I used to imagine that I knew what Brian Weatherson was getting at in his posts about imaginative resistance, but after reading John Holbo's post And all astonishments blow up the world, I'm no longer sure.
I used to think that the idea of imaginative resistance made sense, and needed to be explained. My best guess was that it related to how much you had to rely on something that you know ain't so (and its consequences) in order to make sense of the story. Now I'm not really sure why I ever thought that. Rereading Weatherson's story Death on a Freeway (read it if you haven't--it's only a paragraph), I am puzzled not by the last sentence of the story ("Craig did the right thing, because Jack and Jill should have taken their argument
somewhere else where they wouldn’t get in anyone’s way.") but by Brian's assertion "The problem is the last sentence. Our natural reaction is that this is wrong." My immediate reaction, which I had forgotten about until Holbo's post reminded me of it, was to assume that the story suddenly introduced the narrator's point of view. Even if the last sentence were "Craig did the wrong thing, because murder is wrong." I think that I would have the same reaction. In the context of a story, it seems to me the most natural reading is that any sort of commentary about the action serves to draw attention to the narrator as a character. We may or may not agree with the narrator's assessment of the things in the story, but that's not a puzzle, even in stories with an unreliable narrator.
That being that case, though, I find it impossibly difficult to imagine what a fiction set in a morally deviant world would look like. A morally deviant fictional world isn't a world occupied by moral deviants (that's easy to imagine, but obviously doesn't give rise to imaginative resistance), but a world where what is moral itself is different--but how to express that? Weatherson's example seems to suppose that it's as easy as tacking on a (to us immoral) assertion about what's morally true in that fictional world--but if the natural reading is that simply introduces a morally deviant narrator then what? In fact, if the fictional world really were morally different, it ought to be possible (at least in principle) to have a narrator whose morals agree with ours narrate the events of the story and we ought somehow to be able to conclude that the narrator is unreliable, and that the events of which he disapproves (and that we would, too, if they happened in our world) are nonetheless moral in the world portrayed. In some sense that's what it would be for the fictional world to be morally deviant, and not just the narrator. Having said that, though, I find it hard to imagine such a fiction. The difference between imagining that and a world with some other impossible feature (such as 7 + 5 not equalling 12) doesn't seem very puzzling at all, though. But maybe it is, and I've just gotten myself tangled up.
Very cool Motion Induced Blindness optical illusion. As I've said before, about the checkerboard illusion, I think this kind of thing really undermines the plausibility argument for "zombies" (creatures indistinguishable from humans, but who lack qualia)--and plausibility is the only argument there is that it's a coherent notion. We think that we can imagine seeing the color red but having a completely different (in some hard-to-specify sense) feeling of what it's like to see red than someone else who also sees that color and tells us "yep, that's red." From this the argument goes that it's conceivable that someone could say "that's red" whenever we would, but who has nothing that it feels like to see red; there's just a bunch of nerves firing and chemicals changing, but nothing subjective going on. And if it's conceivable, so it is said, then it's possible.
I think, though, that it's harder (maybe even impossible) to imagine a zombie being fooled by this optical illusion; the illusion is, after all, precisely that you're losing the sense of what it is to feel like you're seeing one or more of the yellow dots, even though physically the photons are still hitting your eyes, the nerves are firing, etc. The lights are on, but you're intermittently not home to Mr. Yellow-dot Qualia. Is it conceivable that the zombie sees but isn't really aware of seeing the yellow dot, and also sees but isn't really aware of not seeing the yellow dot, and yet somehow still can distinguish objectively between the two states (so it can describe the illusion) just like someone with a mind? Or does your brain seize up in a kind of concept induced blindness trying to picture it?
Brian Weatherson points to David Chalmers's _Does Conceivability Entail Possibility paper, and comments on it, but unfortunately Brown.edu is down at the moment so I can't get the right archive link going. Wo also has a post on Conceivability, Possibility, and Zombies. Both Brian and wo take a much more analytical approach, trying to tease out whether it's possible to construct a simple logical statement that clearly shows a conceivable but impossible world; I'm just trying to undermine the plausibility of the intuition that because we think we can imagine having the qualia of green while seeing red, and vice-versa, with no way of verifying this against others's sensations, it makes sense to suppose seeing red (and being able to act appropriately as if one had seen red) accompanied by no qualia whatsoever.
Tip of the hat to The Volokh Conspiracy for the link to the illusion.