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Haha really? Because a good friend of mine has spent a large amount of his life seeking an internal experience that he feels he so desperately needs in order to
by Lambdanaut 4y ago
Haha really? Because a good friend of mine has spent a large amount of his life seeking an internal experience that he feels he so desperately needs in order to have lived a complete life.
It's called complete aphantasia* and it's not too incredibly rare. I've met at least two people who would sit down and have a conversation with me about it.
By the way, my aphantasic friend is a talented composer and an INCREDIBLY powerful writer. He's described composition as "sitting down at the piano and letting his hands do the work." He's never heard music in his mind because he's never had any internal experience whatsoever.
* No dreams
* No internal chatter
* No internal recollection at all
When asked to recall his life, he is able to tell a basic story, but it's not because he internally experiences remembering anything. Instead, he opens his mouth, and the story flows from him, as he has learned to say it.
He's sought out psychedelic experiences just to feel something that is not there, and even then on the most powerful psychedelics he sees nothing (though he does feel things from them).
The range of internal experience is far vaster than many of us ever thought possible. Sometimes I wonder if what is cartoon to me, is the lived experience of some other human being out there.
It certainly would explain somethings.
* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
- benlivengood 4y agoHas your friend heard of p-zombies, and if so, compared his experience to the description of them?
- Lambdanaut 4y agoHAHA Yes. Very much so. "Sometimes I like to think of myself as a philosophical zombie".
- bsedlm 4y agoHe seems like he's somehow split or fragmented or segmented away? Or possibly he just has a radically different way to bring all of his own self together. What if he were to sit in the morning to write down a plan of what he'll do in the afternoon with the idea that he'd do it? What if he didn't even write it?
- mach1ne 4y agoI don't know if split-brain studies are familiar. In short, some people had the connections between their lobes cut off to combat epilepsy. As a result they had two separate brains, and if, for example, a funny image was shown to their left eye, they began to laugh, but when prompted why they were laughing, they couldn't answer. My point is, it is conceivable that your friend has some odd wiring to the parts of his brain which process language. It'd be interesting to get him to an fMRI and see whether the language is processed somewhere completely different to normal people - why not even in the cerebellum.