I am completely mentally blind, no activity in the mind’s eye at all—I have no concept of a mind’s eye. Chess is a good example of how I committed the Typical Mind Fallacy for years, enabling me to maintain denial about other people’s mental imagery. I was so determined to not know that a big part of my mind was missing, that I consistently glossed over anything that other people told me about their own mental imagery… including this:
My oldest son and his father are both expert chess players. They would sit in the car and call out moves to each other. Then afterwards, they could both write down a list of all the moves, compare notes and demonstrate that they had played the same game of chess in their heads. When asked how they performed this magic trick, they told me that they simply visualized the board and moved the pieces!
Now this should be undeniable evidence of mental imagery, but I continued to maintain my denial about that so-called mind’s eye—because as I was to find out later, after breaking through the denial, the denial was a defense mechanism that was protecting me from the emotional devastation of when I discovered the truth about what was missing from my mind.
I’m curious though. How do you experience memories/knowledge of visual things? For example if you remember that someone has long black hair I assume this is more similar to reading about a character with long black hair in a book rather than seeing someone with your own eyes? Or is it completely different from both?
I am completely mentally blind, no activity in the mind’s eye at all—I have no concept of a mind’s eye. Chess is a good example of how I committed the Typical Mind Fallacy for years, enabling me to maintain denial about other people’s mental imagery. I was so determined to not know that a big part of my mind was missing, that I consistently glossed over anything that other people told me about their own mental imagery… including this:
My oldest son and his father are both expert chess players. They would sit in the car and call out moves to each other. Then afterwards, they could both write down a list of all the moves, compare notes and demonstrate that they had played the same game of chess in their heads. When asked how they performed this magic trick, they told me that they simply visualized the board and moved the pieces!
Now this should be undeniable evidence of mental imagery, but I continued to maintain my denial about that so-called mind’s eye—because as I was to find out later, after breaking through the denial, the denial was a defense mechanism that was protecting me from the emotional devastation of when I discovered the truth about what was missing from my mind.
Ah. Linda Gert.
I’m curious though. How do you experience memories/knowledge of visual things? For example if you remember that someone has long black hair I assume this is more similar to reading about a character with long black hair in a book rather than seeing someone with your own eyes? Or is it completely different from both?
EDIT: Sorry, I just saw you already talked about things like that elsewhere in this thread.