Do We Really See in the Mind?

Aphantasia has, in a remarkably short time, become a cultural success story. A hidden minority is discovered, a name is given, testimonies follow, and suddenly an entire inner landscape is redrawn. Some people, we are told, cannot “see” images in their mind. The rest of us can. The line seems clear. The story tells itself.

But pause on that verb. See.

Do we really see images in our mind?

Many people will say yes, without hesitation. They insist they can picture a face, a place, a scene—sometimes vividly. Close your eyes, imagine an apple: there it is. Red, round, perhaps slightly bruised. It feels immediate, almost perceptual. The conclusion seems obvious: there must be some kind of internal image.

And yet, that conclusion quietly reintroduces one of the oldest and most persistent illusions in the philosophy of mind: the homunculus. If there is an image, where is it? And who, exactly, is looking at it?

Because an image, to be an image, must be seen. A picture that no one sees is not a picture. So if you claim there is an image in the mind, you are committed—whether you notice it or not—to a second layer: an inner observer inspecting that image. A viewer behind the eyes, watching a private screen.

This is the point where the story should begin to wobble.

Neuroscience offers no such screen. No inner theatre. No place where images sit waiting to be observed. What it finds instead are dynamic processes: distributed activations, predictive loops, fragmentary reconstructions. Nothing in this resembles a picture in the ordinary sense. There is no red apple stored anywhere, no tiny cinema playing inside the skull.

So what, then, are we doing when we insist that we “see” something?

We are mistaking a possibility for a presence.

What we experience is not an internal image, but the brain’s capacity to make images possible in the world. A readiness, a structured openness, a set of constraints and expectations that allow perception to occur when the world meets us halfway. When you “imagine” an apple, you are not perceiving a hidden object. You are tracing the contours of a capacity—activating the conditions under which an apple could be seen, if one were there.

It feels like seeing because it borrows the language of seeing. But nothing is actually given in the way perception gives.

This is where the old thought experiment of the brain in a vat returns with unexpected force. A brain floating in isolation, fed with no world, no body, no resistance—would it “see” anything at all? The intuitive answer is yes: it could generate its own images. But this intuition relies on the very picture we are trying to question. It assumes that the brain contains images to begin with.

Remove the world, and what remains is not a secret cinema. It is a system deprived of the very conditions that make seeing possible. No light, no surfaces, no depth, no friction—no images. Only the hollow machinery of potential, with nothing to anchor it.

Seeing is not something that happens inside the head. It is something that happens between a body and a world.

Once that is taken seriously, the distinction between those who “have” mental images and those who do not begins to lose its sharpness. What varies is not the presence of inner pictures, but the way people interpret and describe this strange, indirect access they have to their own cognitive processes. Some speak as if they see. Others refuse that language. Neither group is consulting an inner screen.

In that sense, we are all aphantasic. Not because nothing is happening, but because the thing we think is happening—a literal inner image—is not there in the form we imagine it to be.

The popularity of aphantasia, then, may tell us less about a newly discovered minority and more about a shared confusion that has finally been named. It reveals how easily a metaphor hardens into a belief, and how quickly that belief organizes experience around itself.

And perhaps this also explains a more mundane, less philosophical detail. If we truly had vivid, controllable images at our disposal—if the inner cinema were as rich as we sometimes claim—then the relentless demand for external visual stimulation would be harder to understand. Yet entire industries thrive on precisely that demand. Porn is perhaps the best example: if we really were all seeing so many images internally, why are porn websites still so popular? Not because humans are incapable of imagining, but because imagination is not a substitute for perception. It is a sketch, a preparation, a gesture toward something that must still be encountered.

The joke, in the end, is simple. We thought we had a theatre in our heads. We even argued about who gets front-row seats. But the theatre was never there. There is only the stage of the world—and a remarkably inventive way of leaning toward it.