alt Hacker NewsTell me you can still tell it's two separate layers though. You aren't actually getting visual feedback, you are combining the actual visual feedback from your eyeballs with the pseudo-visual feedback from your imagination.
I would say when I do this, it's more like underlaying my imagination with reality, than overlaying reality with imagination - the combination is still clearly imaginative. Right? (I think I'm a 3 or a fraction higher, on the apple test scale)
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For me, when I'm really concentrating, the imagined becomes more dominant.
I like to do mechanical/visual designs in my head, intentionally avoiding whiteboards and whatnot, so I don't lose the ability! When I do this, I've had people come up to me and wave their hands right in my face to get my attention, because I don't see them. I "spaced out" alll the time as a kid.
I can almost always tell the projection and reality are different, but in some very rare and extreme cases (psychedelics, sleep deprivation, extremely protracted and deliberate meditative focus / practice, or e.g. in situations where the projection is properly aligned with the actual stimuli, like seeing a face in the clouds, or in vivid / lucid dreams), the differences can be so small that what allows you to distinguish the two can simply be knowledge of the will / effort involved or e.g. knowledge from laws of physics that what is visualized cannot be present, or, in the case of dreams, an inconsistency with autobiographical memory.
Otherwise, yes, in almost all other cases, I suspect our experiences aren't that much different.