Getting a Feel for Rightness and Wrongness

In the course of the present thesis, I have mentioned feelings of rightness (FORs) and feelings of wrongness (FOWs) (Mangan 2001; Thompson, Prowse Turner, et al. 2011;

Thompson and Morsanyi 2012; Gangemi et al. 2015; Fernandez Cruz et al. 2016). What are they? Remember, for instance, the last time you were arranging furniture in your room until it “looked” or felt right. Recently, the internet has spawned a genre of video clips that capitalizes on the FORs of the audience. These clips show events and actions that typically involve the meticulous manipulation of physical objects such as peeling wood. In fact, “Oddly Satisfying” videos have become prominent enough to be featured inWIRED and The New York Times (Faramarzi 2018; Matchar 2019). Their appeal is admittedly better demonstrated than described. I recommend the same-named subreddit and YouTube channel.

I will now provide you with two long (but entertaining) introspective reports of sustained and highly intense (feelings resembling) FORs that are the result of ecstatic seizures and laughing gas (nitrous oxide gas) intoxication. These reports allow for an instructive peak into the phenomenal nature of FORs:

“Every detail of my perceptions was every bit as accurate as they ever are.”

“In dramatic contrast to the ordinary way of experiencing one’s surround-ings, during my seizures, all of these boundaries would suddenly be erased.

Although all my judgments of shape, size, color, texture, and so on would re-main totally unchanged, the evaluation of my environment would undergo a sudden transformation. Everything would be joined together into one whole, as if every single thing in my surroundings were deliberately placed by an artist with the goal of composing a photograph. This would result in a sense of vividness which derived, not from any dramatic hallucination or visual

“trick”, but from the fact that each object in my visual field was emphasized,

so to speak, by everything else. When these boundaries are erased, a second phenomenon begins - all the ordinary facts about the environment seem suddenly to become infused with certainty and a sense of in-evitability.” “One often has (what is sometimes called) an “aha!” moment when we can suddenly explain several puzzling facts simultaneously with the same answer. The sense that I had when I was experiencing some of these seizures was not unlike a continuous series of profound “aha!” moments.

Although nothing around me seemed to have changed in any concrete way, every observation of my surrounding environment seemed to “make sense”

in this way. It is the sense, as I mentioned before, that one might have when admiring an expertly composed painting or photograph – each detail seems to be the way it is for a reason, even if that reason is difficult to articulate or seems only to float at the very edge of one’s consciousness. “The great consilience, coherence, and vividness of everything in the world seemed to demand an explanation of its organization. And the explanation was imme-diate and completely convincing – some mind or purposive agency was at the root of the world’s organization. This was a conviction that was both incred-ibly vague and totally compelling. Speaking as someone who is not normally given over to such beliefs – I am an atheist who happens also to be a professor specializing in logic – these beliefs are wildly out of character for me. But, looking back on these experiences, I am struck by two features of these beliefs, which I now believe may be related. First, they were absolutely immune to any rational doubt; indeed, they seemed not even to be possible candidates for any such doubt. Second, they seemed – perhaps ironically, given my earlier statement – to have many of the same features as the most justified, and rationally de-rived beliefs that a person could possibly hold. For instead of merely being justified by one or several other considerations or observations, these seemed to be irrefutably supported by literally everything in the world. Lit-erally everything that I could experience seemed to cohere with, and lend support to, the belief that there was some sort of agency behind it all. The level of apparent organization possessed by everything in the world simply demanded such an explanation.” (Picard 2013, 2496, original emphasis) I have made some observations on the effects of nitrous-oxide-gas-intoxication which have made me understand better than ever before both the strength

and the weakness of Hegel’s philosophy. [...] With me, as with every other individual of whom I have heard, the keynote of the experience is the tremen-dously exciting sense of an intense metaphysical illumination. Truth lies open to the view in depth beneath depth of almost blinding evidence. The mind sees all the logical relations of being with an apparent subtlety and instan-taneity to which its normal consciousness offers no parallel; only as sobriety returns, the feeling of insight fades, and one is left staring vacantly at a few disjointed words and phrases, as one stares at a cadaverous-looking snow peak from which the sunset glow has just fled, or at the black cinder left by an extinguished brand. [...] I have sheet after sheet of phrases dictated or written during the intoxication, which to the sober reader seem meaningless drivel, but which at the moment of transcribing were fused in the fire of infi-nite rationality. [...] What’s mistake but a kind of take? What’s nausea but a kind of -ausea? [...] Emphasis, emphasis, there must be some emphasis in order for there to be a phasis. [...] There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference. [...] The last phrase has the true hegelian ring, being in fact a regular sich als sich auf sich selbst beziehende Negativit¨at. And true Hegelians will¨uberhaupt be able to read between the lines and feel, at any rate, whatpossible ecstacies of cognitive emotion might have bathed these tattered fragments of thought when they were alive. (James 1882, pp. 206 sq.)

One thing that these examples show is that the intensity of a feeling does not have to correlate with its accuracy. At the same time, the extremely magnified feelings in these reports are the result of exceptional mental conditions. It stands to reason, however, that they are “just” extraordinary representatives of feelings that are usually ordinary and regular ingredients of our phenomenal life—but inmuch lower dosages. This is what makes these testimonies so remarkable: we encounter FORs with their volume turned up very high and a positivity that comes “in a very large quantity (or a high intensity), explosively”.

When it comes to FOWs my favourite illustration consists in making you look at upward flowing water. Here is a video of “upward flowing water”: https://youtu.be/NiOAfQZwn0g.

Looking at it, you supposedly experience an unpleasant FOW about what you see, i.e.

the feeling takes a perceptual experience as its base. It might also work to look at a static impossible shape like a Penrose triangle:

Depiction of a Penrose triangle

Alternatively, you canimagineupward flowing water (or any upward “falling” object) — or can youimagine impossible shapes? — with similar results. Then your FOW would take an imagining as its base. Of course, there seems nothing really wrong about upward flowing water in a substantial sense. There is nothing really wrong about cars driving on the left side of the street, as you can see here: https://youtu.be/Y8DqAIyuR0Qs. Still, many people coming from countries with right-hand traffic feel that there is something wrong and not just left about it. Perhaps you also remember some occasion when something looked, sounded, felt (in the tactile sense), smelled or tasted “weird” to you.

I submit that in such situations we experience FOWs where we lack a clear way to refer to or describe the kind of wrongness. Thus, we call it weirdness.

The difficulty to arrive at FORs and a high susceptibility to experience FOWs in relation to mundane tasks, such as washing one’s hands or locking the door, is a characteristic symptom of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), a psychopathology marked by the display of debilitating obsessive-compulsive behaviour.¹⁸⁹ In the OCD-literature FOWs are known by other names: “not just right experiences” (NJREs) or “incompleteness experiences” (INCs). They are found to “occur in any sensory modality” (Ben-Sasson et al. 2017, p. 2) and are assessed via surveys where subjects respond to items such as

“I must do things in a certain way or I will not feel right”, “When hanging a picture on

189Another complementary possibility is that there is an absence of an expected FOR that would typically terminate the activity. This appears similar to the absence of an expected FOF towards loved ones in Capgras disorder.

the wall, I have had the sensation that it did not look just right” and “When talking to people, I have had the sensation that my words did not sound just right” (Belloch et al. 2016). Although FOWs are pronounced in OCD patients, they are fairly typical experiences in everyday life (cf. Cougle and Lee 2014). Presumably, a majority of us experiences FOWs on seeing a crooked picture.¹⁹⁰