Alison Gopnik: evaluation

Transcript context

…If someone has aphantasia, they don’t retain images very well, are they also more conscious for that reason? Aphantasia is a whole complicated story. Aphantasia is a puzzle about why it is that we have the kind of imagery that we have. It’s not that people who have aphantasia aren’t vividly experiencing a visual world; it’s that they don’t use that experience when they’re trying to, say, imagine something or when they’re trying to generate an image. I think that what the aphantasia work shows you is that business of generating an image when you’re trying to solve a problem is epiphenomenal, that it’s not that you’re solving the problem by looking in your head and seeing the picture. People with aphantasia, like my friend Ed Catmull, who’s the co-founder of Pixar with my husband, has aphantasia. He’s an animator who doesn’t see pictures inside of his head. I think it just shows that there’s a big gap between what we think of when we think about, say, an animator having a picture inside of his head and what’s actually going on cognitively. I don’t think it would be relevant to the question about consciousness as we usually experience it. If someone has aphantasia, is it somehow that the top-down processing is broken, and thus the image is not retained because some part of the digesting of the image doesn’t happen?…

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