Daniel Kim
Affiliation: University of York
Category: Philosophy
Keywords: Hallucination, Phenomenology, Imagination, Disjunctivism
Date: Thursday 4th of September
Time: 17:00
Location: Room 232 (232)
View the full session: Embodied Cognition
Hallucinations are often viewed as ‘internal’ phenomena, arising from cortical misfirings that simulate perception without external stimuli. This paper challenges this internalist perspective by proposing an alternative embodied imagination model of hallucination, integrating an imagination-based approach with an embodied conception of imagination. Drawing on insights from philosophy and cognitive science, I argue that hallucinations are best understood as embodied (not purely neural) and imaginative (not strictly perceptual). This approach refines our understanding of hallucination while contributing to broader discussions on the distinction between perception and imagination.
The embodied imagination view comprises two core claims. First, hallucinations are embodied, relying on bodily and environmental structures alongside neural activity. Second, they are a form of imaginative activity in which an embodied agent engages in the absence of external objects. This perspective aligns with the frameworks of embodied cognition and phenomenological psychopathology, offering a more nuanced account of hallucination that addresses key objections.
The idea that hallucination is embodied stems from the 4E approach to cognition, which highlights the role of the body and environment in shaping cognitive processes. Sensorimotor enactivism, for example, holds that perception involves exercising certain bodily skills (Noë, 2004). Some theorists extend this to hallucination, suggesting it involves deploying these skills ‘as if’ genuine perception were occurring (Noë, 2005; Ward, 2023). However, this raises two challenges: (1) what constitutes the ‘as if’ activation of bodily skills when no external object is present, and (2) why such activation should suffice to produce conscious experience.
I argue that the ‘as if’ sensorimotor activity is better understood in terms of the bodily skills associated with imagination rather than perception, aligning with theories of imagination within the embodied cognition paradigm. Within this framework, imagination is a participatory activity inherently tied to bodily movements and actions (Gallagher, 2017). Activities such as pretend play and tool-making illustrate that imagination is not purely internal but an embodied phenomenon involving engagement with bodily and environmental structures.
The embodied approach to imagination complements imagination-based accounts of hallucination, which view hallucinations as degenerate forms of sensory imagination occurring without external objects (Allen, 2015; Niikawa, 2023). While these theories explain the ‘quasi-perceptual’ nature of hallucination by drawing on similarities between perception and imagination (e.g., the Perky effect, Anton syndrome), they face key objections: (1) imagination is typically voluntary, whereas perception and hallucination generally are not; (2) they assume that hallucinations require the absence of external objects, challenged by cases of ‘veridical hallucination’ where one hallucinates an object that happens to be present; and (3) they struggle to explain how absent objects influence hallucinatory phenomenology.
The embodied imagination view addresses these concerns. First, it characterizes hallucinations as involuntary imaginings, like earworms and flashbacks, where embodiment plays a crucial role in shaping their content and character. These involuntary experiences have the conscious character they do – despite lacking agential control – due to their embodied nature and dependence on past experiences (e.g., hearing a catchy tune, trauma). Second, it counters the argument from veridical hallucination by highlighting a crucial bodily constraint on attention: one cannot simultaneously ‘attend’ to an imagined object and a perceived object in the same location. Third, it offers a more nuanced account of hallucinatory phenomenology, showing that hallucination is not merely about the absence of objects but also ‘how’ a subject imaginatively engages with large-scale possibilities afforded by the environment.
This view accounts for real-life hallucinations. In Charles Bonnet syndrome, individuals with significant sight loss experience visual hallucinations yet retain ‘insight’, recognizing them as distinct from genuine perception. These hallucinations often appear less integrated, more static, and lacking the fullness of real-world perception, supporting the idea that hallucination, as a form of imagination, has a lesser degree of structure and coherence than veridical perception. Similarly, patients with schizophrenia, despite experiencing immersive psychotic episodes, maintain a degree of separation between their imaginary and shared social worlds, as seen in ‘double bookkeeping’ (Bleuler, 1911/1950). This suggests that schizophrenic hallucinations do not signify a complete withdrawal from reality but a reconfiguration of one’s sense of reality.
The embodied imagination view aligns with phenomenological psychopathology, which sees hallucinations as arising from global disruptions in one’s dynamic relationship with the world over time. Empirical studies document links between imagination and psychosis, showing how life events (e.g., trauma) mediate the developmental trajectory from non-pathological imagination (e.g., childhood imaginary friends) to pathological hallucinations (e.g., auditory hallucinations in schizophrenia) (Crespi et al., 2016). Individuals experiencing psychotic hallucinations remain ‘haunted’ by possibilities instantiated in past trauma that unfold in an affectively charged way. Thus, hallucinations are not merely isolated cognitive distortions but are deeply embedded in an individual’s embodied history, emotional landscape, and social world, reflecting how past experiences continue to shape present perception and imagination.
The embodied imagination view has significant implications for ongoing debates in the philosophy of perception, particularly in addressing an influential argument against disjunctivism – the view that hallucinations and veridical perceptions do not share the same fundamental nature. A version of the ‘causal’ argument claims that if a perceptual and a hallucinatory experience share the same proximate cause, and no further conditions are needed for hallucination, then the kind of experience that occurs in the hallucinatory case must also occur in veridical perception. It assumes that a brain state alone suffices to produce a hallucinatory experience, implying that the same brain state must yield an experience of the same kind in veridical perception. The embodied imagination view challenges this by emphasizing the constitutive role of the body and environment in hallucination.
This perspective has key advantages. First, it provides a positive explanation of ‘subjectively indistinguishable’ causally matching hallucinations as a form of embodied imagination, surpassing standard negative epistemic disjunctivism (Martin, 2006; Fish, 2009). Second, it better captures hallucinatory phenomenology than causalist disjunctivism (Moran, 2024), which rejects the minimal conception of hallucination but lacks a robust positive account of its phenomenology.
By situating hallucination within the embodied cognition framework, the proposed view offers a compelling alternative to internalist accounts and advances our understanding of the intricate relationships between perception, imagination, and hallucination.