The Physics of the imagination

[HydrogenBond]

Here is a new angle for discussion. The human imagination is sort of unique relative to the known laws of physics in that it is not confined to cause and affect or probability. For example, one can imagine winning all the lotteries throughout a country while flying in space without machines or wings. This is being silly but the example defies both cause and affect and probability yet is possible output from the imagination.

 

The physical and biochemistry behind the brain, which creates the matrix of the imagination, does follow the laws of science. However, the output affect, both in terms of active imagination and dreams does not always have to.

 

Here is the scenario, say we could hook up the human brain to a machine and project someone's imagination or dream on a screen so we can watch it like a scientist collecting data. Do these new observational affects, that we can now recored, represent a new area of physics since they are now observable and don't have to play by the rules of known laws?

[questor]

Dreams, imagination, contemplation, flights of fancy all come from the same place. They come from wherever thought originates. There are no curbs on this activity unless it is self imposed. The question that must be answered is: at what particulate level does thought originate, and what is thought made of? Isn't this the most important piece of missing information?

[HydrogenBond]

Dreams, imagination, contemplation, flights of fancy all come from the same place. They come from wherever thought originates. There are no curbs on this activity unless it is self imposed. The question that must be answered is: at what particulate level does thought originate, and what is thought made of? Isn't this the most important piece of missing information?

 

This is true in terms of helping to define how this odd affect occurs and maybe how it works. There should be more effort by physics to investigate this unique frontier even though using a product of the imagination, like a particle accelerator, is more subjectively impressive. This subjectivity is connected to the human imagination using one of its features, anticipating a future that is not even yet manifest. Or, trying to prove what the human imagination anticipates exists even before there is any proof.

 

But the angle I had in mind was looking at the properties of the final affects, which don't have to align with natural cause and affect or probability. Let me give a simple example; banana split. This tasty treat would never appear spontaneously in nature using the known laws of science or probability. For one it requires combining an arctic (ice cream) and tropical affect (bananas). If it wasn't for the imagination this would not be a part of physical reality. Because of the imagination it has become part of reality and can be explained with rational laws. Imagination mediates that step between the limit of what is possible with natural laws acting on its own, and what is possible using natural laws.

 

Humans could be viewed as a natural product of nature through evolution. But the human imagination appears to be at the limit of natural cause and affect and probability and can extend the impossible of natural cause and affect and probability. It is not clear whether the living state does this in a limited way, where this same special affect, behind imagination, sees the new banana split animal form and jumps to the future to make a new critter that is now in reality. We can only rationalize after the banana split animal is made. That is speculation but the imagination does this all the time. Not all products of the imagination can become manifest in reality. While others require additional synthetic steps before this is possible. Still others are only possible in the matrix of imagination to create an imaginary reality that is separate from physical reality. This last is not meant to be derogatory but is pure other physics which is the source of all the other affects.

[Don Blazys]

To:Hydrogen Bond

 

Great topic! How interesting would it be if we could somehow "hook together" two or more human brains and thereby experience not only one anothers exact thoughts, but emotions and sensory input as well!

 

For that matter, any two or more living things!

 

For all we know, thought may not even originate in the brain. It could be, (and this is, of course, is just wild speculation on my part) that thought arises as a sort of "quantum mechanical fluctuation" in spacetime, and that the "intention" or "motivation" behind any particular thought or idea is our true essence, which would then lie in a realm that is independent of spacetime.

 

Thought would then be ubiquitous, and the brain would then be more of a "filter" than a "receptor", generating our "illusion of individuality" which dissapears when the brain comes to an end.

 

"Principles", be they aesthetic or logical, also transcend spacetime.

 

The principle that 1+2=3 will survive the end of this universe and will continue into the next.

 

If we are, at our very core, "principles" that give rise to "motivation" that give rise to "thought", that give rise to "reality", then we really are both immortal and eternal.

 

Space might not be the "final frontier". We ourselves, might be!

 

Don.

[coberst]

I find that imagination is an important but vague and amorphous concept.

 

Aristotle considered imagination to be an intermediary between perception and thought. Our perception process accepted the input from our senses and operated upon them by creating images that facilitated rational thought, “the soul never thinks without a mental picture”—Yates.

 

In the eighteenth century ‘fancy’ and ‘imagination’ were somewhat synonymous and were applied to non-mnemonic [for or relating to memory]. Images that flowed before the ‘mind’s eye’ were “source memories” if they contained the temporal and spatial order of the original experience, if without these spatial and temporal groundings they were dream-like fantasies.

 

For Coleridge, the imagination is "that synthetic and magical power, which reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant tendencies…dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and unify. It is essentially vital [characteristic of life].”

 

M. S. Abrams considers that re-creative imagination would fall under the traditional headings of simile and metaphor.

 

Kant describes imagination as a productive faculty of the mind that enables representations of reality to be formed. Imagination is a synthesizing element of mind.

 

Arjun Appadurai describes imagination as a constitutive faculty of modern subjectivity. He describes it as collective imagination wherein lies a “community of sentiment”. As an example the modern concept of nation as “an imagined political community…it is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their community.” Just the concepts of globalization and immigration become images, symbols are images, it becomes a container image. For Appadurai, "The imagination is today a staging ground for action, and not only for escape." He describes the concept “culturalism” as a conscious mobilization of identities as being the most general form of the work of imagination.

 

CS (cognitive science as expounded in “Philosophy in the Flesh”) has determined that Western tradition has seriously confused the nature and importance of imagination. The traditional objectivist thought of Descartes and Kant has seriously overlooked the pervasive structuring of thought by unconscious conceptual metaphors.

[Icarus]

Even human creativity and imagination has its limitations.

 

I'd like to first confirm what is meant by human imagination? Is it just visualization?

 

For example you can write or talk about higher dimensions, but you could never visualize them.

 

Either way, I believe somehow that even human creativity has some boundaries. But you wouldn't know them because if you did then you would have imagined it already. Now the limitations of the human mind shall be a result of the universe around you. Thus human creativity is a function of the observable universe and its laws. And it has limits.

 

flying around without wings, etc. isn't really a universe not following laws. But just a situation that can be got at with the laws we currently know of.

 

A thought question. You can attempt to imagine the absence of something. But an amalgamation of current events to formulate a new one. But a completely new event. With no prior basis. Is it possible for the human mind to imagine that?

 

I get back to the dimension example because if you were a 2-dimension creature, could you still imagine flight?

[Don Blazys]

I really like hydrogen bonds question:

 

"Is it possible to formulate a set of laws that apply to motion as it occurs in the realm of the imagination"?

 

because, to my knowledge, no one has ever asked it before. It is highly original.

 

After my last post on this topic, I decided to conduct a few "experiments".

 

Instead of reading myself to sleep like I usually do, I closed my eyes and imagined a sphere moving back and forth, from point "a" to point "b", with ever increasing velocity.

 

I noted that my "imaginary sphere" had absolutely no "inertia", so that the changes in direction were instantaneous. (There were no imaginary paddles knocking it back and forth.)

 

At the "maximum speed" allowed by my imagination, I observed "two spheres", going "in and out of existence".

 

It then occured to me that certain sub-atomic particles also seem to go "in and out of existence".

 

I then made that imaginary sphere go around and around in a circle, faster and faster, until at "maximum speed", all I observed was a "ring" or "hoop".

 

Again, my mind detected no "inertia", and it occured to me that my imaginary sphere was quite massless, as are photons and other particles.

 

I then tried to make my "imaginary sphere" move at maximum speed in one direction only, and to my surprise, found it redundant and therefore impossible! All I "saw" was a stationary sphere, because there was no backround or "frame of reference" by which to detect any motion.

 

I thought to myself: "Shades of relativity"? "Finite, universe possible, infinite universe impossible"? "Can Riemann, non-Euclidian geometry be applied here"? Is infintiy essentially "meaningless"?

 

I then tried to imagine, or at least, somehow concieve, of "nothingness", and found that too, to be impossible.

 

From this little experiment, I concluded that the "physics of the imagination", (at least in my imagination,) is in some ways similar to both quantum mechanics, and relativity theory! Very wierd indeed! Fun too!

 

I then fell asleep, and had some extraordinarily vivid and crazy dreams featuring several stunningly beautifull women..., but I won't go into that here.

 

I woke up wondering if the previous nights "mental exersize" had anything to do with how absolutely "real" and "colorfull" those dreams were.

 

Don.

[Moontanman]

I experience a very vivid dream world when I am asleep, I have tried to pay attention over the years and it seems to break down into three, realms, some of my dreams take place in a reality that is obviously not part of the world we are familiar with, people appear in different stages of "real" with people I know being mostly faces and hands attached to bodies like manikins with people I don't know being simply manikins or whited out wraiths. This dream scape seems to have rules and boundaries but not the same as the real world, other dreams seem to be very detailed accounts of reality, same rules, visual and sonic effects as the real world. Then there are the dreams that have little or no substance, anything seems to go and there is no sound, and visions can be distorted to levels that are difficult to understand. Three separate levels, oh any by the way Icarus, I can imagine higher dimensions....

[Icarus]

oh any by the way Icarus, I can imagine higher dimensions....

 

Really? You can imagine extra spatial dimensions? I would like to show disbelief but somehow there is no way it can ever be confirmed or disproved. So well, I guess imagination might not have limits. Only my imagination does.

[Moontanman]

Really? You can imagine extra spatial dimensions? I would like to show disbelief but somehow there is no way it can ever be confirmed or disproved. So well, I guess imagination might not have limits. Only my imagination does.

 

Please, show disbelief, it's a big part of what this forum is about. I can explain what extra dimensions look like but the explanation of the visual looses considerable information in the translation. I would suggest you start out by imagining zero dimensions and work your way up from that. It's what I do......

[HydrogenBond]

Say we could hook the human imagination to a machine, which could project the images of the imagination onto a screen. It would be possible to create images and interactions on that screen that are not based on cause and effect or probability. I can imagine winning all the lotteries, at will, while body surfing in deep space totally naked getting a good tan. Everyone will see this on the screen. This output is being generated by a neural matrix in my brain, that itself is part of cause and affect and probability. But it is generating a repeatable output that does follow the laws of cause and affect and probability. In others words, a phenomena that follows the principles of science is able to generate an output that can go outside very principles.

 

In physics, to use an example, we have many theories for the same thing. They can't all be right at the same time. This is simple common sense. This means at least some of them work under the principles of the imagination. They don't have to be in touch with cause and affect or probability, yet they appear to exist in reality because we can express these with mathematics. Can math be used like a projector from the imagination to creates such imaginary projector affects so other can also see them? In this general example, the answer is yes, since they can all be right.

 

Part of what creates this confusion is the imagination can create real things that are not natural things but synthetic things using natural ingredients. I used the banana split as an example. This is real, follows cause and affect and can be made in the lab. But nature on her own would never make the banana split if it wasn't for the human imagination.

 

The confusion between real and synthetic reality theory, both which can supported by math, could account for why so many theories. The imagination can make all types of synthetic explanations that we can then make come to reality, in the lab, or with math. I am not dumping on synthetic since this can lead to technical breakthroughs which can still advance culture, but we first require the original banana split. But how do we differentiate natural from synthetic when the human imagination is part of the observation process and can step outside purely natural.

 

Let me give an example that always struck me of useful synthetic, which may not be natural. The original particle accelerators were there to simulate the state of matter at the beginning of the universe, when energy was higher. This was during big bang. If you look at BB, the universe is expanding. How does smashing the universe against a target simulate this, when nobody says it even happened? Wouldn't the stuff in the acceleration loop, before it collides, be a better simulation of the universe expansion? I can see saying we are simulating a collapsing star where there is a target at the center, with all the extra stuff appearing. That seems natural. The only point I was making is the human imagination is not confined to the laws of natural reality. It can stay in the natural, it can go outside the natural into the synthetic real, and it can also go into the pure imaginary. I am dumping on the value of the research, so don't get me wrong. I was just just pointing imagination is not confined to cause and affect of probability.

[freeztar]

Really? You can imagine extra spatial dimensions? I would like to show disbelief but somehow there is no way it can ever be confirmed or disproved. So well, I guess imagination might not have limits. Only my imagination does.

 

Your imagination is never limited! :)

 

Check out this post!

[Icarus]

would suggest you start out by imagining zero dimensions and work your way up from that. It's what I do......

 

Ever read Flatland: A romance of many dimensions by Edwin A. Abbott. Its a classic. Talks about a sphere coming to a 2-d world and attempting to show a square the 3-d. To teach it dimensions, it first takes it to 1-d world, where the square appears as a line. and then a 0-d world, where a point refuses to believe that anybody but it exists.

 

Then it takes the square through the third dimension. The square returns home with this new knowledge. The 2-d world thinks the square has gone crazy and imprisons it for life.

 

No context but your post reminded me of that story.