Comment by zug_zug
12 hours ago
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...
> Thus we can very easily believe we "see" something that we clearly do not see.
Okay, so people can't see a bicycle when it's in front of them either, point granted.
How does that prevent people from precisely replicating that phenomenon in their mind, and why does that not count?
Regardless of how you define "seeing", people can do it in their brains, and their visual cortexes light up. It's a bell curve phenomenon, so the average person can't draw a bicycle, some people can't picture a bicycle at all, and some people can describe the rust on their 1969 Schwinn in detail.
How is any of that falsification of the idea of internal visualization?
That's how it went for me. I thought of the correct shape of a bicycle frame (I think I've seen this art thing before) but didn't "pull up" the little pieces like gears and seats until you actually mentioned them.
> most people don't even remember what a bicycle looks like
Not only people. LLMs too.