Aphantasiacs seem to be able to describe visual qualia as adequately as anyone else when the visual stimuli are currently present. But we do see descriptions differ between aphantasia and baseline in two cases: when the visual stimuli is recalled from memory, and when the visual stimuli is imagined. If it was about the difficulty of describing qualia, I don’t think we would see a difference between “visual stimuli present” and “visual stimuli recalled or imagined”.

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suddenlybananas 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm not denying there's a difference between the two groups, I'm denying that the difference is in phenomenal experience. If one group has a different way of describing their experience to others in general (e.g. perhaps because they interpret things much more literally than others), then they would likely describe specific things differently.

	▲	fwlr 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		A quick demonstration I sometimes use to tease out this distinction: “imagine a six-sided die. Are you imagining it? Good. How many dots are on the side closest to you?” If the phenomenal experience was the same and the difference is in the description, everyone should still be able to give a number as their answer, even if they have to use different processes to derive the number from their different descriptions. But aphantasiacs will visibly struggle to answer this question, or give a non-number non-answer like “no side is closest to me” or “depends on which way the die is facing”.