I am reasonably confident I am not aphantasiac in the sense described here. My apple is red with some nice green mottling, dust, etc etc. I can see my wife and children in detail in my "mind's eye". As a child people told me I had a "photographic memory", which I also think is sort of "fake" or semantic, but nonetheless: I can remember images I have seen with visual detail and I can imagine hypothetical objects "visually". I still think many self-diagnosed aphantasiacs are tripping on the semantics of wording in a self-report survey, because I could easily talk myself into the other label based on second-and-third-guessing "but what does it mean to _see_ something I'm imagining?" etc. If there is a group of people with an actual quantifiable brain difference, I suspect it is much smaller than the group of "all self-diagnosed aphantasiacs".

Ironically your comment has strengthened my belief that aphantasia is real and that I have it. :-)

The possibility of visualizing an apple with any of the details you describe is completely alien to me. Like, not "I can conceptualize something like that in my head but it's not SEEING", but "it is impossible for me to conceptualize that".

If you asked me to conceptualize an apple and asked me to add details like the color of it, whether it had a stem, etc. I would just be generating a mental checklist in my head. Vaguely like a running narrative, "I said it was a red apple. I said it had a stem. I said it had a bruise near the top."

But there's no sense in which I'm constructing a model in my head that I can consult, it's just a list of facts.

Every so often I've had discussions with people who do have a mind's eye and they've said something that just caught me off guard with its alienness. In your case the idea that when you imagine an apple it comes to you formed with a bunch of visual detail. I could only fill in details like that if explicitly asked (by myself or someone else). Or a friend saying casually "oh yeah I'm imagining her sitting over there to the left on that chair" - it had never occurred to me that people could visualize something with an actual location in space, or interacting with a real world object.

Yeah, you don't sound aphantasic to me then either. I am certain you are right some self-diagnosed aphantasics are caught up in semantics: psychology instruments in general are quite terrible, and certainly anyone that just does some self-report test and reads no further I could very easily see becoming confused here.

But the more a person thinks and read about it, especially given how much easier it is to find people writing and talking about it today, then I think the likelihood of being caught in such a semantic trap will go down a lot. Or at least, that should happen so long as one doesn't attach excessive moral value to or get bogged down in "identifying" as aphantasic/not.