I personally found out about my aphantasia when reading an article in Scientific American titled “When the Mind’s Eye is Blind”. A whole lifetime of experiences clicked into place.
So it’s not surprising that there would be an outpouring of new discoveries after more people learn of the concept.
Learning about aphantasia is how I learned people experience anything other than nothing visually in their mind’s eye.
Good question, I couldn't quite put it in words, but it's the popularity that bothers me. It could be popular because everybody's having great insights, but it could also be popular because everybody's greatly persuaded by a fashionable media buzz. On the internet, discussions like this always turn into a love-in where everyone reports anecdotal experiences and gets treated with esteem for being part of the community of believers. Back in the 90s I was briefly on a mailing list for people who had done the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator test so we could all report how INTP we were (that's the sensitive nonjudgmental intellectual one). It reminds me of that.
It's popular because most of us had never heard about it until a few years ago, and for a lot of us a whole lifetime of experiences suddenly made sense.
I always wondered why people would talk metaphorically (because I assumed they must do, because clearly you don't see things that aren't there other than while dreaming... or so I thought) about images of people they knew fading, or forgetting what they looked like.
And then suddenly I was told it wasn't metaphorical.
And then a few years later I had my one experience of seeing vivid imagery outside of a dream.
It also keeps coming up because people get all weirded out at the thought that this is a thing, and start insisting the distinction isn't real.
But having experienced both: Imagining things without visuals and with is nothing alike.
And I knew that before the experience I mentioned too, because images while dreaming is also wildly different from how I imagine things while awake.
As someone with aphantasia, all I ever get from people who can visualize is self-report, anecdote, self-assessment, etc.
By definition, this will always be the case until we have a deep enough understanding of the brain to diagnostically assess this.
What I can assure you is that I cannot see/imagine with my mind, and that many other aspects of my life make sense given this limitation, e.g. when people describe their experience of reading books and mental world building, it’s entirely foreign to me. Or when my brother describes his ability to create mind palaces, manipulate visual concepts mentally as if he were using CAD software, etc. it seems preposterous.
But I have to take his word that it’s something he can actually do. Such is the nature of this subject.
Until I discovered the concept of aphantasia in my early 30s, I genuinely thought that people’s descriptions of “visualization” were just a figure of speech. It was mind blowing to learn that people actually see anything more than nothing at all, and a lifetime of experiences and confusion about what other people described about theirs suddenly made sense.
I have similar feelings about those who claim to have an internal monologue or voice etc. It's all so alien to me. Outside of dreams or hynagogia, my "self" and internal experience is non-verbal, non-visual, and mostly lacking any other sensory qualia.
If "me" is rooted in any perceptual qualia, I think and experience a vague mixture of a spatial awareness, proprioception, topology, and emotion. I can barely summon sound memories like music, and this could include lyrics. This recall is very faintly rooted in auditory qualia. Like the ghost of an echo down a distance corridor. Moreso, I can "feel" such music memory as a hint of proprioception, i.e. the after-thump of bass in my body or the after-tingle of a cymbal in my ear. But it utterly lacks the presence and richness of real listening.
I can think about words and phrases I've either heard or read, or try to arrange some words to write or speak later. But they're fleeting concepts, neither visual nor auditory in quality. They're not like the sound or music memory above. They're also not visuals of typography. In fact, I've more than once had words in my lexicon that I could neither pronounce nor reliably spell. I could readily match them to parsed words when reading, but would be unable to express them.
Finally, I have a relative with schizophrenia. I've witnessed how she behaves when hallucinating and/or having delusions. She often seems to experience her thoughts as if being talked to over her shoulder, or can manifest a fear into seeing dangerous threats. Her experience seems a kind of polar opposite to mine.
I wonder how it is to be somewhere in the middle of this range. It must be different from hers, to be useful but not schizoid. And it also seems like it must be a lot more vivid and accessible than my usual experience.
I’m unfamiliar with German basic law, but considering the lawlessness we’re seeing play out in the US right now, I’m curious how/why modern constitutions are less vulnerable?
By this I mean: it’s not as if the things we see playing out are lawful. Is there a structural difference that somehow prevents the same kind of lawlessness?
Put another way, what stops a movement that decides to ignore Germany’s constitution from ignoring it should they somehow gain power?
> For starters, Germany does not give a single person the right to be king with decrees and military leadership.
Separation between civilian leaders and military leaders is a big one, yeah. When the same person controls both the military directly and the executive branch of the civilian government directly you don't have any way to punish him without his subordinates overthrowing him since he controls all the power.
I think a middle ground version of this is possible, e.g. instead of letting your battery die, reset the phone to defaults and don’t install anything with the exception of critical communication apps.
Run the rest of the experiment as described for other categories of use.
When the agency enforcing those labor laws is also blatantly violating the law while carrying out other highly publicized enforcement actions, they will be scrutinized for everything they do, including actions that were likely legal/necessary. That's part of the problem with the government breaking the law - legitimate actions are no longer seen as legitimate, because they have undermined themselves in the public eye.
I also don't think people are "going to bat for a company abusing labor laws" so much as they are highly suspicious of these enforcement actions given the complete lawlessness displayed elsewhere and imagine the possibility that there were more diplomatic solutions that still address the problem appropriately.
I don’t think this framing quite captures what’s going on.
The AI space is full of BS and grift, which makes reputation and the resulting trust built on that reputation important. I think the popularity of certain authors has as much to do with trust as anything else.
If I see one of Simon’s posts, I know there’s a good chance it’s more signal than noise, and I know how to contextualize what he’s saying based on his past work. This is far more difficult with a random “better” article from someone I don’t know.
People tend to post what they follow, and I don’t think it’s lazy to follow the known voices in the field who have proven not to be grifting hype people.
I do think this has some potential negatives, i.e. sure, there might be “much better” content that doesn’t get highlighted. But if the person writing that better content keeps doing so consistently, chances are they’ll eventually find their audience, and maybe it’ll make its way here.
You're not negating anything they've said, but given some insight into why the case might be. However the cult of personality and brand still exists and as a result heavily distorts what could appear here.
Saying that someone ought to write better consistently for them to "make its way here" leans completely into the cult of personality.
I think following people would be better served though personal RSS feeds, and letting content rise based on its merit ought to be an HN goal. How that can be achieved, I don't know. What I am saying is that the potential negatives are far far understated than they ought to be.
I think you’re mistaking my comment for an endorsement when it was primarily attempting to reframe and describe the dynamic.
> Saying that someone ought to write better
I did not say someone ought to write better. I described what I believed the dynamic is.
> I think following people would be better served though personal RSS feeds
My point was that this is exactly what people are doing, and that people tend to post content here from the people they follow.
> letting content rise based on its merit ought to be an HN goal
My point was that merit is earned, and people tend to attach weight to certain voices who have already earned it.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying there are no downsides, and I said as much in the original comment.
HN regularly upvotes obscure content from people who are certainly not the center of a cult of personality. I was attempting to explain why I think this is more prevalent with AI and why I think that’s understandable in a landscape filled with slop.
With all respect, I would encourage you to investigate this more deeply, and the swipe is unnecessary.
I realize it sounds preposterous. I spent the majority of my life holding a similar view. I mentally categorized meditation as another religious affect not much different than prayer or the bliss people report about their personal relationship with some deity.
My view changed when a confluence of life circumstances led to an experience that opened my mind to the possibilities and I ended up going down a meditation rabbit hole where I found that I could access those states at will. What I found was entirely unlike my preconceptions, and made me realize that I’d been summarily dismissing (and judging) people for something I did not understand.
There’s a reason that many people find meditation through prior drug experiences. More commonly psychedelics, but dissociative anesthetics as well.
Certain drugs basically guarantee you’ll experience these states, while learning to meditate “properly” is something that most people find difficult or confusing. I think this confusion comes from the baggage people associate with it and from the frankly terrible meditation and mindfulness apps, books and gurus that have flooded the market, and the “do thing, get result” framing that is common in western contexts. I don’t think most people’s pop understanding of meditation even scratches the surface.
I’ve experienced the bliss of anesthesia drugs. Achieving similar states through meditation is a real thing. This doesn’t have to be “Buddhism” per se. It just happens to be one of the most well known and structured paths for exploring this.
For the record, I’m a materialist and agnostic atheist. My views were formed based on experience, not belief. I think Buddhism is useful in a utilitarian sense, but there are paths of practice that don’t require all of the religiosity.
I try to respond to comments like yours because I see an earlier version of myself in them. I take some issue with how the original comment was framed, but meditation is the real deal and worth exploring.
One of the arguments used to justify the mass-ingestion of copyrighted content to build these models is that the resulting model is a transformative work, and thus fair use.
If this is indeed true, it seems like Google et al must be liable for output like this according to their own argument, i.e. if the work is transformative, they can’t claim someone else is liable.
These companies can’t have their cake and eat it too. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.
I mean that's what they have been getting already - the average joe had to deal with draconian copyright all this time but not that it's inconvenient for big tech they get to hand-wave it away. The social contract has already been broken.
And companies have always been able to get away with relatively minor fines for things that get individuals locked up until they rot.
Why would we suppose AI isn’t in the picture? You’re describing unrelated scenarios. Apples and oranges. You can’t wish away the AI and then conclude what’s happening is acceptable because of how something entirely unrelated has been treated in the past.
As a form of argument, this strikes me as pretty fallacious.
Are you claiming that the output of a model built by Google is somehow equivalent to displaying a 3rd party site in a search result?
I personally found out about my aphantasia when reading an article in Scientific American titled “When the Mind’s Eye is Blind”. A whole lifetime of experiences clicked into place.
So it’s not surprising that there would be an outpouring of new discoveries after more people learn of the concept.
Learning about aphantasia is how I learned people experience anything other than nothing visually in their mind’s eye.