Aphantasia, imagination and dreaming

Philos Stud https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-020-01526-8 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 1 Department of Philosophy, Logic, and Scientific Method, London School of Economics, Lakatos Building, Portugal Street, Holborn, London, UK 123 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 case of imagery generation disorder known as aphantasia (Zeman et al. 2015, 2016). Subjects with aphantasia—‘aphantasics’— are characterised not just as having mental imagery of a reduced vividness, or the incapacity to produce imagery of certain visual kinds, but as lacking the capacity or power to produce visual forms of mental imagery altogether. Whilst the recent findings on aphantasia have previously been considered in relation to the ongoing ‘imagery debate’ in cognitive science which concerns the nature of mental imagery and its cognitive function (Zeman et al. 2015; Kosslyn et al. 2006), the full theoretical significance of aphantasia and its implications for debates about the nature of dreaming have yet to be considered. Bolstered by the fact that these preliminary studies of aphantasia reveal that the condition can be both acquired (Zeman et al. 2010) as well as a lifelong stable condition (Zeman et al. 2015, 2016), this paper starts from the claim that subjects with aphantasia and their dream reports provide an interesting test case for philosophers and psychologists who posit a tight ontological connection between dream mentation and sensory forms of imagination. The plan for the paper is as follows. Sections 2 and 3 outline Ichikawa’s imagination model of dreaming (2009, 2016) and the empirical case offered in support of it. Section 4 introduces the recent studies on aphantasia and the notable neurobehavioural features of the condition that these highlight. In Sect. 5 I bring these together and argue that the dream reports of aphantasic subjects recorded to date present an empirical challenge to the imagination model of dreaming presented by Ichikawa. My argument, which results in a dilemma for Ichikawa, is based on the following claims: (i) Ichikawa is committed to the claim that dreams often involve visual forms of mental imagery—which he characterises as essentially agential phenomena—as central and constitutive components, (ii) that aphantasic subjects ex hypothesi lack the capacity for these kinds of agential experiences and (iii), that aphantasic subjects nevertheless report having rich visual dreams. Insofar 123 Aphantasia, imagination and Dreaming as this goes against the predictions made by the imagination model, I argue that these studies thus appear to disconfirm Ichikawa’s theory, and in doing so, problematically lend support to alternative accounts which the imagination model was meant to replace. In Sect. 6 I consider a way in which the proponent of the imagination model can respond to this empirical challenge. The aphantasia studies notably suggest a strong neurophysiological dissociation between voluntary and involuntary forms of mental imagery, with only the capacity for the former being lost by the majority of aphantasic subjects. I argue that the strongest response available to the imagination theorist is to take up the recent calls for adoption of a variation of the imagination model according to which non-lucid dreams essentially involve involuntary, passive or inactive forms of imagination (O’Shaughnessy 2002; Soteriou 2017; Crowther 2018). I conclude in Sect. 7 with a discussion of the broader implications of aphantasia for theories of dreaming. This includes a proposal for future dream research which can shed light on the empirical viability of this alternative model of dreaming, and move contemporary debate on the conceptualisation question forward. 2 The imagination model of dreaming The claim that dreams in some sense involve imaginative experiences leaves open a number of more sophisticated ontological analyses of dreaming.1 Motivated by the rejection of the orthodox alternative to the imagination view, which claims that dreams are essentially hallucinations which involve misleading, wake-like sensory experiences (or ‘percepts’) leading to false beliefs, Ichikawa’s formulation o (...truncated)