Yes. Of course, Buddhism knew nothing about the workings of the brain, but I think the essence of their insight was that the "self" is not an entity that exists in a stable and constant way, but a system that is in constant change, and that the body is nothing more than a collection of parts, without a "fixed someone" that is apparently "inside" ” and which “collects” everything together and “leads”.
Such a modern understanding requires a huge change in the way of looking at the world.
For me it goes without saying that it must change you completely! I have been practicing meditation for over 25 years. It's a process. I, for example, have always been troubled by the problem of free will, because it seems to me that it is impossible for us to have free will. Of course if we don't have a "self"! The idea that there is someone inside who makes independent decisions is clearly at odds with the way we understand the brain today.
Apparently the famous experiments of Benjamin Libet and new experiments in brain research did not help the idea of free will either...
very true. It became clear to us that the body may choose, but not "I", not that little man who is apparently inside the head. We know today that that "man" feels that he has made a choice, after there was actually a decision by the body regarding the action. Today I no longer feel that I have free will. That feeling just disappeared. People ask me how exactly I got rid of this feeling, and I have to say that I don't know exactly. I observed myself, thought a lot and did a lot of experiments, and at some point my perception of how I make decisions, just changed.
How does this translate into everyday life?
it's simple. If I have to decide about something, I simply say to myself: "He will already decide." The mind will decide. Give it to him." I don't have to decide, because there is actually no small "I" that sits inside. This highly sophisticated body will already do that. And I just wait and see him decide. So in that sense I got rid of a small part of that sense of self.
And what does the knowledge that there is no "self" matter to you? Does it affect your behavior?
Definitely. Many of the tendencies that develop in us because we are convinced that we are "self", such as pride, jealousy, egoism - they are not pleasant. These are things that cause us suffering, and cause us to cause others suffering. If you have a slightly less egocentric worldview, it is easier to respond pleasantly to other people. Paradoxically, precisely if you think of yourself as a biological machine, it is much easier to treat others with compassion.
Basically, consciousness for you is not at all "something" in the world, but a way of functioning of the brain. There is no soul in the machine. If they build an artificial brain in the future, perhaps like the "blue brain" project, it will have consciousness, according to you.
Right. We don't really know how to build subjectivity into the system. My position, which derives mainly from the memetic theory, is that the condition for such a successful machine is that it will be able to imitate and copy, that it will move around the world and be in reciprocal relations with other systems, that it will develop a language, and that in this language there must be the word "I", which will create an illusion of selfhood, which will lead In turn the illusion that that self has consciousness - that is, there is self-awareness. It is not easy to build such a machine.
That is, a machine with consciousness would be one that memes could use to replicate themselves.
exactly. This is how you will get consciousness - with the help of replicating memes and using a machine that is able to imitate and copy and is able to deceive itself into thinking that it has a "self", and that it has something called consciousness - just like we do. Then, like us, of course that machine will also have the opportunity to wake up from this illusion.
Tomer Persico is a doctoral student in religious studies at Tel Aviv University and a teacher at the Reali School in Haifa.
The article was published in issue number 6 of the magazine "Odysseus"
38 תגובות
The unscientific sound (I would say a deconstructionist flavor) that mimetics has is very disturbing, and takes it away from the spirit of Dawkins who represents real science. It's not clear to me how the two connect, but it certainly doesn't give science a good name.
Evolution apparently works not only in biology but also at the most basic level of nature: in the transition from the microscopic quantum standards to the macroscopic standards of relativity by the transition from superposition to the collapse of the wave of the strongest probability. That is, the survival of the fittest probabilities.
This is called Quantum Darwinism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Darwinism
anonymous:
Do you suffer from feelings of grandeur or do you enjoy them?
1. We use the sites you suggested many times. Unlike you, we understand that we need to do more than that.
2. It is not true that everything that was said in the discussion appears on some report website. For example - in none of the sites you brought is there a discussion of Blackmore's book.
wow People, you are repeating yourself.
There are innumerable websites that organize, catalog and explain all the points you raised in the discussion.
To all the evolutionists and delusionists - don't expand on the conversation - just give a link.
Catchy, isn't it? Like "just say no" or "there's Bandura there's friends"
After all, you have two wonderful websites for Linkook
http://www.talkorigins.org/
http://www.skepdic.com/
Blackmore is fatalistic and hopelessly liberal. In her opinion, everything is acquired from the cultural environment, even the 'I'. In the article I did not see a clear reference to the fact that memes are selected according to their suitability to some objective reality. Therefore, it implies that a person has no choice and discretion at all. If all our thoughts and ideas can be reduced to a mechanical brain structure, then there is no meaning to whether ideas are correct or not. If I have no choice but to believe in some idea what guarantee can there be that it is even true.
As JBS Haldane said:
If my mental processes are determined entirely by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true... and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.
By the way, the same is true for memetics - after all, it is itself another meme.
to anonymous user (unidentified)
If there was free will, maybe people wouldn't commit suicide?…
Machel
Accept 🙂
Ghost:
You're squirming. point.
I am mainly concentrating and the main thing is that you told us that there is foresight when there is none.
If you really don't know the meaning of the phrase "foresight" - look it up in the dictionary.
On the other hand - I assume that you actually know what "foresight" is, but, while you are attributing it to me - you are simply diverting the discussion from the main point (which I mentioned) in the direction of reading comprehension.
Machel
If I screw up it doesn't mean you don't screw up.
So I say stop engraving too.
You like to divert reactions in all kinds of different directions instead of concentrating mainly.
"Foresight"
What are you talking about? On the evidence of a baby?
Do me a favor…. Don't mess with my brain
Ghost:
See it's a miracle!
I saw response 23 and already knew what response 24 would be.
Listen: it's better not to regret it yourself or at least read what I wrote before you regret it.
What you quoted from my words is not the only possibility I mentioned (remember the sentence beginning "another way..."? Did you ignore it because you remembered that was exactly what was there?).
In any case - science does not currently recognize foresight. Can you quote a scientist who did an experiment like the one you described or another and came to a different conclusion? It's enough that you can't do it to prove that you're the one who regrets it.
ghost moon,
If you read the link I attached, you must have understood that according to the dubious formations of the experiment there is no need to change the laws of physics yet
"This very sophisticated body will already do it. And I just wait and see it decide"
Have you decided to wait and let him decide?
Excellent interview, will be widely distributed...:) Thank you Tomer.
Machel
stop nagging
The experiment you are talking about is not the experiment I was talking about but the experiment Shahar is talking about.
There were no "projections for such a short time that the mind fails to absorb the image...."
The picture was broadcast for a period of at least a few seconds (as far as I remember), a fraction of a second before you appeared
the image, action patterns were measured - which they attributed to the subconscious.
Machel
stop nagging
The experiment you are talking about is not the experiment I was talking about but the experiment Shahar is talking about.
There were no "projections for such a short time that the mind fails to absorb the image..."
The picture was broadcast for a period of at least a few seconds (as far as I remember), a fraction of a second before you appeared
the image, action patterns were measured - which they attributed to the subconscious.
Noam:
In my opinion, Ghost and Shahar simply saw an experiment that demonstrates blindsight (in people who are not brain-damaged; there are much more impressive experiments done with brain-damaged people) and did not understand it correctly.
I have also seen such experiments.
This is a situation where people got the feeling that the image was trying to convey without realizing that they saw it or without knowing what appeared in it.
This phenomenon can be demonstrated by projection for such a short time that the mind fails to absorb the image, but the process of processing it in the brain already begins and the feeling it conveys is already conveyed.
Another way to demonstrate the phenomenon is to locate in the brain the signs of the feeling that the image conveys and to see that they appear before the signs that indicate a conscious understanding of the image appear.
There was no condition of foresight in these or any other experiments.
Every organization consists of the total number of people active in it but remains in existence even if all the blames change.
The human body is made up of all of its cells and these are constantly changing - but the body remains.
The Bible can be written on a parchment scroll or on a hard disk and its essence will still be preserved.
My conclusion is that the "live" information is the software and our brains are the computers that run it. The computer is just a meaningless block of material without the software.
I am not the brain but the "soul" - the software that ran in it.
Fascinating article, this is a topic that has occupied me for many years...
You shouldn't be in a hurry to dismiss the principle of causality and more so lightly...
(Although in the world of Ghost Moon there are things that are no less illusory..)
In any case, a balanced and interesting article on the reliability of the aforementioned study can be found in the link
http://www.skepdic.com/precog.html
It's always surprising how easily some people are willing to accept any report without putting in the effort and checking a little more, especially when the report is conspiratorial in nature or goes against mainstream opinion.
Lenaam (16):
This is an experiment conducted by Dean Radin - search on Google Google Video
A bit of a weird person if you ask me
The world will not be destroyed if the principle of causality is violated.
At most, the principle of causality will change slightly in its wording.
Shahar, the described experiment violates the principle of causality and on the face of it seems absurd.
Do you have a link to more information about the experiment?
In my opinion, Blackmore really exaggerates the description of "myself" as a "meme".
It also overstretches the parallel between genes and memes.
I will start with the second matter:
There is one very important difference between genes and memes:
The genes change randomly.
Memes change in a purposeful way and the person who determines their purpose is the person who changes them.
This is what allows memes to develop much faster and it is also what allows the creation of new memes - out of thin air.
Therefore, it is not correct to claim that we are fully a product of memes - after all, we also create them.
There is a mutual activity here and the one who represents us in this mutual activity is our self which in my opinion - contrary to Blackmore's opinion - also exists.
This brings me to the first matter.
Blackmore herself describes an important part of the sense of self as a product of a specific part of the brain - the temporo-parietal junction.
In other words - she herself says that this is not an idea that passes from one person to another, but something that is built into our bodies.
There are probably more party mates, as you can see here:
https://www.hayadan.org.il/awakeness-area-in-the-brain-1609093
There is no doubt that we are more of a process than an inanimate object, but that doesn't mean we don't exist! Doesn't a stream also exist?!
I tried to describe the fact that we are a process here:
https://www.hayadan.org.il/blood-is-the-soul-0808099/
which is actually a continuation of this article:
https://www.hayadan.org.il/is-soul-exist-2501098/
Blackmore writes: "We convince ourselves..."
This phrase is meaningless when there is no "ourselves".
It turns out that in this case too, contradictions in the expression of the idea reveal the error in the idea itself.
The same contradiction repeats itself when she says "I tell myself..."
Who are you and who are you if you don't believe in their existence?
The self exists and it exists not only in humans.
Like him, there are emotions such as pride, jealousy, egoism, etc.
They are all products of the evolution of genes and not of memes.
There is no need to teach a baby to be jealous. He knows how to be jealous even before he learned to speak and before someone instilled some kind of meme in him.
It is true that our intelligence allows us to understand that some of these feelings that developed in us during evolution, the overwhelming majority of which is not homo sapiens, may be less suitable for the current period when our life environment is completely different.
This understanding, as well as the various ways in which these natural feelings can be readjusted to our modern times, both memes and humans do discuss them and pass them from one person to another, but the idea that these feelings are themselves memes is... a wrong meme (as mentioned - memes have a life of their own) themselves and therefore even memes that describe wrong ideas can take root in the culture, but I don't find it appropriate to help them with that. On the contrary. I try to root them).
The claim that we do not have free will is also not acceptable to me as simple (that is, in the sense that Blackmore attributes to it, as if the choice is not influenced by consciousness).
It is true that in making immediate decisions - one that there is no time to delve into - our subconscious decides automatically but - as I said before - two things allow us free will nonetheless.
One is that when there is enough time to make the decision we can examine our subconscious decisions and if we don't like them we can "return them to the sender".
The second is that we can "tame" the subconscious and teach it that certain decisions are wrong and that it must change the way it is made. This ability of ours is the basis for the education (and sometimes the training) of humans. It is behind the success of violence control courses just as it is behind the ability I mentioned to moderate the influence of emotions such as jealousy, pride and egoism on our behavior, so that it matches the memes we have about proper behavior.
Luke
According to what I remember from the show, it's exactly like that, the experiment among other things also 'indicated' that the subconscious mind
Picks up information from the environment, in a period of time in the near future (of a few seconds maybe or less than a second I don't know
remember) - before the 'awareness' intends to process the information - and the subconscious knows how to process the future information
to appear, meaning (the information) that in the next step (when it appears) will be processed in 'awareness' or 'recognition'.
In other words, the subconscious does know what will happen 'in a moment'
But awareness (consciousness) 'does not know' what the subconscious 'knows', and therefore cannot know 'what will happen in a moment'.
I watched the same experiment that "Ghost" watched.
In the experiment they presented completely random images selected by software.
Some of the pictures caused an increase in the indices in the subject.
They found that whenever an image that evokes strong emotions was shown, a small increase was measured a fraction of a second before the image was physically presented.
In fact, the body receives messages from the future, not in 50 years but in a fraction of a second.
The only explanation I can think of is that the "spiritual" reality occurs just before the physical realization of the event.
In fact, everything that is on the physical plane, first happens on a "spiritual" plane and then comes true in physical reality.
Sorry that I have to use the word spiritual because it is a bit problematic and can be interpreted in different ways.
Really, really interesting article. You fascinated me really really amazing to think about it. A really amazing article, I really liked it. Continue with articles on the subjects of recognition and consciousness. These are interesting subjects even more because they concern us so much.
Certainly no answer to the mind-body problem has been found, but there are studies and advances in the field.
It sounds funny to me when they say that if there is progress in the field then it will surely end with the conclusion that the body-mind problem is not a presentation of elements such as spirit and soul, etc.
The fact that places in the brain that are inhabited create a feeling of exit in the body does not mean anything. If you stimulate the visual areas of the brain then you can see all kinds of mirrors and sparkles and maybe more complex things. So what does that mean? that we don't see?
I was laughed at.
Ghostly, she asked.
According to the plan you saw, does recognition have the ability to predict upcoming events?
According to what you wrote, the subconscious responded to an image that had not yet been shown on the screen, meaning that the subconscious "knew" to predict the future.
did I understand correctly?
Nice article
There is also an analogy between male and female sex in mm. This is conceptual fertilization
There is also a mutation of false dreams in copying
People commit suicide because of a sequence of scenarios that led them to such a decision. Without the scenarios they wouldn't have done it... or, if they had gone through other scenarios they would have continued with their lives...
Free will is an illusion. It is designed to help us translate the chaos of information at our disposal into simple decisions.
Great article!
Thank you
"There is no free will"
If there was no such thing people would not commit suicide.
Or sorry because of someone who killed himself first, everyone else repeats the action 🙂
"There is no free will"
If there was no such thing people would not commit suicide.
Or sorry because of someone who killed himself first, everyone else repeats the action 🙂
I know her from the grocery store where she buys a kilo of semolina.
He buys a chicken from the grocery store
I want to be as accurate as I remember from the show,
The scientists based their knowledge on those brains and how they 'behave' in different situations such as for example
Fear, joy, etc.
And they discovered that the brain reveals an action pattern of 'fear' for example when an image with the same 'scary' characteristics was about to appear.
But the brain transmits the feeling to the body only as soon as the image appears.
I saw a program on one of the television channels a long time ago, they showed scientists who performed an experiment,
And in the experiment they took a group of people and sat them in front of a screen.
They were shown pictures on the screen, and during the experiment they checked certain areas of their brain with the help of
Some kind of measuring device (perhaps an MRI or something similar), to identify a pattern of activity in those areas of the brain.
The scientists were able to identify that there is a certain repeating pattern of action,
and always appears a few seconds (but an exact period of time) before the image is shown to the subject.
They also managed to discover that this pattern of action causes the subject to "feel" the characteristics of the image
about to appear.
That is, if there is something in the picture that causes fear, then the 'action pattern' recognizes it and causes the body
to feel threatened and to 'shrink' with fear even before the image appeared before the subject's eyes,
And all this without the subject being aware of the 'process'.
The scientists found that the subjects were not aware of this. And basically they thought they made a conscious choice to 'feel'
Threatened' when a 'threatening' image appeared.
While the subconscious decided for them, what they would feel about the image shown, already subconsciously even before they were 'aware' of the image.
In other words, only after the image appeared, did the subject 'feel' what the subconscious had decided to 'feel' (at the moment
that the image will appear), and all this before the subject saw the image and was aware of what he would 'feel'.
Whoever thinks that 'I' is a kind of deception - should stop talking as some kind of 'I' - surely 'to us'.
If he claimed this - his claim is empty, unless he is some kind of automaton, in which case his claim has no importance.
Mamatica - the stupidest thing I've ever heard. joke.