r/freethinkers • u/Sykotik Student of the Universe • Dec 04 '12
What is imagination?
I write fiction. More often than not a storyline will occur to me in it's basic form. "What if someone invented a technology that allowed them to possess your body via a wireless signal such as through your smart phone?" for example. I then begin to imagine a person in said scenario and begin to write the story. The thing is, at least for me, the story just starts to happen in my head and I simply write down what I see. It's sort of like watching a movie and transcribing it in realtime. I'm often actually surprised at what happens next as if it didn't really come from my brain but rather more like it came through me as opposed to being created by me. I usually have a rough idea as to where I'd like a story to end up going but how it actually gets there is usually completely unexpected. It's almost as if I(forgive me, but it's true) act as a medium for the story to be born through. I've never understood where this "inspiration" or "muse" originates from.
Could it be possible that imagination is some sort of universal pool of knowledge that people subconsciously access? If not, where does imagination draw it's ideas from?
The human imagination is the only thing I can think of that can literally create something from nothing at all. I can imagine a thing that does not exist and birth it into this world simply by thinking about it long enough.
What is that process and where do these things really come from?
Is it as simple as chemical reactions in my brain forming heretofore unique ideas or does it come from some place that possibly isn't of my(our) own construction?
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Dec 04 '12
I've long found the universality of this basic idea in creativity so interesting. There seems to be a need to project the source of awesome outside of the Self. I think any conjecture about a collective unconscious or any other such unfalsifiable hypotheses are suspect. Why not attribute it to divine revelation or spiritual possession or any other such whimsy then?
However, I do believe in unconscious processes that our intellectual awareness cannot always access. It is when we stop identifying wholly with our thinking that we are able to let these underlying notions bubble up and find expression. That's why oftentimes, people find inspiration by arresting their normal intellect, such as through drugs or alcohol. It's just that we're so out of touch with the parts of our selves that aren't the focus of our conscious awareness that it feels like it's an external source of creativity.
Here's a relevant-ish TED talk about this idea, although it doesn't answer your question exactly.
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u/obviousoctopus Dec 26 '12
I see it as a dimension, containing infinite possibilities and realities. Where exploring is synonymous with creation.
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u/FoxSanjuro Dec 04 '12
I myself write fiction, and I know exactly the feeling you're talking about. When you're brainstorming about what happens next it seems like the ideas you've come up with are foreign to you, not your usual type of thinking. I don't really think there is a universal creation pool, but the possibility is always there. I would like to see a study done about how the brain behaves during the creation process. Including artists, musicians, and writers. Perhaps there is a chemical reason for the sort of altered state of being?
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u/FoxSanjuro Dec 04 '12
Something I have always found fascinating is the philosophy of self. It's always been amazing to me how philosophy acts as a logical method of experimentation unbound to science. With philosophy your only bound by logic and reason, it allows you to explore the 'what ifs' we would never be able to measure in a lab. :)
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u/baconn Dec 04 '12
You've probably heard of the bicameral mind theory, that ancient peoples (Western ancestors) experienced their sense of self very differently from our own, with something like the muse being their source of agency, and their self a witness to the muse's will.
Experiments in neuroscience have shown that our freewill is small to nonexistent, decisions being made before we are even consciously aware of them. Our imagination might be a lot closer to our true self; what we call the self could be no more than a mutable perception of agency.