Reality and imagination: two sides of the same coin?
By Celeste Ng
image credit: Flickr
In an essay for the New York Times, professor of logic Timothy Williamson examines the connections between imagination and reality—and comes to some counterintuitive conclusions:
On further reflection, imagining turns out to be much more reality-directed than the stereotype implies. If a child imagines the life of a slave in ancient Rome as mainly spent watching sports on TV, with occasional household chores, they are imagining it wrong. That is not what it was like to be a slave. The imagination is not just a random idea generator. The test is how close you can come to imagining the life of a slave as it really was, not how far you can deviate from reality.
Fiction and reality, Williamson appears to argue, are intricately intertwined. Fiction may help us better negotiate reality —and it can also help us expand our understanding, and vice versa:
Even imagining things contrary to our knowledge contributes to the growth of knowledge, for example in learning from our mistakes. Surprised at the bad outcomes of our actions, we may learn how to do better by imagining what would have happened if we had acted differently from how we know only too well we did act.
This is an interesting wrinkle on the whole notion that fiction is escapist. It can – and certainly does – have those elements for me, but even in a humanoid creatures from Mars SciFi there’s still an element of considering different facets of human nature (since even that was written by a human). A parallel for me would be film. I really like horror movies. Of course one reason is because being frightened in an ultimately safe fashion is enjoyable, but also because they let you imagine the worst thing and what you’d do.
Reality is a created construct.
If three people see a man hit by a car and killed in the street. The first one says he stepped out purposefully and committed suicide.
The second says a person behind him pushed him.
The third says he clearly tripped.
No one is lying. Each believes what he/she saw is the reality and they are all right and wrong. Unless it can be proven otherwise, their belief makes each version the ‘reality’.
It is not what happens that creates reality but what we AGREE happened. So if someone say vampires exist (sparkly or otherwise), the society as a whole says this is fantasy. As a society/majority, we agree there are no vampires.
However if I caught one and exposed him to the public, showed them the fangs, the blood drinking, the DNA proof.
Then reality for the whole might change.
Reality is what is agreed upon as true by a majority of those involved unless it can be proven otherwise by an believable source.