Reality ⊄ Imagination !

Space, Time and Imaginary Reality — Assignment

Hello all! Welcome to this blog post on — The boundaries of Imaginary space

Firstly, lets define a few frequently used notions…

• Imaginary Space — The space of everything that we can possibly imagine.
• Reality Space — Everything which exists in the Universe, including whatever we believe exists to the very least.
• The Theory of Imagination v/s Reality in question being -
  The Imaginary space is a superset of the Reality space.

I do apologize for the super-vague, overly simplified definitions.
I’d be a true humanities student someday, I promise!

The Intuition

Me: So, Is Reality ⊂ Imagination? What do you think?
X: Yes!
Me: But why?
X: Obviously, how can it not be !

Haha, Does the last sentence ring a bell?
I believe we all accept the theory that Reality ⊂ Imagination without ever questioning it! I seek to question it in this blog post vis-a-vis with the assignment.

This theory while proposed in class by Prof. Navjyoti, I’d agree, felt perfectly intuitive. So, I seek to challenge intuition itself!
Without any further ado, let’s dive in…

What is Reality? What is Imagination?
The biologist Lewis Walpert believes that Science does violence to common sense. I’d totally agree! Look at the History of it!

Quantum Theory — The clichéd example!

Lets begin with Quantum Theory as an illustration.
Keeping aside the conclusions as of now, the very assumptions that Quantum theory makes are bizarre! Dawkins exclaims “It’s so queer that physicists resort to one or another paradoxical interpretation of it! So queer that David Deutsch, in “The Fabric of Reality” embraces the many-worlds interpretation of Quantum theory, since the worst that can be said about it is It’s preposterously wasteful !”

The World of Neutrinos

Why not follow intuition?
Science has taught us, against all intuition that things apparently solid, like rocks and stones almost consist of empty space.
But, Dawkins asks — Why do rocks, and other solids look and feel hard, impenetrable then? The novel proposal is that we have evolved to think like this, furthermore this very process is what should limit our thinking.

Let’s perform a thought experiment with a Neutrino!
Assuming it evolved from Neutrino-sized ancestors, it would believe with sheer obviousness that Rocks do consist of almost empty space. Quantum Theory, a part of its daily life, would seem so real, it would believe all findings from Humanity about the Quantum world to be trivially true.

Matter — A useful fiction

We often think and question matter — What is Matter? What is not Matter?
Steve Grand is positively scathing about our preoccupation with matter itself. He asks — Why always matter? He questions — Why do we usually perceive and even imagine solid, material things as really things at all? Why do waves of Electromagnetic fluctuation in vacuum seem unreal, honestly?
Yes, To the extent that Victorians thought that waves must travel in some material! They couldn’t determine what, hence came up with Ether. Why?
Because it must be some material!

No wonder we’ve evolved in a world where matter is useful fiction!

Life, Death and Atoms — Who am ‘I’ ?

Steve Grand theorizes that we are more like a Wave than you know, a permanent thing. Dawkins beautifully illustrates it as follows:

Recollect a very vivid memory from your childhood.
The question is — “Were you really there at that time?”
You’d reply “Obviously! That’s why I remember it!”
Aha! That’s when Dawkins drops the bombshell! You weren’t there!

Not even a single atom that is in your body today was there when it took place! In fact, Atoms just momentarily come together to briefly be you!

The only reasonable theory that I’ve come across which debunks this follows this thought -
‘You’ are not the atoms in your body, but the pattern of atoms.
The consciousness is an emergent feature of that pattern!
But, if its true, what’s the difference between a good night’s sleep and Death? The atoms completely change overnight, right?
Can the Pattern still remain identical? Very unlikely, right?

Hence, The thing that I would call “Myself” would vanish forever, with only the memory remaining every time I die (i.e. sleep)! This theory is elegantly illustrated here. Please do pause and read it. It’s totally worth the time!

So, What do we mean by ‘Ourselves’?
Concluding from the above illustrations,
-> We cannot define who we are!
-> We failed miserably at defining the world around us.

Therefore, I concur with Dawkins, ‘Reality’ isn’t a word that we should use with simple confidence.

Debunking — Reality ⊂ Imagination

So, I ask again.. What is Reality? And what is Imagination?

• What is it that makes us capable of imagining anything at all?
• What clues does it give about what we can possibly imagine?
• Are there things about the universe, which will forever be beyond our grasp, but not beyond the grasp of some superior intelligence?
• Are there things about the universe, which are by principle ungraspable by any mind, however superior?

I’d like to conclude quoting the famous Biologist J.B.S Haldane,
“Now, my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, it is queerer than we can suppose. I suppose there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any possible philosophy.”

References:

Almost entirely inspired from the TED talk by Richard Dawkins: Why the universe seems so strange?
Also some things referred from Existential Comics here and there!