D-Machine

Note that being hyperphantasic can also be an advantage because you can create much more complex visual models to aid thinking in similar ways.

I think the bigger takeaway is not to think that having a particular sort of richness of any kind of mental imagery (regardless of the sense modality) is somehow automatically better or worse. The mind is malleable and an intelligent mind can find clever ways to exploit what it has most richly, and there are surely disadvantages to imagery of some sensory modalities being too rich or real (e.g. schizophrenia).

> when I close my eyes I cannot see things. That is what seeing is. [...] The visualization is akin to seeing, but obviously I am not seeing them. [...] a lot of people like you are saying "well, I can 'see' but I can't 'see-see'

I most definitely am not accusing you of this, and your other comments I think make clear you have considered this, but I would be wary of collapsing a continuum to a binary here. Most of the time, visualizing is indeed only analogous to seeing, i.e. visualizing is "seeing, but not 'see-see'ing". However, with extreme focus, regular practice, and/or altered states, this distinction breaks down, and it is harder to make the separation so clear.

I suspect the more hyperphantasic you are, the more easily you can find examples in experience that blur the boundary between seeing vs. visualization, but with normal visualization capacity, these blurred cases are likely quite rare. But I don't think, fundamentally, except in true aphantasics, that there is always a 100% clear dividing line between seeing and visualization.

You might find it interesting to read up a bit on blindsight and the neural plasticity of the congenitally blind.

E.g. fMRI experiments on some such people show rich activation of the visual cortex when the blind person is going about and space and hearing and feeling things. This could just mean that region has been recruited to do non-visual processing, but it could also be that the visual cortex is producing strange and unimaginable images in their mind's eye in response to sounds and feelings, such that they are really literally "seeing" sound and such.

In case you missed my other comment linking to similar polls and stuff on Reddit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49469522. The hyperphantasia subreddit covers all other sense imagery too, and I am high on all of them.

Also, to be clear, my images usually are NOT spatially located, but I can choose to make them so if needed, and occasionally they just are spontaneously.

You might also find the work of Louis Sass ("Madness and Modernism", and other works) to be relevant, as he notes it is extremely common for schizophrenics to always be localizing (sensing) their thoughts have specific locations in space, or e.g. are "moving from the front of my head to the back", and other such extreme (and arguably unhelpful) spatialization of aspects of the mind's eye. He argues this might be part of why they are prone to hallucinations and delusion.

See also Reddit, there has been lots of discussion and some similar polls. E.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/hyperphantasia/, and https://www.reddit.com/r/hyperphantasia/comments/kkbxom/when... for the specific poll.

Certainly some self-diagnoses (positive or negative) are definitely based on misunderstanding, much semantic, as I already agreed in this very thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49468528.

The projected image is not typically indistinguishable from normal vision, namely in that there will be an "ephemerality" to the image. Some examples of this ephemerality:

- the projected image usually has a translucency, i.e. it doesn't also block what is behind where it would be physically if it were really there

- the projected image requires sustained concentration and mental effort to maintain detail, and if you let any aspect of your mind wander or stray from the task, the translucency increases, it may pop out of the visual field, or lose details

- the projected image (say, an apple) doesn't have full details at every particular point, i.e. if I focus on where the stem would be, that detail intensifies, but the surrounding areas become more ephemeral; with a real apple, this happens somewhat depending on the focal point too, but not nearly as much

- the projected image can be made less ephemeral and more rich and stable with the use of pscychedelics (e.g. psilocybin) or quasi-psychedelics (e.g. cannabis)

So, yes, you can "see" it in reality, but not, in most cases, to the degree that you "see" a real apple. Often the ephemerality really does manifest in a way extremely similar to how an afterimage persists, but this isn't always the case.

> I have always suspected that people with “aphantasia” simply misunderstand the idea of a “mind’s eye,” believing that others can somehow visualize something in their actual field of vision at will.

Many people can do precisely this, though the projected image is not usually 100% clear in some form, i.e. it may have a translucence or impermanence, and it can indeed take some practice to develop this skill. But it isn't uncommon at all, and comes up regularly in some spiritual and meditation practices.

> Can anyone confirm that they have this ability, which specifically is to superimpose imagined objects inside your actual field of vision? If the answer to this is yes, then okay, I guess I have aphantasia.

Yes, this is utterly trivial for me, but then I am hyperphantasic by any measure or definition.

It is also common to read people telling others to explicitly do this kind of superimposition (or "projection") in early psychological experiments, and meditative and/or spiritual and esoteric practices. It would be really odd for people to spontaneously just give such specific nonsense instructions if they couldn't just do it.

This is interesting and I wonder if it might explain some apparent cases of aphantasia. Also seems relevant to some aphantasics experiencing mental imagery when using psychedelics.

Then you are almost certainly aphantasic. "It is all just semantics" has to do some incredible acrobatics to make sense of so much language and reported experiences, and doesn't seem biologically plausible either.

Of course, we can never be sure, but from a theoretical and empirical standpoint "all aphantasia discussion is just semantic confusion" is not useful and a complete non-starter.

Yeah, you don't sound aphantasic to me then either. I am certain you are right some self-diagnosed aphantasics are caught up in semantics: psychology instruments in general are quite terrible, and certainly anyone that just does some self-report test and reads no further I could very easily see becoming confused here.

But the more a person thinks and read about it, especially given how much easier it is to find people writing and talking about it today, then I think the likelihood of being caught in such a semantic trap will go down a lot. Or at least, that should happen so long as one doesn't attach excessive moral value to or get bogged down in "identifying" as aphantasic/not.

I think a couple of the comments in this very thread above, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49467695 and https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=slibhb are quite relevant to your case. Thinking this is just semantics is a strong indicator you are likely highly aphantasic.

It is highly unlikely to just be semantics, because when it comes to visualizing complex objects as a non-aphantasic, the specific details spring forth unbidden as an image first, and then you attach the language, and it isn't the reverse order. I suspect also tests of visual memory of complex pictures should reveal similar things here, because e.g. language and other things don't really seem to be able to represent such details, and neurobiologically, there isn't much plausible other way your brain could be memorizing a complex photo without retaining / having activation patterns similar to the actual viewing (and this is what we see in fMRI studies).

If you are careful at noticing your thoughts (and not aphantasic), you can also notice if you are a highly visual thinker, you might sometimes confuse certain memories of things (spellings, place names, other things) that are similar only visually, but not logically or in any other sense modality representation. This would suggest the representations are genuinely visual in these cases.

But yes, no way to be 100% certain, but the "it is just semantics" case is very weak and can't explain much.

If you have good visualization ability, you can project your image onto a location in the real world, maybe sort of like a translucent layer or image placed on a clear film placed over reality, or you can just sort of visualize the image in "mental space" which doesn't correspond to any particular location. Likely what is more common depends on the person.

It depends on if when you visualize e.g. an "8", you visualize something like a lemniscate turned 90 degrees, or e.g. visualize a number line, e.g. maybe a straight line with dashes at the 7, 8, 9, and with these dashes having e.g. some visual label, and so on.

I.e. if your "visualization" of eight is something like a picture, such that I can show you various pictures and you can say "yes, my visualization is sort of like drawing A, but also has such and such elements from drawing B", and so on, then, yes, this is clearly not total aphantasia. But if no such picture could ever have any similarity to your visualization, and you are somehow just experiencing some kind of non-pictorial "logic content" here, then, yeah, that sounds pretty aphantasic to me.

Well, by contrast HN doesn't allow user blocking or muting, or keyword muting, nor do most other social media sites. So I tend to see Twitter as offering the user far more curation and control than most, even if it is imperfect.

Never had any significant issues with these features, I tend to suspect a skill issue when people say things like this. Muting is the most effective option, but it does require you use it with some careful thought.

No one is banning or prohibiting AI generated music from being listened to hear, just they are saying that to be considered on a very specific chart, there need to be limits on the amount of AI used. Very weak overall, especially given the irrelevance of these kinds of charts today.

Most complaints about Twitter look quite lazy once you understand you choose your followers, can block accounts, and mute words. It's not like these are hidden features that are hard to use even.

You can work around this (for now) with the Firefox Old Reddit Redirect extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re.... Not that you're missing much...

No need for apologies, I saw no good reason to take your comment as combative or dismissive or anything!

Oh, I don't disagree at all!

Hard to see how you can read what GP said as anything other than "basically free", and failing to quantify, like you are doing here, and just categorically calling all electricity use bad is not coherent or helpful either.

I mean, good, maybe if this is intended to preserve the value of human-produced art and/or to limit the scope of official charts. But I'm not sure how you actually prove this or thus justify any particular instance of enforcement.

It could not be Frankfurtian if we say that he was just speaking colloquially and obviously only really meant something like "quite close", and indeed making up random percentages to stand for such vague feelings is really quite a normal thing in certain styles of everyday conversation. Whether or not such a style is appropriate in this context is debatable, but it could save him from the bullshit charge.

But I don't see how it being an estimation makes it less bullshitty, because there is simply no reasonable way to tie that 80% to anything concrete or meaningful. It is stated in such a way that evaluating the truth or accuracy of the estimate is basically impossible, i.e. it is bullshit by vagueness, even if it is an estimate. Only the "end of the year" claim is concrete, but the AGI definition has much of the same BS-via-vagueness problem, so it is still all very Frankfurtian to me.

So I don't see it as banging news, but just as more BS and almost certainly a nothingburger. But, hey, whatever, time will tell.

It is almost certainly a completely made up number though. It's not quite on the same level of emptiness as "rate your emotion on a scale of 1-10", but it might as well be.

I.e. are we 80% of the way by the calendar, then if so, as measured by when? We're only about 66% of the way through the current year. Is it that they are 80% of the way through some final totally defined training or tuning procedure? Not likely. And it is 80% of the way to AGI, which is vaguely defined as that which can "outperform humans [by how much? what proportion of humans?] at most [how much, exactly, again?] economically valuable work [what work is not economically valuable?]."

Call a spade a spade, the 80% thing is 100% total bullshit (in the Frankfurtian sense, i.e. it is completely unconcerned about truth, and is all just about generating feels).

LLM weights are frozen once the model is trained and a specific version is released, or this is true at least currently for almost all major models. You can ask interesting consciousness questions about LLMs, but you most definitely need to separate LLMs during training (whether this is pre-training, later fine-tuning, or general instruction tuning approaches) and after, during inference. None of this has any relevance to the core points I was making re: useful vs. useless discussions of LLMs and consciousness, because the weights point was just a minor example to illustrate a larger point about how narrowing the scope of the conversation is necessary for productive discourse.

I doubt we agree on what "rigorous definitions" means, given that you are happy to continue using a useless, vague family resemblance concept like "consciousness", but complain that pointing out dynamicness and/or change is involved is too vague.

I believe one cannot give a rigorous definition of consciousness precisely because it is a family resemblance concept, and there is no actual essence. This is why I suggest shifting to talking about aspects, since then productive insights and truths can be discovered.

You are still stuck in thinking consciousness is one unified thing, but it is about one of the clearest examples of a family-resemblance category as you can think of.

Dynamicness / change is one aspect that is definitely part of what we tend to think of as being quite fundamental to consciousness, and there are a lot of ways in which LLMs can't and/or don't really change, and this strongly constrains how similar LLM consciousness can/could be to ours.

If the SEP isn't enough to trigger the thinking needed for you, just ask an LLM what I said, to "go through the ways in which LLMs do/don't/may exhibit phenomena that are generally what we consider fundamental aspects of consciousness". You'll see there are some clear answers, and some uncertainties and vagueness.

> Are you saying I need to have certain beliefs (discredited by someone) for something objective to be true or false?

I am saying that, if you reject radical social constructionism (or solipsisms of various flavours, i.e. we are all just plugged into the matrix or some kind of simulation), then you must believe there is a real world out there independent of our consciousness / awareness of it. There must also be patterns / structure in that world, some of those patterns and structures being essentially constant, and those are what we call "true" (objective) facts about reality. BUT if you are a radical social constructionist or solipsist of some kind, then it can be perfectly coherent to reject any idea of objectivity or truth, except as contingent on social consensus (or personal beliefs, in the solipsistic case). Radical social constructionism being "discredited" is just a recognition that it basically forces you rapidly into incoherence.

> Which ways and how can it be demonstrated experimentally?

Try reading through the SEP article I linked above (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/#ConCon), particularly sections 2, and then especially section 4. You'll see you don't even need to run experiments to answer certain questions, you can just logically prove there are certain aspects of consciousness LLMs can't have, or clearly already have. Others you'll see immediately need qualifying or more information to answer. EDIT: Or just ask any AI to list the ways in which LLMs can, cannot, and might be able to exhibit the various aspects of consciousness. It will give you a decent answer, likely in a pretty little table.

See e.g. 4.8, Dynamic Flow: LLMs basically can't have this, as their weights are frozen. You'd have to claim that the activations during inference are the dynamic component, but then that means LLMs are conscious only in the few seconds or even milliseconds during inference. Likewise, they don't have memory, so every inference is this consciousness being born anew, as it were, at least in current models.

You can of course go much further on even this specific point, but, the point is, there is lots of useful discussion and thinking to be had when you go through the aspects of consciousness in this way, and definitely at least some clear answers.

EDIT:

> That's not what the consciousness debate I see is about.

I just mean there are some similarities between the lobster consciousness debates and AI consciousness debates. Obviously the stakes and many aspects are different, I was just trying to illustrate why and how discussion and experiments can be useful and consequential here.

Even just reading the Wikipedia article on consciousness would have been a good start here, but it is hard to believe the author has ever even done that...