I imagine it’s just an ingrained use of language picked up from other people - no thought behind it, like an atheist who says ‘Christ’ as an expletive.
It goes beyond that, I think, in that many of us have gone most of our lives believing others used this language metaphorically, and assigning a meaning to these words.
I was about 45 by the point I realized most people to varying degrees actually meant that they saw things when imagining them.
And so to me it's not that there no thought behind it, because I do something when I "imagine" something, just not the same thing. The word means something different to me, and most of the time you wouldn't notice even when it's staring you in the face.
E.g."I imagined her face" has a meaning to me even though I can't literally see a face when imagining it, but I can recall qualities and emotions and sensations of it anyway and to me those things add up to the meaning of that word, because nobody ever thought to assume it needed explaining that it was literal.
Opening that line of inquiry quickly makes it apparent that we assume a whole lot about how similar our inner lives are that just doesn't consistently hold up, but that we don't challenge without digging into precisely how people use various words.
This is so earth shattering to me. I'm completely unable to actually "see" anything when I imagine it, but I think I can visualize in the sense of recalling or imagining how it would look.
Do people actually close their eyes and hallucinate or am I reading way to far into this?
vidarh|2 years ago
I was about 45 by the point I realized most people to varying degrees actually meant that they saw things when imagining them.
And so to me it's not that there no thought behind it, because I do something when I "imagine" something, just not the same thing. The word means something different to me, and most of the time you wouldn't notice even when it's staring you in the face.
E.g."I imagined her face" has a meaning to me even though I can't literally see a face when imagining it, but I can recall qualities and emotions and sensations of it anyway and to me those things add up to the meaning of that word, because nobody ever thought to assume it needed explaining that it was literal.
Opening that line of inquiry quickly makes it apparent that we assume a whole lot about how similar our inner lives are that just doesn't consistently hold up, but that we don't challenge without digging into precisely how people use various words.
jvanderbot|2 years ago
Do people actually close their eyes and hallucinate or am I reading way to far into this?