Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Aldous Huxley's Deep Reflection

thereader.mitpress.mit.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 67 posts

Re: Aldous Huxley's Deep Reflection

#41

Post by xyzwave »

B1FF_PSUVM wrote: post #19

Huxley was a very persuasive writer, witty and engaging, with good insights. But I doubt that making an already unreliable pattern recognition apparatus go haywire can produce anything useful. Entertaining, maybe, useful, no.

You mean an experience which categorically compels individuals to be kinder, more gentle, and less selfish in pursuing genuinely altruistic ends is not useful? Often times as a result of (their ego) thinking they were going to die.

Entertaining, not really, useful, most certainly.

Re: Aldous Huxley's Deep Reflection

#42

Post by lo_zamoyski »

driggs wrote: post #29

This is an especially interesting read given that Huxley described his own apparent aphantasia - lack of mental visual imagery - in "The Doors of Perception": I am and, for as long as I can remember, I have always been a poor visualizer. Words, even the pregnant words of poets, do not evoke pictures in my mind. No hypnagogic visions greet me on the verge of sleep. When I recall something, the memory does not present…

Mental images in everyone are hazy and fuzzy and undetermined compared to what we perceive via sense perception.

I have doubts about the existence of aphantasia in the strict sense. While I can agree that different people indulge in greater or lesser day dreaming or imagination or pay greater or lesser attention to mental imagery or remember and recall images better or with greater precision than others, I don't think aphantasia as the total absence of images (where "image" is understood as a hazy sense impression) is real. I suspect that whose who claim to have this condition falsely believe that others have images that are of the same "resolution" and vividness of sense experience, but this is not the case, certainly not in most people.

Re: Aldous Huxley's Deep Reflection

#44

Post by wcarss »

lo_zamoyski wrote: post #42
driggs wrote: post #29

This is an especially interesting read given that Huxley described his own apparent aphantasia - lack of mental visual imagery - in "The Doors of Perception": I am and, for as long as I can remember, I have always been a poor visualizer. Words, even the pregnant words of poets, do not evoke pictures in my mind. No hypnagogic visions greet me on the verge of sleep. When I recall something, the memory does not present…

Mental images in everyone are hazy and fuzzy and undetermined compared to what we perceive via sense perception. I have doubts about the existence of aphantasia in the strict sense. While I can agree that different people indulge in greater or lesser day dreaming or imagination or pay greater or lesser attention to mental imagery or remember and recall images better or with greater precision than others, I don't thin…

That could be the case to a degree -- it's likely very hard to rule out simple miscommunication in general as a part of the equation here. But I have a friend who administered this test (to be spoken to its subject):

Close your eyes. Imagine a ball resting on a table. The ball begins to roll, quicker now, and it goes over the edge of the table. It bounces, once, twice, three times, and rolls along the floor, then comes to a stop again.

What color was the ball?

Did you have to make that detail up just now when I asked you, or was that what you saw?

This last question is the decider: a visual detail like that is very difficult to omit while _picturing_ the situation, but is very easy to leave out if your brain doesn't work that way. If you had to choose a color at the end, you may have the true "no picture at all" form of aphantasia, as opposed to just failing to understand that other people don't see a real, solid image.

Re: Aldous Huxley's Deep Reflection

#45

Post by throwa9724567 »

lo_zamoyski wrote: post #42
driggs wrote: post #29

This is an especially interesting read given that Huxley described his own apparent aphantasia - lack of mental visual imagery - in "The Doors of Perception": I am and, for as long as I can remember, I have always been a poor visualizer. Words, even the pregnant words of poets, do not evoke pictures in my mind. No hypnagogic visions greet me on the verge of sleep. When I recall something, the memory does not present…

Mental images in everyone are hazy and fuzzy and undetermined compared to what we perceive via sense perception. I have doubts about the existence of aphantasia in the strict sense. While I can agree that different people indulge in greater or lesser day dreaming or imagination or pay greater or lesser attention to mental imagery or remember and recall images better or with greater precision than others, I don't thin…

Couldn’t disagree more. I have aphantasia and can’t conjure up a mental image of any sort.

Re: Aldous Huxley's Deep Reflection

#46

Post by burkaman »

lo_zamoyski wrote: post #42
driggs wrote: post #29

This is an especially interesting read given that Huxley described his own apparent aphantasia - lack of mental visual imagery - in "The Doors of Perception": I am and, for as long as I can remember, I have always been a poor visualizer. Words, even the pregnant words of poets, do not evoke pictures in my mind. No hypnagogic visions greet me on the verge of sleep. When I recall something, the memory does not present…

Mental images in everyone are hazy and fuzzy and undetermined compared to what we perceive via sense perception. I have doubts about the existence of aphantasia in the strict sense. While I can agree that different people indulge in greater or lesser day dreaming or imagination or pay greater or lesser attention to mental imagery or remember and recall images better or with greater precision than others, I don't thin…

Why do you doubt it? When you talk to someone with aphantasia, one of most people's first questions is something like "sometimes my mental images are pretty fleeting and indistinct, is that what you mean?" and they'll say "no, I don't even understand what 'mental image' means". It's possible they're all lying or very confused but it seems unlikely.

A friend with this condition also told me that growing up, people would often say "picture x in your mind" and he always assumed it was a figure of speech for "think about a description of x" because he couldn't imagine what else "picturing" could mean.

Re: Aldous Huxley's Deep Reflection

#48

Post by Cthulhu_ »

midoridensha wrote: post #6
robertlagrant wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You say it drives your wife crazy, so it seems that being in this state doesn't actually help you resolve issues between you and your wife. It only numbs you to the conflict and puts the whole burden on your wife. I don't understand why you're saying this. The technique wasn't primarily to resolve issues with spouse; it was to fight panic attacks.

If the OP needs to zone-out to avoid a panic attack when talking with his wife, it sounds like they have some serious marital problems, and this is just a way of avoiding dealing with them.

You're blaming one person's emotional and physical experience on two people for some reason. One thing that is important in a healthy marriage is that people's feelings vs their actions are separate entities, and that one person's feelings shouldn't affect someone else's in an unhealthy fashion (enmeshment). A panic attack is unhealthy and unhelpful - if there's a conflict, one party going into a panic will not resolve the conflict.

TL;DR, being able to stop a panic attack or otherwise unproductive emotional response is a great skill to have. If the other party takes that personal then that's something they need to work on themselves.

Re: Aldous Huxley's Deep Reflection

#49

Post by Cthulhu_ »

mistermann wrote: post #39
bowsamic wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they do not talk of that

[flagged]

ChatGPT is not an authoritative source and should never be used in any kind of argument. I'm sorry you seem to defer to it instead of bring in your own take.

Re: Aldous Huxley's Deep Reflection

#50

Post by paint »

throwa9724567 wrote: post #45
lo_zamoyski wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mental images in everyone are hazy and fuzzy and undetermined compared to what we perceive via sense perception. I have doubts about the existence of aphantasia in the strict sense. While I can agree that different people indulge in greater or lesser day dreaming or imagination or pay greater or lesser attention to mental imagery or remember and recall images better or with greater precision than others, I don't thin…

Couldn’t disagree more. I have aphantasia and can’t conjure up a mental image of any sort.

[dead]
Post reply on HN