Folk Beliefs About Phenomenological Differences and Similarities Between Kinds of Mental States

The topic of this chapter is pre-theoretical beliefs about phenomenological similarities and differences between mental states. I report the results of a set of exploratory studies on folk beliefs about phenomenological differences and similarities between dreaming, remembering, perceiving, imagining, and hallucinating. Study participants were inclined to treat some pairs of mental states as phenomenologically relatively similar (dreaming and imagining; hallucinating and dreaming) and other pairs as phenomenologically relatively different (hallucinating and remembering; dreaming and seeing). Similarity judgments, however, were often sensitive to the order of comparison. For instance, study participants were much more inclined to agree that hallucinating feels like seeing than that seeing feels like hallucinating, and much more inclined to agree that dreaming feels like seeing than the other way around. Furthermore, beliefs about phenomenological similarity were associated with beliefs about how likely various metacognitive mistakes are.