Comment by jhedwards
12 hours ago
They absolutely exist. I have a VERY strong minds eye and can invent and watch movies if I want to. Once I was driving while my friend described a post-apocalyptic landscape. I was seeing that landscape and not the road. Suddenly (some part of my brain was still paying attention, thankfully) the road rushed back to me and I saw that the cars in front of me had stopped. I had to slam on the brakes to avoid an accident.
As possibly a tradeoff for this intense visual imagination, I have dyscalculia: I am unable to do more than simple calculations in my mind, and the more math I do the more my mind "closes up" and I feel a kind of pain and visceral frustration. There was nothing more frustrating growing up than people telling me I just needed to be patient or try harder, when nothing I did had any effect on my math ability.
As an adult I have worked around that disability by learning the fields of math that don't involve lots of numbers (discrete math is fine, algorithms are fine), and by learning non-numerical strategies for breaking down problems into smaller, more manageable calculations.
People are different, we have different cognitive abilities. Just like some people are blind or deaf, some people lack a visual imagination, an internal narrative, or the ability to manipulate numbers. I think this cognitive diversity is really quite fascinating.
Right away the story is impossible to verify. What does "I was seeing that landscape and not the road" actually mean? You can't answer that, and neither can I. I will never, ever, know what you mean by that.
I can guess, and I definitely have already done so.
Well, I can't imagine myself in this situation. Under no circumstances I would use the expression "I see landscape and not the road" because well, I can only see the road. I can't imagine seeing something that I don't see. If I close my eyes and try to imagine a landscape (or a car, or an apple) I don't see anything. Asking me "what was the color of the apple that you imagined" is meaningless, because the apple had no color.
I don't claim I have aphantasia, but it's pretty obvious that I don't experience "visual imagination" the same way some other people do.
This is why the denialism about differences in visual experience are so indefensible: they basically require an assumption that the whole world is out to lie and deceive.
Like, so, people just say things like "I see it in my mind's eye", and insist it is not a metaphor... why, exactly? If the typical mind fallacy assumption of denialists was correct, then no one would have any incentive to use such metaphors, because they would feel false. So clearly minds do in fact differ.
To state otherwise is a kind of narcissism / solipsism, or at least there is something monstrous about this kind of denial. "Everyone else is clearly wrong about their experience and their descriptions of it. I know better".
I think you just have a different interpretation of how you "see" things. Sounds just like any other anecdote of getting distracted on the road, those can be dramatic, but nothing here points to actual visual hallucinations.