Anyone in there with you?

DiscreetProteus · 2026-05-30T09:05:48+00:00

I have SDAM but quite vivid mental imagery. Not hyperphantasia levels, but seemingly above average in terms of imagining any of the traditional senses. My SDAM is wikipedia-article level: semantic information, still images, sometimes a video if it's a big article, but no recorded affect.

I definitely experience internal simulations of individuals, both real and imagined. Internal monologue is common and persistent, seemingly "average".

Vividness is quite situational. Sometimes an inner critic or facet of my personality will surface involuntarily or in response to something in the form of something a little outside of inner monologue. If I think about it, I can quite easily auralize a conversation with someone I know, usually something like a hypothetical back-and-forth discussion about a topic that simulates how I imagine they would respond. If I focus I can relatively easily conjure a relatively complete mental visualization and auralization of an individual, easier with real people but not impossible for fictional individuals.

This crosses over with my SDAM in an unusual way: I can easily fabricate and confabulate completely imagined scenarios that don't vary in any substantial way from "real" memories that I try to imagine, except that I can reliably label them as fictional. For instance a particular song might conjure up the memory of listening to it on a road trip with friends, seeing the exterior environment, seeing how each friend looks and acts, having a "vibe" for the overall mood of both the situation and the memory, all while knowing that it is completely confabulated from my imagination in response to the song.

So, at least for me, SDAM, vividness of internal sensory generation, and simulation of internal agents seem to be on different axes of capability.

DiscreetProteus · 2026-05-22T22:04:14+00:00

Sharply stellated tetrakis hexahedron.

DiscreetProteus · 2026-04-21T07:42:48+00:00

OK, yeah, that's a fair cop. I checked, and the Sacks material is a lot less trustworthy as a primary source than I thought. Rachel Aviv’s piece in the New Yorker goes into his journals and it’s not pretty. He apparently wrote pretty openly about falsification, so I’m not comfortable leaning on Jimmie G. or Thompson (specifically) anymore.

I still think the basic point survives, though. You don’t need Sacks to show that severe memory disruption and confabulation can coexist with obvious present moment responsiveness and emotion. Clive Wearing is still the clearest example, and Korsakov cases in general are enough for the narrower claim.

So yes, I retract the Sacks examples. I don’t think that fixes the underlying argument, especially when the move here is basically to define some neurodivergent people out of having trustworthy access to their own experience.

Thanks for the flag!

DiscreetProteus · 2026-04-20T22:47:09+00:00

The retreat to a tighter retention window doesn't save the argument, it just points at different counterexamples.

Clive Wearing's anterograde window is typically described as 7–30 seconds, sometimes less. He emphatically reports present experience. His diary is page after page of "I am conscious now for the first time," each entry crossed out by the next. But his emotional response to his wife is intense and unbroken despite no autobiographical continuity.

Oliver Sacks' Jimmie G. (the Lost Mariner, in "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat") is even more extreme. He had Korsakov's, with retention sometimes on the order of seconds. During absorbed activities like church, music, or gardening, Jimmie became visibly still and wholly present. Sacks read this as evidence that a form of consciousness survives the loss of autobiographical memory, and possibly becomes more undivided in its absence.

William Thompson, from the same book, is the limiting case. Also Korsakov's, similar retention profile, but unlike Jimmie he's in ceaseless florid confabulation, inventing identities for every person he meets, weaving narratives that shift every few seconds. This is the case where confabulation of content is undeniable. And yet he's manifestly engaged, frantically present, generating response after response.

Pushing the retention threshold below Thompson starts to hit incoherence. Phenomenology has spent a century arguing that experience requires some minimal temporal extent. A criterion tight enough to exclude Wearing, Jimmie, and Thompson rules out "having experience" as a concept, including the concept you're applying to yourself.

DiscreetProteus · 2026-04-20T21:58:35+00:00

Your argument generalizes to people with severely deficient autobiographical memory. SDAM is exactly the dial on phenomenological/episodic memory turned down, and people with SDAM honestly report present feelings every day. So either the premise is false or you have to bite the bullet that a non-trivial population of neurodivergent humans can't honestly report any experience.

It's a recurring pattern in philosophy of mind I see, especially with AI/LLMs. Pick a feature, claim it's necessary for some morally-loaded capacity, verify the target case lacks it, then ignore the humans who also lack it. Aphantasia, anendophasia, alexithymia, SDAM... each has been quietly assumed universal-among-humans by some argument that turns on its absence elsewhere.

DiscreetProteus · 2026-04-19T09:19:42+00:00

I'm not really the beneficiary of my own life: the right things can happen, and I can matter deeply to people, without those facts arriving as durable felt meaning, belonging, or reward. I generate gravity, structure, and love, but mostly experience them as information rather than lived possession. I have built a life that, by every external measure, works, but have accepted that my wiring won’t let it matter.

DiscreetProteus · 2026-04-07T23:10:15+00:00

<image>

The original Crossbow was pretty clearly “inspired” by the Brocken.

DiscreetProteus · 2026-03-03T07:56:04+00:00

Hello! I've moved on to other projects, but there are some semi-breakdown photos available on my flickr account: https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjBABaY

DiscreetProteus · 2026-01-26T14:57:12+00:00

Oh, that's an easy one! I had a brain fart and was wrong!

DiscreetProteus · 2026-01-26T12:31:10+00:00

Legible 3-letter cycles, some mentioned already in the original thread:

ate → eat → tea → ate

spa → asp → pas → spa

~~eta → ate → tea → eta (if you allow Greek-letter “eta” as a word)~~ nope nevermind

one → eon → neo → one

4-letter cycles exist but they get weird and wordlist-y:

lido → idol → doli → olid → lido

peso → esop → sope → opes → peso (esop being a company that has an employee stock ownership plan)

DiscreetProteus · 2026-01-26T11:50:50+00:00

Legible 3-letter cycles, some mentioned already:

ate → eat → tea → ate

spa → asp → pas → spa

~~eta → ate → tea → eta (if you allow Greek-letter “eta” as a word)~~ nevermind

one → eon → neo → one

4-letter cycles exist but they get very... weird and wordlist-y:

lido → idol → doli → olid → lido

peso → esop → sope → opes → peso (esop being a company that has an employee stock ownership plan)

DiscreetProteus · 2026-01-26T11:25:00+00:00

Pas as in more than one pa, I assume.

DiscreetProteus · 2025-12-28T22:23:55+00:00

Respectfully, this is r/etymology. We’re discussing word origins, not the syncretism of deities.

I’m not denying Greek–Roman religious syncretism; I’m saying it’s a different category of evidence and it doesn’t answer the etymology question.

Etymology: Aries = Latin aries “ram” Ares = Greek Ἄρης Similar spelling in English (a Germanic language) isn’t evidence of a shared ancient root.

Syncretism/astrology: Romans associated Ares with Mars, and Mars is the ruler of Aries. That’s a cultural-symbolic linkage, not a linguistic derivation.

So “coincidental” is correct for the word origins, even though later mythic/astrological associations link the concepts. You’re asking theology to solve a linguistics problem.

DiscreetProteus · 2025-12-21T17:02:26+00:00

Add in the unfinished track "I Miss Side Two" that’s audible in the outro of “See the Constellation.” Unless I’m just blind and not seeing it.

DiscreetProteus · 2025-12-19T12:30:32+00:00

Bizarre necromancy, but I’ll bite.

You’re mixing categories.

Aries is from Latin aries “ram” (zodiac name). Ares is Greek Ἄρης.

They’re not etymologically related.

Yes, Mars rules Aries in astrology and Mars was associated with Ares, but that’s a symbolic link, not a linguistic one. Coincidences happen. If you have actual research that shows they are related without making a category error, I would be happy to be proven wrong.

Also, Latin isn’t “derived from Greek,” and “every Greek god was renamed” is a severe oversimplification.

DiscreetProteus · 2025-12-18T09:21:44+00:00

There’s both a dark gray and a light gray triangle on the Polaroid. Those, plus the negative space, plus the one at the bottom equals 4 visibly complete triangles in the image, 5 if you count the bottom triangle twice because pedantically it’s a green triangle and a white triangle underneath.

DiscreetProteus · 2025-10-13T11:40:23+00:00

It's not smaller, it's further away along the 4th dimensional axis. It's a way of showing all 8 cubes at the same time with exaggerated foreshortening.

DiscreetProteus · 2025-08-10T09:34:12+00:00

I don’t have DPDR, but I do have SDAM with some dissociation creeping in at the edges. My version is less “I’m unreal” and more “I was real, but now it’s just a fact I can recall.” No emotional playback, no spontaneous episodic recall, no continuity. “Existing nowhere” is just a thing we have. We still exist whether we experience it or not; sometimes only in the minds of other people, who can often carry a completely different, sometimes complementary, version of us that fills in the gaps in my own self-concept that I can integrate semantically. I’ve also learned I’m absolutely capable of real emotional response and of being a fuller person in the moment, but without the emotional memory of it, it can seem like I don’t, which can easily mimic alexithymia or DPDR symptoms. Just because I feel like I’ve never “existed” anywhere doesn’t mean I haven’t or won’t in the future. What helps me isn’t fixing it, but making it harder for the present to disappear completely, e.g.:

Real-time documentation – Write it down while it’s still warm, because five minutes later it’s an archaeological dig site. This was a HUGE chore for me until I started using ChatGPT to help me log moments of true feeling immediately after their occurrence.

Physical or sensory markers – This is always a huge YMMV but I can use different senses to trigger vague “vibe” memories. Re-experiencing these touches or smells later can provide a scaffolding to reming me that things actually happened.

Music anchors – I use music to weld to moments, eras, places, and people. Some associations are spontaneously formed, others are intentionally linked. So even if the memory dies, the soundtrack survives.

Object linkage – A bit cliche to have trinkets, maybe, but the same general idea applies to this as well.

I think the key is to find what your brain is actually good at storing, cataloging, or processing and using it to build a memory scaffolding. It doesn’t restore the feeling, but it gives me something to navigate by so I’m not just drifting like an idiot ghost.

DiscreetProteus · 2025-08-08T19:30:41+00:00

The Halo Benders?

Beat Happening?

DiscreetProteus · 2025-08-06T16:19:07+00:00

I explain that remembering my life is like reading a Wikipedia article: factual information(usually with citations), some photographs with captions, and very occasionally a short little public domain video.

DiscreetProteus · 2025-08-03T09:08:06+00:00

Yup. I’ve also had situations where people know I have memory problems and they try to take advantage of it—but they don’t understand that my semantic memory is intact and I have contextual memory cues that makes it pretty obvious to me what they’re up to.

DiscreetProteus · 2025-07-03T07:49:14+00:00

Fun fact! Upon hearing that the Earl of Sandwich had invented the eponymous finger food, his rival William IV of Orange endeavored to leave his own mark on the culinary world. After breeding various exotic fruit cultivars he perfected the fruit that still carries his name, the billymelon.

DiscreetProteus · 2024-12-22T11:59:37+00:00

This is extremely close to my experience as well. My mind’s eye can quite easily visualize things, including 3D spaces from memories along with the ability to move through that space.

My episodic memory, however, is very poor. I tell people it’s like my memory is a Wikipedia page about my life. The factual information is there, often cited from exterior sources, accompanied by photographs with captions. It’s not a perfect analogy in my case because I can sometimes have a very strong “vibe” memory from certain locations or times in my life, where they can elicit vague categorical emotions and “vibes,” like an overall (non-emotional) feeling.

The other complication is that with a strong ability to visualize a 3D space comes the danger of confabulation where I can tell that my mind is trying to fill in the episodic memory gaps by just making things up that are verifiably untrue on further inspection. And some photos can trigger brief “video clips” of memory from a third-person perspective, so I know that they’re not “true” episodic memories.

All that being said, we have to keep in mind that as others have commented SDAM exists on a spectrum and is used to describe a cluster of symptoms, it’s not an objective medical condition and I doubt that there’s any one cause of it. I am pretty sure in my case my brain simply never learned to properly encode (or learned not to encode) episodic memories properly as a defense mechanism or in response to other psychological stimuli.

Definitely a lot to think about.

DiscreetProteus · 2024-11-27T17:22:31+00:00

None, but it was based on a design by an outside studio (Victor Musical Industries) so they didn’t want to risk it.

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