quale and qualia (12. 344)

Having come to a similar epiphany at a point in life I considered fairly late and doubting maturity—but perhaps this sort of realisation needs time to incubate and couched in inexperience—that everyone was their own hero and main character, I found this curated list of introspective descriptors (with an invitation to readers to submit their own) from Marco Giancotti to be quite resonant. Although I don’t normal think to believe that my own subjective experience to be radically different from the next individual nor informed by some prodigious synthesis of sensations and neither compensated by recently coined conscious lacunas like aphantasia, imagination without mental images or internal monologue, the notion that we’re all naked aligned with the Emperor’s New Clothes is a really fascinating and engaging notion to ponder, nomothetic, broad generalisations versus the idiographic and the idiocentric. I like to think of myself capable of imagining in all these avenues and could accept that others do not but there is a measure of scepticism for divergence from the norm. Among the shared experiences that spoke to me, was a short interview with physicist Richard Feynman, as self-diagnosed with a benevolent form of arithromania, about how people count and calculate mentally in various ways. Much more—with growing contributions at Æther Mug at the link above.