'I can't imagine anything worse': A salute to Prince Philip (in his own words) (The Little Book of...)

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There are pleasurable mental states known as jhana in which one is highly concentrated but not imagining (neither nothing nor something). The lower jhana could not be described as nothingness as pleasure is certainly experienced. Zeman A, Dewar M, Della Sala S. Lives without imagery - Congenital aphantasia. Cortex. 2015;73:378–380. doi:10.1016/j.cortex.2015.05.019

But we can influence which of the coloured images someone will see in the binocular rivalry display. One way is by getting them to imagine one of the two images beforehand. For example, if I asked you to imagine a green image, you will be more likely to see the green image once you’ve put on 3D glasses. And the stronger your imagery is the more frequently you will see the image you imagine. We found that when the aphantasics tried to form a mental image, their attempted imagined picture had no effect on what they saw in the binocular rivalry illusion. This suggests they don’t have a problem with introspection, but appear to have no visual imagery. Why some people are mind blind We use how often a person sees the image they imagine as a measure of objective visual imagery. Because we’re not relying on the participant rating the vividness of the image in their mind, but on what they physically see in the binocular rivalry display, it removes the need for subjective introspection. Ask yourself who would you approach to help you solve your problem if you could ask anyone in the world.The study team showed photographs of three rooms to 61 people with aphantasia and 52 without the condition. The scientists then asked participants in both groups to draw the rooms, once from memory and once while using the photo as a reference. The drawings were scored objectively by 2,795 online volunteers. To imagine "nothing", ie "give image", is a statement of relation as we only observe nothing through a relation of multiple parts. But the question remains, "When I try to think of nothing, am I truly thinking of nothing, or just something that looks like nothing?" In other words, is the absence of something enough to manifest nothing, or do we need the absence of everything to express nothing?

Overall, these discoveries, and learnings have led me to think in a very broad sense, about how every single person’s mind works differently. And just as everyone’s experience of synesthesia is unique, so is the experiences of those with aphantasia.

Mind blind

UPDATE: It occurred to me that given the Ontology tag in your question, and given that my last paragraph is mostly based on my own idiosyncratic views about existence and reference, I should bring in some considerations from the seminal article on ontology, Quine's "On What There Is". Your questions about nothing, and my own reasons for thinking that imagining nothing is impossible, bear a striking resemblance to the problem of negative existentials. Some philosophers, notably the Meinongians, have thought that there are some things that have the property of "not existing". So, they would analyze negative existentials like "There are no unicorns" as expressing the sentence "There is something such that it is a unicorn and it doesn't exist". They could do this because they distinguished between two senses of "there is". One, the one familiar to us from Quine, is to read "there is" as expressing the existential quantifier. Anything that "there is", in this sense, exists. Now, the other sense of "there is" is subsistence. They thought that there are some things (like unicorns, for example) that subsist but do not exist. Dance CJ, Jaquiery M, Eagleman DM, Porteous D, Zeman A, Simner J. What is the relationship between aphantasia, synaesthesia and autism? Consciousness and Cognition. 2021;89:103087. doi:10.1016/j.concog.2021.103087 In a recent study we set out to investigate whether aphantasics are really “blind in the mind” or if they have difficulty introspecting reliably. Binocular rivalry The word itself by it's etymology suggests picturing nothing. This of course is absurd: there is nothing to picture, and we don't have ready experience picturing nothing, not even space. (Or do we?)

The is initial thought of realizing that you weren't thinking is always a jolting, maximal adrenaline-type of experience. It's incredibly brief though. Being unable to visually remember important events, such as what the flowers or dress looked like on a person’s wedding day, can also be disheartening. Even simple imagery tasks, such as counting sheep to fall asleep, is a challenge.

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Everything you think of is something (something that you think). In that sense, when thinking about nothing, we must admit that nothing is a kind of something. That's one of the fundamental paradoxes of thinking (and of being in general). So yes, you can think of nothing, just like you can think of anything else. Now for us, it is safe to assume that most of us are not going to face this situation in our life. So what would be you reaction watching the news about this thing or seeing the pictures of these scrawny little kids. It's very repeatable once you have done it. Once in a while, instead of returning to the normal mode of consciousness, you can be taken to some very unusual states of consciousness that are deeply blissful and longer lasting. But the launchpad for all of these states is entering into nothingness. Zeman A, Milton F, Della Sala S, et al. Phantasia–The psychological significance of lifelong visual imagery vividness extremes. Cortex. 2020;130:426-440. doi:10.1016/j.cortex.2020.04.003

There are many ways of imagining which don't require visualization. So I think you can be perfectly imaginative and aphantasic," he said. "It's just one piece of the big jigsaw. We're complicated beings." Tamar Gendler responds by providing examples of "imaginable conceptual impossibilities," that is, concepts we can both 1) imagine easily, 2) hold to be physically (or even logically) impossible. We all know that the following propositions are false, and impossibly so: a) 12 is not the sum of 5 and 7, b) 12 used to be the sum of 5 and 7, but is no longer the sum of 5 and 7, c) 12 both is and is not the sum of 5 and 7. So no, one can not intentionally imagine anything (nor nothing) without a sense of self. One who actively imagines anything (whether the concept of nothing or dancing rabbits) does have a sense of self. Before seeing that tweet, I had no idea aphantasia existed let alone that my own imagination was something out of the ordinary. I simply assumed all people saw the same vapid, nondescript nothingness when they closed their eyes, and that the majority of language associated with mental imagery — such as picturing your happy place or counting sheep to fall asleep —was metaphorical rather than literal.One way to resolve all this is to think of nothing and everything as properties of something, not complements to it. Every something is just a bit of nothing and a bit of everything combined. To put it another way, anything can look like nothing if there's none of it, or it can look like everything if you have all of it. Nothing and everything are properties of objects comprised of something.