About a year ago, while talking with an AI, I encountered the word aphantasia for the first time.
Until then, I had apparently assumed that expressions such as “imagine this” or “picture this in your mind” simply meant “think about this.” It had not occurred to me that, for many people, these expressions referred to something more literal.
If I close my eyes and try to imagine a familiar face, my house, or an apple, nothing appears.
There is no faint image, outline, colour, or spatial scene. My lack of voluntary imagery is not limited to vision. I also cannot intentionally reproduce sounds, smells, tastes, touch, or bodily sensations in my mind.
That does not mean that I know nothing about the object I am trying to imagine. I can retrieve facts about it. If I think about my house back home, for example, I might know that after opening the front door and passing through the vestibule, the room immediately to the right is my father’s study.
But that information does not appear as a mental scene. If I want spatial information, I have to retrieve spatial propositions.
This distinction has made me reconsider not only what it means for me to imagine something, but what it means for me to remember, understand, and perhaps even think.
I do not know how much of what follows is caused by aphantasia. It may be a strong influence, one influence among many, or perhaps not a relevant factor at all. I have no proper way of separating these possibilities.
So this is not an explanation of aphantasia, nor an attempt to derive a theory of cognition from my own experience.
It is a record of several things I have noticed.
Remembering Without Returning
When people describe remembering an important event, they sometimes speak as though they return to it.
I do not recognize that experience.
Remembering, for me, is much closer to retrieving information than returning to an experience.
Even something as ordinary as remembering what I ate yesterday can require effort. Daily events are often not distinctive enough for me to consciously preserve them. If I do remember yesterday’s meals, what remains may be something like:
I ate a protein bar after the workout.
or:
I came home afterward and ate pork belly and rice for an early dinner.
These are facts.
There is no accompanying taste, smell, image, bodily sensation, or feeling of being there again.
Different kinds of information also seem to survive to very different degrees.
What happened tends to remain relatively well. So does who was there. The order of events is often accessible, perhaps because arranging events chronologically is itself an explicit operation.
Conversation is less reliable. If I did not understand something when it was said, or if I considered its meaning uncertain, I often fail to retain it. To preserve such a thing accurately, I would have to preserve not only the statement but also the fact that I did not understand it, or that I lacked sufficient evidence to interpret it confidently.
Emotion is even less reliable.
I seem to experience emotions normally while they are happening. But I do not later re-experience them. If I explicitly or implicitly turned an emotion into language, I may remember that I felt it. Otherwise, I often have to infer my past emotional state from other facts.
Perhaps I remember that I behaved in a certain way. Perhaps I remember what I said. Perhaps I remember that I regarded the situation as important.
From those facts, I can reconstruct a likely description of what I must have felt.
But reconstruction is not recurrence.
A friend recently told me that sometimes an emotion returns even when the event associated with it has become unclear. I found this surprisingly difficult to relate to. Whether that difference is related to mental imagery, I do not know.
What seems clearer is that my memories depend heavily on explicitness.
What Is Not Made Explicit
I have a strong sense that if I want something to remain available to me, it needs to be made explicit somehow. What is not made explicit seems much harder to preserve.
I also suspect that I am more concerned with what not to preserve than with preserving as much as possible.
For me, remembering something incorrectly often seems more costly than failing to remember it at all.
I do not consciously decide, each time something happens, whether it deserves storage. The process seems to take another form. I ask questions:
Really?
Is this certain?
Could this be false?
Why?
The questions come first. What remains afterward may be partly determined by what survives those questions.
This creates an odd asymmetry.
Information that can be clearly stated is relatively easy to retain. Information whose status is ambiguous is harder. Something that I did not understand is not automatically preserved as an unresolved impression. Unless I also preserve the fact of my uncertainty, it may simply disappear.
This may be one reason I have often felt compelled to make things explicit before I can rely on them.
Understanding as Explicitness
My thoughts seem to occur mostly, perhaps almost entirely, in words and sentences.
I can think about abstract concepts and logical relations, but I seem to do so through language as well.
I am not sure whether I have anything like a thought that exists clearly before language but has not yet been expressed in it. Perhaps I do. If so, I have difficulty identifying it.
This becomes more obvious when I try to distinguish understanding from explanation.
People sometimes say:
I understand it, but I can’t explain it.
For me, that state has always felt very close to not understanding it.
If I understand something, I should be able to state what I understand.
If I cannot say what the thing is, what relation holds, what distinction matters, or where the boundaries of the claim are, then I have difficulty regarding myself as possessing an understanding that merely happens to resist expression.
For me, making something explicit is not merely a way of communicating an understanding I already possess.
It is often what having an understanding means.
This does not mean that every understanding has to be simple. Quite the opposite. I am often comfortable with considerable complexity, provided that the structure is sufficiently clear.
I noticed this while studying programming in Canada. Complex systems did not necessarily trouble me. Ambiguous ones did.
Once the objects and relations were explicit enough, complexity itself was often manageable.
I suspect this distinction matters more to me than the distinction between simple and difficult.
Defining Through Failure
Looking back at some of the things I have written on this website, I noticed another recurring pattern.
I often define things negatively.
Rather than beginning with a positive definition and elaborating it, I frequently search for counterexamples. I ask where a statement stops working, what case it fails to include, what possibility would make it false, or what hidden assumption would have to be added to preserve it.
If a statement admits multiple interpretations, my first instinct is often not to select the most reasonable one and continue.
I look for the interpretation under which it fails.
A positive claim may leave its boundaries unclear. A counterexample reveals at least one boundary immediately.
Again, I do not know whether this has anything to do with aphantasia.
It may come from personality, education, habit, concern about error, philosophical influence, or something else entirely.
But it fits with the broader pattern.
If understanding requires explicitness, and if explicitness requires knowing what exactly a claim does and does not permit, then counterexamples become a convenient tool for constructing understanding.
This may also explain why ambiguity can be expensive for me.
Uncertain Understanding
There is one attitude I have not entirely abandoned:
If my understanding is uncertain, I do not consider that uncertainty to somehow become understanding merely because action would be convenient.
If I do not understand something, then I do not understand it.
Many situations do not provide enough information for complete clarification. Other people may not know exactly what they mean. The object itself may be vague. Some distinctions become available only after acting. Some questions simply do not admit the degree of precision I would prefer.
One change I have been experimenting with is therefore not a relaxation of my standard for what counts as understanding.
It is an attempt to keep understanding and action separate.
Suppose I do not understand something sufficiently.
Previously, I might have treated that fact as a reason to stop:
I do not understand this. Therefore, I should not proceed.
I am increasingly willing to replace that inference with a different question:
I do not understand this. Would that be, by itself, sufficient reason not to proceed?
These are not the same question.
The first concerns what I know.
The second concerns what I should do under incomplete knowledge.
I can regard my understanding as inadequate without thereby justifying inaction.
In practice, this distinction is still unstable. My habit of looking for counterexamples coexists very easily with a rule such as “proceed unless there is sufficient reason not to.” I still frequently want missing meanings clarified. I still notice ambiguities that other people seem comfortable ignoring.
But it has at least given me another option.
A Question About Beauty
One of the questions I asked myself while preparing this note was whether I can strongly experience beauty, atmosphere, or a sense of the world without visual imagination.
I found the question unexpectedly difficult.
My first response was roughly this:
If I look at a sunset or a night sky and find it beautiful, then technically I am experiencing beauty without visual “imagination.” There is visual perception, but not internally generated imagery.
Similarly, when music is playing, I can experience the music. When it stops, I cannot continue hearing it in my mind.
But then I began wondering what exactly it means to “experience beauty.”
Would I first need to clarify what I mean by aesthetic experience?
What exactly is the question trying to isolate?
At some point I realized that this response may itself be more informative than any answer I could eventually give.
Someone asked me a relatively ordinary phenomenological question, and my instinct was to determine whether the terms of the question were sufficiently clear before answering it.
Perhaps that is an example of the very thing I am trying to describe.
The Advantages Are Uneven
There are aspects of this way of experiencing the world that I like.
When I turn off the lights and close my eyes before sleeping, there is complete stillness.
I used to assume that everyone had the same blank internal field.
Learning about mental imagery made me realize that the situation is more complicated than I had assumed.
There is also a kind of comfort in explicit structure. If something is sufficiently well-defined, I am often able to handle considerable complexity without much difficulty.
But there are costs.
Memory is the most obvious one.
A life whose past is mainly accessible through propositions is different from one that can be revisited through images, sounds, sensations, or emotional reactivation.
I know that things happened.
I can often tell people what happened.
Sometimes I can tell someone what I believed, why I acted, and how strongly I felt something.
But much of the lived experience is absent.
There is also a social cost to my tendency to treat ambiguity as something to be uncovered and resolved.
When another person describes something ambiguously, my approach is often to clarify the words and conditions rather than to rely on an intuitive reading of what was meant.
When some part of an interaction was not understood, I may find it difficult to preserve.
I do not want to draw too much from this. Human relationships are too complicated to explain through a single cognitive characteristic.
But they expose some weaknesses of this cognitive style.
What Aphantasia Explains
I am tempted to say that aphantasia explains a great deal about the way I think.
That may be true.
It may also be an appealing story constructed after the fact.
I have no version of myself with vivid imagery against which I can compare the person I became.
I do not know whether the absence of sensory imagery caused me to rely more heavily on explicit propositions. I do not know whether that reliance made linguistic precision unusually important to me. I do not know whether my preference for counterexamples grew from the same source.
Perhaps these traits reinforced one another.
Perhaps only some of them are related.
Perhaps I have mistaken coexistence for explanation.
For now, the strongest claim I am comfortable making is much smaller:
I have almost no internally reproducible sensory experience, and I also seem to rely heavily on explicit information when remembering, reasoning, and understanding.
The relationship between those facts remains uncertain.
That uncertainty does not make the observations useless.
A Note for the Rest of This Website
This note is partly an attempt to provide context for the rest of this website.
Many things I write about here concern uncertainty, definitions, insufficient grounds, contradictions, the limits of justification, and the problem of acting without complete resolution.
For a long time, I treated these mostly as philosophical problems.
They are philosophical problems.
But I increasingly suspect that the way I approach them is also connected to something more basic about how cognition feels from my side.
If an experience is difficult to preserve unless I make it explicit,
if something does not feel understood unless I can state it precisely,
if ambiguity is therefore experienced not merely as vagueness but as an absence of understanding,
and if counterexamples are one of my most reliable tools for finding the boundaries of a claim,
then perhaps some of the recurring concerns in these notes become easier to place.
Not explained.
Placed.
For now, this is simply another description to keep alongside the others.