Comment by numeri
12 hours ago
Quoting myself from a thread on aphantasia several months ago:
… there are plenty of scientific experiments that show actual differences between people who report aphantasia and those who don't, including different stress responses to frightening non-visual descriptions, different susceptibility to something called image priming, lower "cortical excitability in the primary visual cortex", and more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
So we know that at least the people who claim to see nothing act differently. Could it just be that people who act differently describe the sensation differently, you might ask?
No, because there are actual cases of acquired aphantasia after neurological damage. These people used to belong to the group that claimed to be able to imagine visual images, got sick, then sought medical help when they could no longer visualize. For me, at least, that's pretty cut and dry evidence that it's not just differing descriptions of the same (or similar) sensations.
Yup, sadly the absolute denialists saying "it is just semantic confusion" don't really have a tenable position, as a quick read through this whole thread would instantly reveal.
Yeah, this is a valid critique of the whole internal monologue idea, but interestingly aphantasia has been quite empirically confirmed and the simple apple test has been validated!
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I don't consider self-reported nonsense to be empirical confirmation. There can be correlations between different self-reports, that doesn't mean that our idea of why those correlations exist is correct.
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