Why I imagine, and so should you
I am no guru. I do not have a winning playbook, and in fact I consider myself a sore loser in every aspect of my life except one - imagination. Even before I could speak broken words, I had a very vivid sense of imagination. I imagined a lot of things that kids usually do - flying through the sky, dragons and aliens, strange animals under the earth's crust and so on - and also a lot more that were "different", for the lack of a better word.
I remember a number of events that had actually never happened. These are false memories, crafted by my brain from overzealous bouts of imagination. For instance, I distinctly remember holding a baby green and yellow turtle, which I later found out to be a Belly Slider turtle. This had clearly never happened, and yet I can still remember holding it on top of my palm one morning in Spring. My brain had conjured up a scene not unlike the hallucinations in popular AI models, albeit in higher definition and stronger believability.
Why did this happen? Why did my brain weave these deliberate lies, and could this mean that much of my memory is actually a distorted layer on top of something more real, more boring? No, there's much more to it than appears.
My imaginative mind was triggered from a dissatisfaction with reality, and as I gathered more experiences, these concocted scenarios started becoming more visible than the boring reality itself. At some points in my journey, they completely replaced reality, while at other points they stuck around like an annoying thorn in my pants. The power of imagination is more intense than we have accounted for, since it acts like a filter between the mind and the raw truth of existence. This filter is how our million years' worth of genomic jugglery prevents itself from being overwhelmed by the colors of a parrot or the painful memory of childhood trauma.
I imagine, a lot. I can illustrate a typical train of thought as it winds through the strange landscape of my consciousness:
- (I see a cloud) Hmm, I wonder if that's a cumulus...these have flat bases but the nimbus clouds are slightly warped at the bottom, why though? Okay surely the height and the mixing of vapor and gases - navier-stokes equations - now how does the light interact with the CCN? If I was an alien looking down at Earth, what could I gather from just cloud behavior?
- Cloud behavior reminds me, what would it look like to cruise down the thick atmosphere of Jupiter? The violent maelstrom of gases and thunder that would churn the life out of anything, that's right there outside the transparent window of my spaceship, and I can peer through something no human eyes have seen before. Wow. I wonder what Neptune is like. What would an alien planet look like? If I really was the alien looking down at Earth, what notion of life would I carry with me?
- How would aliens steer their spaceships? Ionic drives, Fusion drives, Warp drives or something even more exotic? Perhaps something to do with Casimir vacuum, but that's a tiny energy. Has somebody done any work on the actual Casimir vacuum (goes down a deep rabbit hole of Russian lab work and declassified texts). [Hours later] Ah, it seems propulsion science is one of the clearest indications of a Kardashev Type-1 civilization. There should be some map that scans the visible universe for these signatures and crunches numbers like SETI@Home or something.
- Zeppelins should make a comeback. We need Steampunk, we need Solarpunk. We need machines that look grand and achieve the ordinary in extraordinary levels of simplicity; we need simple machines that achieve extraordinary feats. Both ends of the spectrum, united by the common thread of human ingenuity. I want to walk out into a sunny day and watch beautiful green and gold painted Zeppelins cruising between floating restaurants with elaborate signs and suspended platforms where Humans and Androids share fresh sandwiches. Imagine the world of "Blade Runner", but with abundant trees and wild spaces and no gentrification. A world not of harmony, but of willful meaning hardcoded into every aspect of the lived experience. Where the mind is an integral part of the machine, and the machine is not devoid of a mind. Where the sky is not obscured by thick black smoke characteristic of dystopia, but beautiful cottony cumulus clouds of hope.
And so on, until the mundane goblet of reality spills some truth into my fertile mind, obscuring the train and its imagery for a while but never wiping it out. I dream of things that shouldn't exist, and my brain's internal "type checker" vehemently opposes all nonsensical stuff even before they are compiled into a coherent canvas of imagination. However, I have always waged a battle against this strong checker, and will continue to do so, because I have to imagine. To dream, to revel in the great filter and peer through it - that is my purpose. I will imagine, I must imagine - I'm sure Prof. Hilbert's Fedora must be nodding in silence from the great beyond.
Because you see, imagination is the essence of existence. The greatest minds in neuroscience and AI all agree, that the sign of a healthy mind is indicated by its imaginative powers. And the sign of a superior intelligence is the seamless transfer of insights and intuition from the platonic world of imagination back to the more grounded world derived from the senses. The philosophy of Advaita Vedanta expressively goes in-depth into this, the metaphysics of being. And to harness this extraordinary power of visualization and build an internally self-consistent world model - that is perhaps the most ecstatic feeling I've ever known. This is the window into the proverbial "Aha!" moments that feel so extraordinary in hindsight. Galileo and his insights, Netwon and his apple, Wallace and his evolutionary intuition, Einstein and his geometric insights, Tesla and his inventions - each act was pure imagination at play. The power to chalk out an abstraction the world and weave out its details, is something even the "Oxford School of Physics" swears by, in its emphasis on Model-building in Physics.
And thus, I have always loved to imagine simply because it is the most rewarding of all human experiences by a huge stretch. Nothing ever comes close to the feeling of abstracting away a world of unnecessary details and homing in on the kernel of my thoughts and then building up a custom world for it to exist. I imagine simply because it gives me a taste of the grander scale that exists beyond the senses, almost as I'm grappling at the texture of reality through a fine fabric curtain. The magic is tangible, but only for the most relentless and intentional bouts of imagination. This is akin to the act of creating an impossible peak and then climbing it just because "It's there!".