# The Profile of Imagining  ## Metadata - Author: [[Robert Hopkins]] - Full Title: The Profile of Imagining - Category: #articles - Summary: insert summary - My notes: - Summary: The text discusses the differences between perceiving and imagining, highlighting how imagining represents objects while perception creates a more intimate connection with them. It delves into how sensory imagining requires knowledge of profiles and how imagining lacks the ability to capture the full phenomenology of sensing. Overall, the text emphasizes the distinct features and contrasts between perceiving and imagining. - URL: https://readwise.io/reader/document_raw_content/192314074 - Source File: The Profile of Imagining by Robert Hopkins.pdf ## LLM Chats ## NotebookLM ## LLM Audio ## Highlights > Representations can be accurate by accident. The accuracy that perception presents itself as enjoying is not like that. In perceiving, how we experience things as being is given as brought about by their being that way. In other words, the phenomenology of perception suggests that Determination too should receive Yes as its answer. Thephenomenology ofimagining again differs sharply. Rather than being experienced as determined from without, our imaginings are given to us as arising from within ourselves. We can capture the difference by borrowing a distinction from Kant. For Kant, recep- tivity is the mind’sability to receive representations, spontaneity its capacity for ‘bringing forth representations itself’.As far as phenomenology goes, percep- tion is receptive, imagining spontaneous.³ ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j299xk6c1hjvb9c6bynp22rt)) > Now consider Independence. We experience the objects of perception as existing, and being as they are, whether or not we are perceiving them—indeed, whether or not we are aware ofthem in any way at all, be it in perception, thought or any other conscious state. Perception presents its objects as mind-independent. Not so imagining. Much ofwhat we imagine has no reality beyond our imaginings themselves. Of course, we do often enough imagine real objects and events: Paris in sunshine, the Big Bang, Queen Elizabeth II in her last days. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j29a0da4jhvrvsq4ageq6cx2)) > Perception’s phenomenology strongly suggests that the answer to Exhaustion is No. The things we perceive, far from being given as exhausted by our perceptual awareness of them, are experienced precisely as having features of which we are not currently aware. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j29a2fjhnmn4514fneb2hjsz)) > Although I introduced sensory imagining as a state that captures what it would be like to sense the objects represented, it seems that capturing phenomenology need not amount to reproducing it. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j29a4dnm27yab25htzfbkxgd)) > Does sensory imagining always have the four features I’ve described? We might worry that some imaginings appear in disguise. Is hallucinating a form of sensory imagining? Is dreaming? If the answer in either case is yes, prima facie imagining can occur in the absence of the phenomenology described above. For when we hallucinate, and sometimes when we dream, don’twe take ourselves to be perceiving? If perceiving presents its objects as real, mind-independent and so on, and imagining usually does the opposite, how can we mistake these imaginings for perceivings, unless they lack the usual phenomenology? ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j29a5j72reexr1nf8zg0bvyw)) > Perceiving posits its objects as real, imagining does not. We made sense of that contrast in terms of whether the states offer themselves as guides to reality. That is a feature ofphenomenology, but one which might well ground a further difference in functional role, a difference in relations to belief. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j29aa35074xgdfqp2me6yj0n)) > Finally, both Sartre and Wittgenstein, and with them Gilbert Ryle, address the theme of Exhaustion. All three claim that we experience the things we imagine as failing to outstrip our awareness. And, as we will see below (Chapter 2), they also connect this idea to a fifth contrast between imagining and perceiving: that only perception leaves room for observing the objects it represents.⁷ ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j29aeq111baed02afy6z43n5)) > Sartre contrasts imagining, not only with perception, but with states of pure thought, which he calls ‘conceiving’. It is possible to see, visualize, or think of one and the same thing—say, a straw-bottomed chair. But, as Sartre rightly notes, there is an important difference between the first two and the third. Perceiving and visualizing both in some way present us with, or show us, the chair, as merely thinking of it does not. (Another way to put this point, allowing ourselves to expand the notion of experience further than above, would be to say that the first two amount, as the third does not, to forms of experience of the chair.) ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j29ahg83hrwy83cbdn8ra5sv)) > Conceiving is an exercise of intentionality, the mind’s ability to be directed towards things, in its thinnest form. I ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j29ajz9wv3rfecq8b013cna2)) > . As with the material of various sub-pictorial ‘images’ in which we see things, such as Rorschach blots or the flickering flames of a fire, the analogon need bear no significant relation to the objects consciousness uses it to make present. And in this respect sensory imagining resembles conceiving: all the work in determining the state’s object is done by intentionality, the mind’s capacity to direct itself at the world. This capacity demands its own resources. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j29apbkrcp50k9rc36bh53gn)) > Ryle makes no mention of anything other than knowledge and the uses to which it is put. Indeed, he goes further, explicitly denying that there is need, or room, for any such element. In describing our experience of hearing a familiar tune, he draws on a Kantian distinction between the sensation for which the sounds are responsible, and the knowledge we use to order that sensory input. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j29azgyjth2xbs0ea9pwaqj5)) > Chapter 2 turns to the differing ways in which imagining and perceiving are experienced as relating to us to their objects. It begins by considering the different access we have to things imagined and things perceived. I agree with Sartre and Wittgenstein that, while observation is key to perception, it is excluded from imagining. We observe what we perceive, we cannot observe what we imagine. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j29b7dmrr9exq7srbp8n9dpc)) > While both imagining and per- ceiving are transparent, only perception is what I call ‘Direct’: we experience the ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j29ba6bbs4q18k8j07sv9d4q)) > mind-independent things that are its objects as constituents ofour own perceptual states. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j29baabadp0n1eq374z4khyz)) > . In what does our exercise ofspontaneity consist—what is the activity that arises within us? Since the result is something we experience as representational, presumably that activity is one of representing. But what is the nature of this representing? ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j29bc43hqvn1emf3anjg6g48)) > What, then, is the knowledge involved in sensory imagining; and on what does it operate? ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j29bd8qa3yxpk70n2yx1rdy5)) > My claim is that the way certain properties are present in perceptual experience is as patterns in other properties. Shape, for instance, is present to us in visible figure; surface colour in the colour of light reaching the eye. In both cases properties that are independent of our perspective on them are present as ‘profiles’ in properties that are perspective- dependent. The latter properties constitute the appearances of the former prop- erties, appearances that shift with our relations to the objects that bear them. We experience the perspective-independent properties by placing the perspectival ones in those profiles. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j29bfmtynj0stg1z2tyarxc7)) > To imagine those properties, we must deploy the knowledge ofprofiles described in Chapter 3. However, here that deployment takes a rather different form. While in perception the knowledge is used to form expectations about how perspectival properties will ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j29bjhs6t0rw0y6e95kdfz78)) > develop, in imagining it is used to undertake commitments to ensure they develop in appropriate ways. And while expectations in perception concern perspectival properties with which we are presented, the commitments in imagining concern perspectival properties we merely represent to ourselves. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j29bkmj1qq1r2qby5zgp2cpt)) > The concept of imagining is rather like one of doing than receiving. Imagining might be called a creative act. (1980: §637) ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j29by2r18mp2949skkgshmhn)) > Even imaginings that come unbidden or that prove resistant to control do not leave us uncertain whether or not they are receptive to the things they ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j29c6ay4bmjv8xvmkt98rn78)) > represent. We experience them for what they are, the products of our own mental workings. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j29c6ewtn3hs3335f388gq8e)) > Not all powers are alike. The examples above fit into three broad camps. Fragility is a disposition, a tendency to manifest some change (or stasis), given appropriate triggering conditions. Climbability is an affordance, an amenability or suitability to being treated in some way by some agent. Wit is an ability, the power of an agent to act in certain ways. W ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j29devhg6jent4a9mjtd3zxj)) > This brings us to the key question: how does the shape of our power to undertake imaginative action relate to that of our power to undergo imaginative episodes we do not initiate? If you are like me, the answer will be that the two match. What I can deliberately imagine I can find myself imagining unintentionally, and vice versa. The broad limits on my imaginative performance, the respects in which I outperform some imaginers and underperform others, are in each case the same. For any subject for which this match holds, we have reason to treat their ability and their capacity to imagine as (instances of) the same power. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j29f4s3p15nabeg6fkz4vava)) > True, only the former can be described as, say, laborious or effortless; but that is because those terms only apply to actions. True too, not everything we are able to do with active imagining we can do when imagining passively. It may indeed be that we can learn through imagining whether the sofa fits up the stairwell, but only if that imagining is intentional. Here the difference is due to factors accompanying action. Ifimagining is to reveal whether the sofa will go up the stairwell, as we imagine the pair interacting their dimensions must be held constant. Only where we attend to imagining and control it to our investigative end can we have any confidence that this condition is met. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j29f9pxy0na71w1ympg1j3d8)) > . Both are powers to imagine, but one is an ability, resulting in action; the other a capacity, actualized in imaginative episodes that are not actions. But if these powers are to perform the explanatory duties that give the appeal to powers its point, they must be psychologically real. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j29fakc52jjf5b399rss57pr)) > To reject the split genus view is not yet to identify the relation in which imagin- ation stands to agency. The argument for that rejection does at least confirm that the capacity to imagine is a power of the agent. Abilities are possessed by agents alone, since they are powers to act. If the capacity to imagine is the same power instance as the ability to imagine, and the latter belongs to the agent, the former must also do so. There is no parallel pressure in the case of blinking or breathing. When actions these things are exercises of a power on the agent’s part, of course; but their automatic or reflex occurrences may actualize a power possessed only by her body, or one of its parts. But, while interesting, all this does is confirm what we already knew. We were already construing imaginings, even when not actions, as exercises of an agential power. And nothing here as yet unpacks that power’s connection to agency. Something can be a power of an agent and yet display no such connection: examples include not just dispositions, but also capacities such as understanding Italian, or a memory for faces. I ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j29fdkr0d1bhz05hrgh51a1z)) - Note: No problem, I'd be happy to help you understand it. Just let me know which paragraph you're referring to, and I can break it down for you. Q: I've understood this text up to here. but this paragraph is difficult for me to understand A: The paragraph you are struggling with delves into the connection between imagining and agency, exploring how spontaneity in imagining relates to the power of the agent. It discusses the distinction between abilities and capacities in the context of imagining as an exercise of agential power.