Imagination is commonly understood as the opposite of reality. We typically define the ‘real’ as what can be perceived by our senses and the ‘imaginary’ as what cannot be perceived by our senses. Dreams of both dormant and awaken state, ideals, fairytales, fiction of any sort… are all regarded by us as unreal products of our imagination. Thus a widely accepted definition of the ‘imaginary’ could well be: that which is not real.
In this article I aim to give ‘imagination’ a completely different notion: the very opposite notion, indeed… In this article I aspire to define ‘imagination’ as the very force that shapes reality!
When Imagination Invades Reality
Humans, we tend to understand imagination as a strictly peculiar property of our species. Indeed, as long as we cling to traditional definitions, imagination arguably is the principal differentiating point between us and other animals.
Many animals have developed admirably complex and sophisticated codes of communication. However, their vocabularies (the set of notions they are capable of communicating) seem to be strictly confined by their senses. It is well credible to assume that lions have words (or intraspecifically-transmittable meaningful units) for sky, earth, day, night, food, sex, all animals and plants species of the savannah, that and the other shape of rock, and absolutely any other pattern having already occurred in sensory reality.
But – although I suppose this point cannot be proven as of yet – it is highly doubtful that a dog, horse, dolphin, elephant, or any other animal has the ability to mentally visualize a bow, a chariot, a starship, a matryoshka-brain, or any other thing that is not a thing.
This is hardly surprising. The animals’ inability to imagine nonexistent patterns is a result of their inability to create patterns – or, reversely rather, an animal’s ability to imagine follows its acquired ability to create in the first place. And there is only one animal that has acquired such an ability… The fundamentally major difference between humans and the rest of the animals is not the ability to imagine, but the ability to create.
A wonderful accident happened in the African savannah some 2 million years ago. Due to whatever motivations, an ape stood up and walked on two legs! Those remarkable steps were that ape’s definitive diversion from traditional biology. For one thing, it saved the ape precious energy that was previously expended for locomotion and could now be used for other tasks. Most importantly, it left the ape with two spare limbs that could also be now used for other tasks. Eventually, those useless protrusions dangling from the ape’s shoulders evolved into what we now know as the human hand: one of the two most exquisite instruments that evolution has devised together with the human brain.
The human hand was the first instrument in our real world that could consequentially manipulate the environment in specific, non-random ways. The human hand was designed to arrange matter and energy distribution in functional, self-replicating patterns. It started that by piling stones – probably cairns should be celebrated as the first invention of mankind – and moved on to… look around you!
That a hand can hold up a pen and write down an equation doesn’t mean by itself that it will. There was one thing missing before humans could move on from piling stones and lighting bonfires to assembling skyscrapers and nuclear reactors: ever more powerful data-processing units and increasing interconnectivity between them. Human brains were developed as the means for humans to take apt advantage of their hands’ capacity.
Other than crude processing power and the ability to outsource acquired information (language) there was yet another absolute prerequisite before humans could transform their environment in such complex ways that they eventually did. When hands became able to choose what to imprint in reality out of an infinite selection of possible patterns, brains needed appropriate filtering and designing mechanisms in order to guide the decision-making process as to what to create. There came imagination as we know it into play. Imagination may well be regarded as the most ancient designing and filtering software.
Whether you are an artist, an architect, or a kid playing with sand, your creating process essentially remains pretty much the same: you imagine something that does not exist but can potentially exist and, by using your hands guided by your brain, you strive to make it exist. Look around you! Chances are – if you don’t happen to read this in the middle of a jungle – that only a small fraction of what you see is not a product of human imagination. Your computer, cities, cargo ships, spaceships are all possibilities gone real by the means of our collective imagination. Imagination is the very force that has shaped most of what you observe in your everyday, real world.
Why do we then still tend to associate imagination with the unreal rather than with the fabrication of reality? Probably because our imagination is capable of constructing seemingly infinite concepts that our hands and brains cannot make real. But is it imagination that is extravagant or hands and brains that are lame?
When Imagination Overrides Reality
Some 200 years ago humanity was confronted with a dire problem. Hands and the human body’s energy mining potential had reached the limit of their ability to manipulate the environment, but imagination pushed as relentlessly as ever to further edit reality. So it came up with an ingenious solution. Why not take advantage of external energy sources and create external, mechanical hands?
The Industrial Revolution was in essence nothing more than the contrivance of external, artificial hands that empowered imagination to edit reality in dramatically more fundamental ways. But just as our primeval ancestors needed additional processing power in order to duly utilize their newly acquired hands, so did we too in order to maximally manage our newly acquired factories. The human skull had reached the limit of its spatial capacity since a long time already. Outsourcing did the trick for a while but, as amounts of data needed to be processed grew exponentially, the collective of human skulls also came to a standstill. There was only one solution: We had to devise external, artificial brains!
19 years into the 21st century, few things seem impossible. The border between imagination and reality fades with every day passing. Advanced Artificial Intelligence and Nanotechnology are bound to make our imagination the incontestable master of reality before long. Pretty much anything at all that we can imagine but cannot create does not anymore give vent to vanity, but only introduces a mere technical problem. Controlling entire energy outputs of stars or black holes, making Legos of all atoms of the universe, deliberately distorting and manipulating the very fabric of space and time as well as of other dimensions, even picking out any possibilities we prefer from the quantum field’s infinite available range… none of these are a sick man’s dream anymore; they are but mere technical problems for imagination to solve. Welcome to the age of magic! Imagination is overriding reality!
The future of reality clearly belongs to imagination. Since reality can be shaped in any possible way, it can only be up to imagination to choose what to shape it into. But where do we come into the picture? The future belongs to imagination… but does imagination belong to us?
That I suppose depends on the definition of ‘we’. Are we an erect ape with four limbs and two eyes that possesses the faculty of imagination… then there isn’t place for us in the future. Are we the imagination itself that temporarily possesses a body and a crammed skull… then we are the future.
We would do better to identify ourselves with imagination rather than the human body or brain. Traditionally, we have been regarding imagination as a phenomenon emerging exclusively in the human brain. But since it has escaped by now from our skulls, nothing tells us that it ever was really confined in them after all. Perhaps it was the very same force that created the human brains, as well as everything else, in the first place. We can well loosen up a bit our definition of imagination to comprise the totality of the force that generates the classical reality out of possibilities. In this sense, we basically equate imagination with consciousness.
When Imagination Begets Reality
Why does something exist? The best of our answers would probably be because it is possible for it to exist. With the same logic, it could well be possible that nothing exists. But that would, after all, only be but another possibility. For every one of the infinite objective universes that may conceivably exist, there should be a corresponding number of universes that do not exist. But whether existent or nonexistent, all potential universes remain essentially the same: possibilities.
To the best of our knowledge, we may assume that our universe existed way before we (as humans) appeared. Quantum physics suggests that for a particle to stabilize and acquire a fixed position within the space-time reality of our world, it needs to be observed. Arguably, the only power that can make observations is consciousness. Since not we humans, what observed the world that we found?
An attractive answer would be that we consciousness observed it before we became humans. A slight sparkle of consciousness may have caused the Big Bang and subsequent orchestration of this universe. Some sort of consciousness may have imagined that a such-and-such world can be derived out of possibility waves and set to create it.
Though our imagination is seemingly unrestrictedly opulent, we still have hard time to imagine how galaxies or birds came to exist without something having priorly imagined them. We can clearly understand how any of our creations was created but we feel utterly powerless to comprehend how anything that preceded us was created. That may be so because we mistakenly search for a different creator. What if we created everything? Remember, not we as humans but we as imaginative consciousness.
Consciousness, imagination, creativity must have pervaded the universe all along. It only lacked technical solutions. Whereas by setting a simple set of parameters such as nuclear, electromagnetic, and gravitational forces it is a straightforward process to create simple things such as atoms, stars, and all sorts of condensed, orbiting balls… it required vast amounts of time and experimentation filtered by natural selection to create things that can create things, such as ribosomes, hands, and automated factories.
The entire history of the universe seems like an arduous strife to organize itself geometrically; a valiant endeavor to order chaos directed by imaginative consciousness. And this process is only at the beginning. What is the universe set to make out of itself? A universal brain? A God? Does it know? Is the outcome of this universal evolution deterministically predefined? Or does it also create the process? Will it eventually dissolve and perish before entropy within its own boundaries? Or will it escape space-time to outer dimensions and keep evolving indefinitely?
What exactly consciousness is and why it does what it does is another question. For now we may only speculate that consciousness is imagination acting as a link between our observable universe and the underlying quantum field: imagination extracting reality out of possibilities.
