VirtuaLyric

A friend of mine has not-quite-complete-aphantasia, meaning he cannot "see" visual images in his "mind's eye", except for some rare occasions. When he remembers things he saw, or imagines what hypothetical things might look like, he almost never has mental imagery. But he can still recall information about what he saw, including stuff like "how many items were there", even though he did not consciously count the items when he was looking at them, and is only counting them by examining the memory when asked. I asked him how he was doing it, and he said it was like examining concepts about what he saw, and somehow using those concepts to figure... (read more)

Illusionist theories of consciousness say that people do not actually ever experience phenomenal qualities; we just have the very deep delusion that phenomenal qualities are a thing.

Whether it's a hallucination or not doesn't matter. Either way, our delusion tells us that we're perceiving things as "qualities", as "feels", even though all we are really perceiving is data. If I'm looking at something, then I am acquiring data that tells me, for instance, that there's a certain dark red shape at a certain location in my visual field, and a different reddish-orange shape near it, and whatever else. I'm acquiring the knowledge, the concept, of certain colors and brightnesses being in certain locations... (read more)