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Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

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Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#171

Post by andrewla »

komadori wrote: post #165
andrewla wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, I can look at a blank wall, and if you say "superimpose a red circle in the middle of the wall" I can very easily imagine that wall with a red circle on it. But I can't "see" it in the sense that you can see the afterimage of the apple on the blank screen. Are you saying you can see in a way indistinguishable from normal vision an imagined object in your field of vision?

I would characterise myself, per your original question, of being able to superimpose imagined objects onto my visual field. I would not say that such a superimposed red circle is entirely indistinguishable from a real one, but the experience is very much akin to seeing. For one thing maintaining superimposed objects requires a degree of mental focus of which I am constantly aware, especially if the object is detaile…

I actually agree with you about the "is my red the same as your red" -- I do not believe that aphantasia is real but simply that people are talking past each other and getting hung up on semantics.

I see things with my eyes, experience has taught me that when I cover my eyes I cannot see things, when I close my eyes I cannot see things. That is what seeing is. I cannot see with my ears, I cannot see with my fingers. I can imagine shapes and faces and objects just fine, and can rotate them around if necessary, etc., but I cannot see them because my eyes are not involved; when I close them the imagined images do not disappear. The visualization is *akin* to seeing, but obviously I am not seeing them.

Some people on this thread claim that they can see imagined objects in their field of view. I cannot do this. I don't know if I believe that other people can. But a lot of people like you are saying "well, I can 'see' but I can't 'see-see'" -- I'm not interested in you, you are like me, I'm interested in people who say that they can "see". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49469365#49469495

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#172

Post by zug_zug »

andrewla wrote: post #120

It would take a lot to convince me that aphantasia or phantasia actually exist. Let's talk very specifically about the afterimage test here. Can anyone confirm that they have this ability, which specifically is to superimpose imagined objects inside your actual field of vision? If the answer to this is yes, then okay, I guess I have aphantasia. But none of the other criteria seems to apply. I can imagine a song, and…

I'm going to second you for a different reason:

I guess one thing I don't really get or perhaps don't by about phantasia is that the way our whole visual field works in a big illusion: we can really only see a tiny fraction at the center of our vision with any meaningful detail and we don't even realize each eye has a blindspot.

Thus we can very easily believe we "see" something that we clearly do not see.

To make this into a more concrete test, there's a study that most people don't even remember what a bicycle looks like [1]. I'd ask somebody who insists they have phantasia to picture a bicycle, ask them if they see it clearly and in full detail as though it's in front of them, and then say great, how many gears do you see? Does it have a chain? Which way does the handlebar go? Please draw it.

Of course they don't need to draw a perfect bicycle, they could be imagining an imperfect bicycle, but I suspect what would happen is that they would be dynamically adding detail as you asked them (e.g. about the break cords) rather than having seen the whole thing in all of its detail at once. I think that's just an implausible amount of information to pull up for the average person in a moment and render.

1 - https://twistedsifter.com/2016/04/artist-asks-people-to-draw...

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#173

Post by andrewla »

Rooster61 wrote: post #140
rappatic wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. The afterimage test was a major red flag for me. To see something in your “mind’s eye” has nothing to do with physical vision, yet the afterimage works by exhausting some of the eye’s physical cones. It’s a confusing non sequitur and totally unrelated to the subject at hand. I have always suspected that people with “aphantasia” simply misunderstand the idea of a “mind’s eye,” believing that others can someho…

> To see something in your “mind’s eye” has nothing to do with physical vision, yet the afterimage works by exhausting some of the eye’s physical cones. It’s a confusing non sequitur and totally unrelated to the subject at hand. Which they go to the correct length to explain in the link associated with that demonstration. I found that exercise quite apt. They aren't saying "This is what non-aphants see" but rather "T…

Maybe you're right, but there are people on this thread claiming that they can actually see things in their field of vision, not "akin to seeing things" but see-see them. I can't do this and I don't think I have aphantasia; I am interested in people who say that they can do this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49469365

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#174

Post by D-Machine »

vehemenz wrote: post #158

I wonder what it's like to be born blind and have zero visualization ability. Then I wonder what it must feel like for that person to read sighted people on the Internet debate their supposed lack of visualization abilities.

You might find it interesting to read up a bit on blindsight and the neural plasticity of the congenitally blind.

E.g. fMRI experiments on some such people show rich activation of the visual cortex when the blind person is going about and space and hearing and feeling things. This could just mean that region has been recruited to do non-visual processing, but it could also be that the visual cortex is producing strange and unimaginable images in their mind's eye in response to sounds and feelings, such that they are really literally "seeing" sound and such.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#175

Post by jawns »

basscomm wrote: post #164
jawns wrote: post #111

I've known about aphantasia for a long time, but there is one question I keep coming back to: Is it a skill issue? When I was in second grade, our teacher asked us to close our eyes and imagine a pretzel. I closed my eyes and tried to will a pretzel to appear as an image, and I failed miserably. All I saw was darkness and faint squiggles. I didn't understand why so many of my classmates said they could "see" the pret…

> but there is one question I keep coming back to: Is it a skill issue? Every time the topic of aphantasia comes up, this question always gets asked. I get that it's apparently inconceivable that someone who doesn't have aphantasia just assumes that everyone who claims they do is just doing it wrong or misunderstanding what the mind's eye is or that the claimant's own experience is just flat wrong. It's dismissive an…

In my own personal experience -- which I presented immediately after the sentence you quoted -- I didn't originally understand how to visualize, and then later discovered more about how to actually visualize.

So clearly it's not like the case where a person is born without a sense of smell, because in that case nobody's going to present an "at first I didn't know how to smell, but now I do" story.

I'm not saying that all people who experience aphantasia are "just doing it wrong." But I can assert that in at least some cases it is a skill issue, because one of those cases was my own case.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#176

Post by D-Machine »

andrewla wrote: post #171
komadori wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would characterise myself, per your original question, of being able to superimpose imagined objects onto my visual field. I would not say that such a superimposed red circle is entirely indistinguishable from a real one, but the experience is very much akin to seeing. For one thing maintaining superimposed objects requires a degree of mental focus of which I am constantly aware, especially if the object is detaile…

I actually agree with you about the "is my red the same as your red" -- I do not believe that aphantasia is real but simply that people are talking past each other and getting hung up on semantics. I see things with my eyes, experience has taught me that when I cover my eyes I cannot see things, when I close my eyes I cannot see things. That is what seeing is. I cannot see with my ears, I cannot see with my fingers.…

> when I close my eyes I cannot see things. That is what seeing is. [...] The visualization is akin to seeing, but obviously I am not seeing them. [...] a lot of people like you are saying "well, I can 'see' but I can't 'see-see'

I most definitely am not accusing you of this, and your other comments I think make clear you have considered this, but I would be wary of collapsing a continuum to a binary here. Most of the time, visualizing is indeed only analogous to seeing, i.e. visualizing is "seeing, but not 'see-see'ing". However, with extreme focus, regular practice, and/or altered states, this distinction breaks down, and it is harder to make the separation so clear.

I suspect the more hyperphantasic you are, the more easily you can find examples in experience that blur the boundary between seeing vs. visualization, but with normal visualization capacity, these blurred cases are likely quite rare. But I don't think, fundamentally, except in true aphantasics, that there is always a 100% clear dividing line between seeing and visualization.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#177

Post by riffraff »

The Apple test is great, my wife found out with it that she, and our daughter, have aphantasia, we kept bringing this up with other people and turned out quite a few do, and also quite a few do not have an internal monologue.

It's very surprising!

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#178

Post by jpfromlondon »

andrewla wrote: post #120

It would take a lot to convince me that aphantasia or phantasia actually exist. Let's talk very specifically about the afterimage test here. Can anyone confirm that they have this ability, which specifically is to superimpose imagined objects inside your actual field of vision? If the answer to this is yes, then okay, I guess I have aphantasia. But none of the other criteria seems to apply. I can imagine a song, and…

You're absolutely right.

Nobody hallucinates or "sees" the object, it's like an object instantiation with default properties that you can name/describe, nothing more.

If you quiz someone long enough you can get them to acknowledge they don't see anything "in their head" whatever that means.

This nonsense makes me irrationally annoyed, I suspect because it's unfalsifiable attention seeking, some people I've met mention it every chance they get angling at it being some sort of disability. I get it, you don't see anything...I don't see anything either...nobody does.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#179

Post by riffraff »

basscomm wrote: post #164
jawns wrote: post #111

I've known about aphantasia for a long time, but there is one question I keep coming back to: Is it a skill issue? When I was in second grade, our teacher asked us to close our eyes and imagine a pretzel. I closed my eyes and tried to will a pretzel to appear as an image, and I failed miserably. All I saw was darkness and faint squiggles. I didn't understand why so many of my classmates said they could "see" the pret…

> but there is one question I keep coming back to: Is it a skill issue? Every time the topic of aphantasia comes up, this question always gets asked. I get that it's apparently inconceivable that someone who doesn't have aphantasia just assumes that everyone who claims they do is just doing it wrong or misunderstanding what the mind's eye is or that the claimant's own experience is just flat wrong. It's dismissive an…

Fwiw, I can visualize things, I can hear noises in my head but I cannot, for the life of me, smell things in my head.

So it's easy for me to imagine people who don't have other "mental senses", maybe that works to explain it to other people.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#180

Post by EGreg »

Serious question... are LLMs basically operating like aphantasia?

Because phantasia seems to me to be just memory of actual qualia having actually experienced seeing something. No? Can't people with aphantasia remember that experience in any kind of vivid sense? Because "the concept of a beach" is something that an LLM can read from a corpus, and so can a person, even if they never experienced one.

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