2 ms·

>I don’t have closed eye visuals Nobody does, this is all unfalsifiable nonsense, it's an artifact of the language used to describe imagination.

edb_123 17d ago
Many people have such visuals, so I'm very curious as to what you mean here? I have really intense closed eye visuals during psilocybin trips that basically feel like the fabric of space and time unfolding and presenting itself in an all-encompassing ocean of geometric patterns and fractal-like structures. And sound can become images, and images can become sounds. This can be a really profound experience, and I can assure you that they are definitely a real phenomena. I can also experience a form of closed eye visuals when not tripping but mediating (or while relaxing in bed in the dark, waiting to sleep). But they're of a quite different kind, and remind me more of a very active type of phosphenes morphing with blotches of color and light. But they are also kind of on a different layer (more in the background of the "mind's eye") than the strong "in your face" visuals I experience when tripping.
- zug_zug 17d ago
  I put some thought on this in this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49469729 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49469729
zbikowski 17d ago
I agree that it's unfalsifiable - necessarily all discussions to do with interpretation of qualia are. I think, however, that your reasoning is backwards. Language such as "picture this," "envision yourself on a beach," the concept of the "mind's eye," or especially the word "imagination" from "image" is much more likely to exist as a result of the actual process than to be its cause. Parsimony favors assuming that the description evolved from the experience - if nobody "saw" mental imagery, we would more readily describe the thought process as "thinking about," "reasoning around," that sort of thing. The language used cannot be used as proof on its own. What makes me think this is more than a description problem is that reported vividness of imagery correlates to unconscious effects: pupils constrict to imagined bright shapes and dilate to imagined dark ones, scaled to how vivid the person says the image was[0]. People reporting aphantasia don't show those effects. Despite this not constituting "proof," I cannot rationalize it being a coincidence. If it matters, I call myself aphantasic, though I cannot prove it to you. You may relate to my initial thought - "surely all this language is metaphor, and people don't really walk around hallucinating on command." Taking (the vast majority of) people at their word, however, indicates that they really do see things when they think about them - though visual mental imagery is meaningfully different from actually seeing (but is more like seeing than aphantasics assume). Refer to Galton's original 1880 study[1] for 150-year-old rationalizations that are the same as mine. [0] https://elifesciences.org/articles/72484 https://elifesciences.org/articles/72484 [1] https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Galton/imagery.htm https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Galton/imagery.htm
bobsmooth 16d ago
No, we really do. Do you ever get a song stuck in your head?
degamad 15d ago
It sounds like you might be aphantasic and were not aware of it for long time. I remember when I first realised people had real pictures, in my 20s. I had a friend whose technique for studying involved putting notes on his wall. He claimed he had photographic memory, and could walk over to his wall in his mind and read any piece of paper on it. We had a long conversation after that exploring each other's experiences. I cannot picture anything while awake (only sometimes when asleep or in deep meditation). He was aware that photographic memory was unusually good, but assumed that everyone had at least some visual memory/imagination. I also remember the first time I "saw" the difference too. I was waking up from a dream, once of only 2 dreams I remembered strongly after waking up. I was in a scene like in an action movie, running away from someone in a tall office building. I run up some stairs, burst into a room, and spot an open window across the room, with a big bunch of blue balloons outside tied together and floating up. I dash across the room and jump out the window, grabbing onto the string under the balloons. As I float up, I start to swing around, bback towards the building. I see the shiny windows, but just before I turn far enough to see the balloons or myself in the reflection, I fade into awakeness. Up to this point everything had looked just like real life, but as soon as I woke up, I could not imagine the imaagery any more. Since then, on a couple of occasions when I'm really tired, I'll catch myself transitioning to sleep, because after the lights are out, I'll start fading into picturing myself in a random location, but as soon as I notice it and try to interact with the world, I fade out to black again. So I have had the experience of being able to "see" things in my head (maybe a dozen times in my life while sleeping, two of which I remember vividly, and once while doing an extended meditation session, and once during a hypnosis lesson on induction). And I can contrast those specific visual experiences with the blackness I get when I close my eyes any other time. Have you tried this experiment yourself, or on others to see how much detail they visually imagine? [0] In my experience, most people report somewhere between a 2 or a 3. I tend to ask people to close their eyes and imagine this scene, then read out panel 4 verbatim. "A woman sits at a table. She is resting her chin upon her hands. Apples sit on the table to the right of her. A pineapple to her left.". I give them 30 seconds to notice their imagination then show them the 4 panels and ask which is closest to their imagination. The thing that's most interesting is not the number that they say, but that a significant proportion of people point out the differences from what they imagined, unprompted. Like "I saw her with shorter hair", or "I saw green apples", or "in my head, she was a brunette". Those are not things I would even think of if you read out that description to me. [0] <https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/1b4u0rt/what_do_you_see/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/1b4u0rt/what...>

edb_123 17d ago

Many people have such visuals, so I'm very curious as to what you mean here? I have really intense closed eye visuals during psilocybin trips that basically feel like the fabric of space and time unfolding and presenting itself in an all-encompassing ocean of geometric patterns and fractal-like structures. And sound can become images, and images can become sounds. This can be a really profound experience, and I can assure you that they are definitely a real phenomena. I can also experience a form of closed eye visuals when not tripping but mediating (or while relaxing in bed in the dark, waiting to sleep). But they're of a quite different kind, and remind me more of a very active type of phosphenes morphing with blotches of color and light. But they are also kind of on a different layer (more in the background of the "mind's eye") than the strong "in your face" visuals I experience when tripping.

zug_zug 17d ago
I put some thought on this in this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49469729 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49469729

zbikowski 17d ago

I agree that it's unfalsifiable - necessarily all discussions to do with interpretation of qualia are. I think, however, that your reasoning is backwards. Language such as "picture this," "envision yourself on a beach," the concept of the "mind's eye," or especially the word "imagination" from "image" is much more likely to exist as a result of the actual process than to be its cause. Parsimony favors assuming that the description evolved from the experience - if nobody "saw" mental imagery, we would more readily describe the thought process as "thinking about," "reasoning around," that sort of thing. The language used cannot be used as proof on its own. What makes me think this is more than a description problem is that reported vividness of imagery correlates to unconscious effects: pupils constrict to imagined bright shapes and dilate to imagined dark ones, scaled to how vivid the person says the image was[0]. People reporting aphantasia don't show those effects. Despite this not constituting "proof," I cannot rationalize it being a coincidence. If it matters, I call myself aphantasic, though I cannot prove it to you. You may relate to my initial thought - "surely all this language is metaphor, and people don't really walk around hallucinating on command." Taking (the vast majority of) people at their word, however, indicates that they really do see things when they think about them - though visual mental imagery is meaningfully different from actually seeing (but is more like seeing than aphantasics assume). Refer to Galton's original 1880 study[1] for 150-year-old rationalizations that are the same as mine. [0] https://elifesciences.org/articles/72484 https://elifesciences.org/articles/72484 [1] https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Galton/imagery.htm https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Galton/imagery.htm

bobsmooth 16d ago

No, we really do. Do you ever get a song stuck in your head?

degamad 15d ago

It sounds like you might be aphantasic and were not aware of it for long time. I remember when I first realised people had real pictures, in my 20s. I had a friend whose technique for studying involved putting notes on his wall. He claimed he had photographic memory, and could walk over to his wall in his mind and read any piece of paper on it. We had a long conversation after that exploring each other's experiences. I cannot picture anything while awake (only sometimes when asleep or in deep meditation). He was aware that photographic memory was unusually good, but assumed that everyone had at least some visual memory/imagination. I also remember the first time I "saw" the difference too. I was waking up from a dream, once of only 2 dreams I remembered strongly after waking up. I was in a scene like in an action movie, running away from someone in a tall office building. I run up some stairs, burst into a room, and spot an open window across the room, with a big bunch of blue balloons outside tied together and floating up. I dash across the room and jump out the window, grabbing onto the string under the balloons. As I float up, I start to swing around, bback towards the building. I see the shiny windows, but just before I turn far enough to see the balloons or myself in the reflection, I fade into awakeness. Up to this point everything had looked just like real life, but as soon as I woke up, I could not imagine the imaagery any more. Since then, on a couple of occasions when I'm really tired, I'll catch myself transitioning to sleep, because after the lights are out, I'll start fading into picturing myself in a random location, but as soon as I notice it and try to interact with the world, I fade out to black again. So I have had the experience of being able to "see" things in my head (maybe a dozen times in my life while sleeping, two of which I remember vividly, and once while doing an extended meditation session, and once during a hypnosis lesson on induction). And I can contrast those specific visual experiences with the blackness I get when I close my eyes any other time. Have you tried this experiment yourself, or on others to see how much detail they visually imagine? [0] In my experience, most people report somewhere between a 2 or a 3. I tend to ask people to close their eyes and imagine this scene, then read out panel 4 verbatim. "A woman sits at a table. She is resting her chin upon her hands. Apples sit on the table to the right of her. A pineapple to her left.". I give them 30 seconds to notice their imagination then show them the 4 panels and ask which is closest to their imagination. The thing that's most interesting is not the number that they say, but that a significant proportion of people point out the differences from what they imagined, unprompted. Like "I saw her with shorter hair", or "I saw green apples", or "in my head, she was a brunette". Those are not things I would even think of if you read out that description to me. [0] <https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/1b4u0rt/what_do_you_see/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/1b4u0rt/what...>