You're deriving the cow. You don't see the cow, but you know things logically about the cow, and you can describe it just as well as would someone who does see it. But you are not, and don't need to be, actually seeing the cow.
Well, I was able to, but it didn't come from first principles or even visualizing it. It came from imagining myself at a keyboard and "simulating" typing. In my mind's body, I would type a sentence, which enabled me to extract the location of the keys, which I could then translate into part of the visual sketch on paper. The initial sketch came out with key sizes and shapes heavily distorted, but all of them spatially located in the correct relative horizontal ordering, and a second sketch made it possible to regularize them.
Not sure what it means, but it was an interesting exercise.
A tiny tiny fraction of people talk about their mind's eye being part of their visual field, to the point that they can sort of functionally see -- hallucinate -- an imaginary object on a table like AR.
Another small number of people talk about imagining complete objects out of nowhere that they then have to analyse to describe; the imaginary thing has complete shape before its shape is described.
Most children can sort of whimsically play the imaginary-drinking tea game, imagining the shape of the teacups, imagining spilling tea or milk, but the mental images might not have attributes like colour or weight until they are specifically assigned to the visualisation. Like: what colour are the teacups? They don't have colour until you pick one, and then they do. Is it a heavy cup? It's not, but I do have a saucer. The more you add to the visualisation, the less translucent/ghostly/formless/conceptual it is.
The fascinating thing about broad aphantasia is that it appears to be way beyond even that; it's like things only happen conceptually, yet they still happen. Like the sibling comment from andrewflnr perceptively said: as if it's a conceptual blind-sight.
And when you consider our evolutionary pathway, perhaps it actually is the same phenomenon: a part of the brain successfully doing part of the task, without the support of the visualiser.
But this is different from the kids tea party. I can easily pretend to hold a teacup without closing my eyes and visualizing a teacup, I don't think one has anything to do with the other.
If you ask someone to actually imagine seeing a teacup but what they're imagining doesn't have a colour or size, _what are they imagining_?
I'm imagining a teacup - made of china, decorated in some way, capable of holding a few mouthfulls of ~75C thin liquid, smaller than a big mug, larger than a shot glass, with a handle sizes for the tip of one finger, delicate, ceremonial; concept space constrained to broadly teacup-ish area. But not a specific teacup unless it becomes important whether it's a plainer heavy duty cafe teacup or a grandma's Royal Jubilee promotional teacup.
Right, isn't that weird though! :-)
I don't know if it's weird; generalising a category from specific examples is saves memory space over remembering every individual teacup we've ever seen, so going the other way starting with a general concept of a teacup and only specifying as and when needed seems to make sense.
I obviously failed to communicate what I was saying.
If you give me a teacup and tell me to imagine I can see it, I have to know what it looks like before I can form that image.
This is all just a failure of communication because to me, part of the definition of having an image of something in your mind is that you know what it looks like.
Since knowing the colours and shapes are required to form an image, if you don't have those, you don't have an image.
Imagining a teacup is possible without imagining you can see a teacup.
The pure, abstract essence of teacup, to them.
I suppose I assume it does have size and shape (it's functionally an imaginary cup, after all, and not another imaginary object).
Maybe to someone who has only ever seen blue teacups, it's inherently blue?
For me, if I start that exercise it's not even white; its colour is undefined until I interrogate the idea it should have colour.
Or until whichever hilarious infant I am having an imaginary tea party with tells me what colour it is, of course.
If you ask me to imagine seeing a maze with hundreds of turns, rather than saying I have a nonspecific image, I'll say I'm having trouble forming a concrete image.
If you ask people to imagine a teacup, some will imagine seeing one, others will imagine holding one, others will have no images or feelings in their mind.
I'm pretty sure, like others are, a lot of this is just down to ambiguous or poorly specifies language.
Not really. I mean, I have some aphantasia-type aspects with faces. But my mind's eye is quite amenable to the semi-lucid mental image of a cup that doesn't have colour until I ask myself what colour it has, doesn't have fine shape details until I consider them.
After all, not all of our eye even sees in colour! Part of our visual apparatus only provides black and white imagery to our brain. So there's plenty of colourless imagery within our cognition.
If I ask you to imagine you can see something, and you haven't decided on basic details like what it looks like, this is exactly equivalent in my mind to me saying "imagine a number" and you not being able to tell me any digits of the number - you didn't really do what I asked.
We can go through and tediously define every word we're using but hopefully the above paragraph will allow you to tell where our definitions differ.
I don't really feel like that's true. If you asked me to choose a specific number, sure. But if the task really were just to imagine the concept of a number, unbound to anything, it wouldn't be a specific number until it needed to be.
Similarly, when thinking of a cup, unless I'm explicitly trying to imagine a specific cup, as close to reality as possible, it is merely a cup. Not a red cup, or one with a tiny annoying handle that I can only fit one finger into.
There are two questions there. Select the properties of a randomly chosen cup, and relay them to me. At which point i'd feel like im making it up as you ask for specific properties. Or just picture a cup, squashing, stretching, rotating. I think very much that these mental images are deeply baked into the ways we interact with the world (and are not literally seeing so much as attention to details of idealized concepts). It can't be a coincidence my mental image having transformations applied to it effortlessly is because of my work with 3d modelling and robotics.
If my mind wanders into those things, I could imagine the cup morphing between those scenarios, unreality forming into reality. Seeing with the minds eye is not seeing, in a literal sense.
I believe that there is a sense in which if we were forced to actually see the real world as it is, every detail of everything all at once, as a camera sees it, it would be far too much (consider things like optical illusions, human blind-spots in the visual field). Hence all sorts of mental shortcuts are taken where below the concious layer things are stiched together to make a false sense of cohesiveness out of a distinctly disconnected and incoherent stream of input data. Every sense even has varying time-lag, to the point the brain predicts nerve signals before they come in, hence phantom limb pain etc. It ends up that so little of you is actually the concious mind you.
Objects in the minds eye are similarly abstract objects. You cannot see every detail unless you decide upon what you choose to see. An apple, in my mind, has the blotchy, slightly coarse texture on the outside most apples have. But is it a red apple or a green apple? It's somewhere between the two. The digits of my number are a blur approximating all digits, the digits I expect to see, until I look closely. Similar to how the room in your peripheral vision is still the same. Probably.