Ooof, like trying to explain what color is. It’s…knowledge, largely divorced from sight. Sometimes glimpses of a specific edge or abstracted shapes aligning, but mostly just a certainty of the position/relationship.
Actually, the closest I can think of how I imagine manipulating objects is the sense of proprioception. I can close my eyes and move my limbs and know where they are in relation to each other or when they’ll touch without visualizing it. So I conceive of objects in space. It’s like navigating the place where you live with the lights out. I suppose others may overlay their vision with where they believe objects to be, but I largely move with the knowledge/memory of where things were relative to each other.
Maybe it’s a crutch or some form of synesthesia, but especially when I’m working with a challenging subject or some knowledge or emotion that I’ve only recently internalized, that concept is also associated with a position in space - usually around and sometimes intersecting my head. Trying to explain myself in this reply is like a pressure around my right eyebrow, which I hadn’t really noticed until writing about it.
