This is more of me trying to understand how people imagine things, as I almost certainly have Aphantasia and didn’t realize until recently… If this is against community rules, please do let me know.

The original thought experiment was from the Aphantasia subreddit. Link: https://www.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/comments/g1e6bl/ball_on_a_table_visualization_experiment_2/

Thought experiment begins below.

Try this: Visualise (picture, imagine, whatever you want to call it) a ball on a table. Now imagine someone walks up to the table, and gives the ball a push. What happens to the ball?

Once you're done with the above, click to review the test questions:
  • What color was the ball?
  • What gender was the person that pushed the ball?
  • What did they look like?
  • What size is the ball? Like a marble, or a baseball, or a basketball, or something else?
  • What about the table, what shape was it? What is it made of?

And now the important question: Did you already know, or did you have to choose a color/gender/size, etc. after being asked these questions?

  • keletappi@sopuli.xyz
    0·
    7 months ago

    Haven’t until recently thought much about people using vision-related words to describe thoughts. Never realized they mean those words literally. I suspect I have the aphantasia.

    My answers to OPs questions:

    1. The ball has no concept of color, it’s an abstract notion of ball
    2. the individual is also an idea of a person that has ability to approach the table and the ball and apply force to it, but it is not fully thought out representation of a biological person, it has no such thing as gender or limbs, it’s a concept of “someone” as was required
    3. They (none of the objects or the person) don’t look like anything, they exist as ideas of entities in void
    4. The size is not set, so the ratios can be applied very fluidly to play out different sizes of objects or forces applied, like pushing force, or gravity, or lack of them. I thought this was very vague description so I thought best to make a few different tests to understand what would be outcome before continuing the question. When I got to the end (what happens…) I thought well a fuckton happens depending on multitude of other related but undefined things! What a stupid question.
    5. The table has no height, shape or edge, since none was required, but in a few cases there were tilts, edges, motion and other topologies, and whatnot. It’s not made of anything, it’s a concept.

    You are all just hallucinating and not seeing the actual things going on, and that makes you all handicapped.