I have been giving some thought to the nature of imagination and in this, and a few posts following, I will share them.
I have suggested (most recently in my last post) there is far more about the universe than is picked up by our senses and perceived after being processed by the brain. This is an evolutionary necessity. Our senses and brains select enough to present a reasonably stable picture of the world around us.
Other species have senses different from our own. So, birds and insects for example, detect different wavelengths of light. They perceive colours unknown to humanity. We cannot conceive of different colours to the ones we know. But we know they exist because they relate to wavelengths of light and some animals can see light we cannot.
One question philosophers have asked, is whether we all perceive the same thing. The answer seems to be both yes and no. Yes because we perceive in sufficiently similar ways to be able to communicate about the things we perceive. I don't suppose we can ever be certain we all perceive, for example, colours in the same way. But the chances are we do because we seem to have a similar response to them. I suspect the major differences are culturally determined. There was a time when colours were not named and so people compared the colours of things, eg Homer, I think, writes of the 'wine dark sea'. Some people have a condition called synaesthesia, where they experience the sense data of one sense from the stimuli of another, eg some people perceive numbers or musical notes as colours.
So, everything we know is inside of our heads. We cannot know the universe as it really is because we have no access to it as it really is. We can use instruments to detect things outside the range of our senses but ultimately everything is processed by our brains.
The odd thing is we can agree about so much. I can describe an object to you and you can locate it and pick it up, I can give you directions to my house, I share a place with my neighbours and we all experience it in a very similar way.
My suggestion is everything we perceive is the work of our imagination. We distinguish what we call 'real' from what we call 'imaginary' through recognition. We carry a picture of a place or person in our minds and name what we see according to that picture. Several descriptions of the same thing will be both different and recognisable.
Theologically, I suggest we think of recognition as love. It is recognition this person and this place is unique, something to be treasured because it is unique. We fall in love when we contemplate the form of a tree, the detail of a beetle, the apparent infinity of the universe. Each of these things has its integrity, each time we look we see more and yet recognise it as the same.
Even the thing we hate has this property. Emotion often accompanies recognition and so it should. The thing we should fear is not our passions but our indifference.
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