When I read the very 1st paragraph of this article, I had a series of mini revelations about how my mind works, and perhaps the minds of others. I'd appreciate it if you read it first (just the 1st paragraph), and then came back here to explore with me why I think it was interesting... Thanks for coming back!

So, my question is slightly loaded, because I have what is called 'aphantasia', and reading this paragraph made me wonder whether the way non-aphants think (around 96% of the population) was fairly represented by this writer.

When you pictured the scene, how specific was it? Did the follow-up descriptions the writer gives fairly mirror your own experience?

Because when I read it, I didn't get a visual 'picture' in my head, (there is nothing visual in my head, because I am an aphant) but I did imagine the scene conceptually. The thing is, for me the scene I imagined was absolutely abstracted. It was the idea of a person washing hands at a sink. There was little to no specificity. There was no bathroom or kitchen, circular or square sink in my inner imagination. There was no specific person, man or woman, black or white, no specific way their hands moved, no specific relationship between the redness of the liquid, and what it might be (i.e. blood or paint). I just imagined an abstracted set of related ideas: person, washing hands, sink, red. That was it.

So when the writer goes on to then assume everyone pictured something really specific, that made me wonder: is the abstractness of aphantasic thinking universal? Do aphants always imagine in a kind of realm of Platonic ideals? Do none aphants always picture specific things? How much of the writer's assumption here is fair, given that we ALL sit on the spectrum of mental visual imagination? What are the social implications of these different ways of thinking?

What happened in your mind when you read this paragraph? I am intrigued to know, and where you usually sit on the spectrum of visual imagination.

I was nineteen, maybe twenty, when I realized I was empty-headed. I was in a college English class, and we were in a sunny seminar room, discussing “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” or possibly “The Waves.

Bots are everywhere. From simple algorithms and aggregator bots to complex “artificially” intelligent machine-learning systems, they have become inescapable. Some are in chat programs.

THE nature of consciousness is truly one of the great mysteries of the universe because, for each of us, consciousness is all there is. Without it, there is no world, no self, no interior and no exterior. There is nothing at all.

Prof Stuart Russell wrote the book on artificial intelligence back in 1995, when the next few decades of AI were uncertain. Sitting down with Ian Sample, he talks about his latest book, which warns of a dystopian future in which humans are outsmarted by machines. But how did we get here?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/audio/2019/oct/18/stuart-russell-on-why-now-is-the-time-to-start-thinking-about-superintelligent-ai-science-weekly-podcast

Daniel Dennett talks to Jim Al-Khalili about the evolution of the human brain.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08kv3y4

Author Adrienne Mayor discusses the myths that contained the first blueprints for artificial intelligence

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/audio/2018/nov/02/the-ancient-greeks-warned-us-about-ai-chips-with-everything-podcast

Bots are everywhere. From simple algorithms and aggregator bots to complex “artificially” intelligent machine-learning systems, they have become inescapable. Some are in chat programs.

Julian Jaynes was living out of a couple of suitcases in a Princeton dorm in the early 1970s. He must have been an odd sight there among the undergraduates, some of whom knew him as a lecturer who taught psychology, holding forth in a deep baritone voice.

Millions of years ago, a few spiders abandoned the kind of round webs that the word “spiderweb” calls to mind and started to focus on a new strategy. Before, they would wait for prey to become ensnared in their webs and then walk out to retrieve it.

‘Each of us constructs and lives a “narrative”,’ wrote the British neurologist Oliver Sacks, ‘this narrative is us’. Likewise the American cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner: ‘Self is a perpetually rewritten story.

Authors: R. Guevara Erra, D. M. Mateos, R. Wennberg, J.L. Perez Velazquez Abstract: It has been said that complexity lies between order and disorder. In the case of brain activity, and physiology in general, complexity issues are being considered with increased emphasis.

In 1984, the philosopher Aaron Sloman invited scholars to describe ‘the space of possible minds’. Sloman’s phrase alludes to the fact that human minds, in all their variety, are not the only sorts of minds.

Sometimes this failure of prediction is even science fiction's explicit subject. In Isaac Asimov's classic Foundation series, for instance, a brilliant mathematician devises a method of calculating historical probabilities.

Julian Jaynes was living out of a couple of suitcases in a Princeton dorm in the early 1970s. He must have been an odd sight there among the undergraduates, some of whom knew him as a lecturer who taught psychology, holding forth in a deep baritone voice.

Sarah Perry is a guest blogger who blogs at Carcinisation and is the author of Every Cradle is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide.

We must consider the possibility that intelligence, creativity and even consciousness are purely functions of the material world, with human beings as a peculiar kind of computer.

KentuckyFC (1144503) writes "One of the most profound advances in science in recent years is the way researchers from a variety of fields are beginning to formulate the problem of consciousness in mathematical terms, in particular using information theory.

Deborah Gordon spent the morning of August 27 watching a group of harvester ants foraging for seeds outside the dusty town of Rodeo, N.M. Long before the first rays of sun hit the desert floor, a group of patroller ants was already on the move.

Researchers have hitherto assumed that information supplied by the sense of sight was transmitted almost in its entirety from its entry point to higher brain areas, across which visual sensation is generated.