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AI bro discovering imagination (piefedimages.s3.eu-central-003.backblazeb2.com)
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[-] Nangijala@feddit.dk 0 points 3 months ago

It's so trippy to me because I'm opposite of that. If I'm daydreaming, I see the worlds inside my head almost as clearly as the real world, to the point where they overlap. I can be looking at a street in the real world and wherever my daydream is taking me, I see that as well on top of the real world.

I find it both fascinating and hard to imagine (ironically) how someone could see absolutely nothing in their head if someone told them to think of a tree growing out of a lake or a car that is also a three story house.

If there is one thing that upsets me about living, it's that I will only ever experience the world once and through one perspective.

[-] MajorasTerribleFate@lemmy.zip 0 points 3 months ago

Speaking only from my own experience as someone with almost-total aphantasia (I definitely dream visually, and when I get very tired I can sometimes see fleeting things with my eyes closed, with almost no control over what), I have found I have a very strong spatial memory and imagination. When someone asks me to imagine an apple, I get no picture, but I can still have awareness of/can sense its shape and position relative to me. I can feel a shape spin in my head. It's as though there is some particular step between "add the object to the environment, conceptually" and "render the object" that doesn't happen for me.

[-] wizzor@sopuli.xyz 0 points 3 months ago

So... You kind of percieve a symbolic representation of space, a sort of platonic ideal version? Must be a very different experience for you to read books than it is for me.

[-] MajorasTerribleFate@lemmy.zip 1 points 3 months ago

I wrote this up for another comment, so I'll put it as a reply to yours, too, so you get a notification about it:


In my time, I have played a fair amount of Dungeons & Dragons (and other such games), including "running" as a Game Master. The planning and narrating of locations is something I feel like would be greatly benefitted by having actual visual imagination. When I learned about aphantasia as a thing (and came to realize that when people talked about picturing something in their head, they were being a lot more literal than I realized was possible), one friend of mine wondered how I could do what I've done running those games, describing places aloud from my head, etc. without visual imagination. I said I don't know, but that he should consider how much better it might have been if I could picture things.

As far as maybe getting you closer to my experience:

Look at some table or other small pieces of furniture near you. Think about what you are doing with normal visual processing - your eyes are getting simple brightness/color signals from incoming photons.

Those get sent to your brain, and a few layers of processing happen - this region is square or rhombus shaped, this region is darker, this part is narrow and tall. Another layer maybe predicts the parts you can't see and gives you a sense of the table's thickness at various points (legs, main surface).

One layer/process considers how the trapezoid shape you see as the surface is actually a square/rectangle, and the apparent width changes based on the distance of that part of the table. All this happens without you having to think much about it, and you end up with not just a simple map of "this square is dark brown, this trapezoid is grayish" but a sense of a whole complex object.

Now, take that multi-layered sense of the table and try to focus just on the physical shape of it, your sense of where each part exists in space. Try to "imagine"/consider the table as an object you sense the presence and shape of, and then also imagine it to be invisible. You still know it's there, you have awareness of where you could walk without hitting it, how you could crawl under it, how far you should lower an object in your hand before letting it go so as to set it on the table rather than either dropping it or slamming it down.

If any of that clicked for you, that probably approximates the experience of non-visually imagining something solely spatially. Basically, everything the visual experience would tell you about the object, except now pretend it's invisible.

this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2025
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