Imaginary Friends

When we were very young, we had friends who were toys, whom we assigned lives to, and who were what we now call imaginary friends. And supposedly, as adults we are supposed to grow out of such imaginings. But that is not it at all.

You see, the imaginary is the most powerful form of cognition. Whether it is a formal (in several senses) construct like a memory palace, used to recall a myriad facts, or a stuffed bear with a too-small red shirt and now become a cultural icon, we use the hologram images of our imagination to store an abundance of our lives.

Here's the thing. Even if (as Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris assert) our cognition of self and the world is merely an emergent illusion stemming from chemical complexity, all that illusory richness retains structure better if the basis of illusion is more complex. It is like having a back-story that is never published, but forms the basis for a fantasy realm.

And so, Christopher Robin and Pooh, Calvin and Hobbes, and a host of other half-real and half-imagined friends, here's to you! May you never fade except as the tired old illusion of life fades, and may you greet us as we pass from illusory existence to illusory ending.

My previous cat was a smokey darkness with white socks. He waited on the roof, with only the shadow of his pricking ears to show his presence. Then you opened the door, and that would galvanise him into some frantic process of descent which would end with him in the house at your feet, hoping for a rub-and-scratch. He is gone now, buried in a little plot to the side of the house. But I, the illusory resident in this illusory realm, still look up seeking pointy ears some evenings. That illusion of memory, of life other than my own, it makes me seem more real even though Dennett and Harris might very well be right.

Who's to know? These days, marmalade sun-cat looks upon me with curious green eyes, miaows softly, comes for his morning head-rub. Over the years, I have come to associate intelligence and warmth with that cat. It is no doubt an illusion. But it gives me an illusory warmth far greater than the chilly sad confusion of Sam Harris's Free Will, in which he asserts that he had none when he wrote the book and I had none, reading it.

And so again, here's to imaginary friends, even those we have the luxurious illusion of thinking are real. Here's to the friends of my childhood: Darwin, Tesla, Newton, and the powerful ghosts who once lived within an imaginary five-mile radius of my imaginary birthplace in that great imaginary, the Isle of Ely. Cheers, and a solemn sherry to you all.

Responses 003 (Nov 2012)

The short list for the year ahead has this as Question 3: "Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand." — Albert Einstein. Do you agree?

I think this question is one of those trivial ones which can be made important by deliberately introducing extra material. So let's dispense with the trivial approach first.

Knowledge does not exist without information, and information does not exist without data. At each stage, the questions of validity, reliability, utility, generalisability, transferability (etc., etc.) intervene in an attempt to prove or disprove the various claims that arise (whether actual or potential). Hence the only way to claim knowledge is to subject it to tests of some kind of reality — something that contrasts or is contrasted with imagination. Without imagination, i.e. the capacity to create images/imagery or otherwise imagine, we cannot test knowledge. Knowledge therefore has no importance without imagination.

In fact, etymologically and historially, the image or imago is the ideal or fully-developed concept of something. The real is merely the sub-standard shadow in Plato's cave. We see this usage in the relationship between (for example) real and ideal gases.

At this point, we can concede completely that Einstein was right. However, as always, a case can be made for negotiating on the basis of 'important'. What does 'important' mean?

'Important', from Latin importare, is used to indicate something 'brought in', 'brought into the discussion'. This explains why 'import' can mean 'significance' as well as 'something shipped in'. When we say something is 'of import' or 'important', we are saying that it is a point to be noted, or that we should pay attention to it.

And that is why knowledge might be thought of as more important than imagination — knowledge is reality as far as we can confirm it, and is thus the basis of our action in this world. It introduces the key points to be considered in what we do, as opposed to imagination, which is what we might aspire to (or have realised that we can never attain).

The argument then, it seems to me, is whether the real is of greater value (practical or otherwise) than the ideal. It's a good debate to have. While the idea of an ideal gas allows us to conceptualise many things, no such gas exists — we have to solve problems in reality based on real gases.

Displacement

Some distant chronicler will note that along the way, I left sealed notes concerning people with odd appellations. Who, for example, is Wolfberry? Who on earth was Trivandrum?

The answer to these questions, and many more, is that in some sense they are all figments of my imagination. I should hate to think that people might think of them in a way wholly informed by my strange imaginings. But, on the subject of 'strange imaginings'... well, I was once accused of using 'smearing innuendo'. Well, read through the whole blog and see if you can find any. No longer constrained by gentlemanly civility, I will say outright that there is none here.

Rather, I suspect that some people are prone to projection, a phenomenon in which people tend to attribute to others the habits of mind and body that they themselves possess. Then again, it might also be displacement, a phenomenon in which people tend to pick on harmless victims so as to disperse their rage (and other negative affect) towards objects which are dangerous or untouchable.

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Notes:

1. I have given many of my associates odd little names like 'Wolfberry' or 'Trivandrum'. I do this because I am genuinely fond of them despite my shortcomings and theirs. Haha. On the other hand, should I have accidentally referred to any specific person as 'Grand Inquisitor', I would probably not have meant it kindly.

2. This is my 1200th post! Wow, it's been a long journey indeed.

The Black Swan

Those of you who have heard me speak before might remember the mentions of black swans, chaos and catastrophe theory. This all came back to me as I read Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. It is an interesting book; it is, as far as I know, pretty ground-breaking in exposing the facts people don't often think about.

Taleb destroys, with great finesse and remorseless logic, the idea that the normal distribution is a useful predictor for the big movements in history and in life. In fact, statistical arguments depending on the normal distribution and its proxies seem to end up giving us more-of-the-same, mediocre possibilities. History may have these as her staple diet, but the muscles and bones of history require sterner stuff.

But this is not all of his argument. He goes after Platonicism and other models that seek to shoehorn data into ideal models. He comes out in favour of the legitimate imagination and the knowledge of unknowledge, this last typified by Umberto Eco's antilibrary. An antilibrary, as he deftly explains, is that portion of a person's library which has not been read and yet is an integral part of that library; it is thus the mobile resource on the intellectual battlefield. People who don't read are one thing; people who have nothing they want to read are quite another.

The problem is that the world tends to seek to find consoling and conforming narratives to explain chaos, catastrophe and crisis. St Paul's epistle to the Romans mentions as much: be not conformed to the world. I remember very distinctly my meditations on this the day before my career was elevated to a different plane. I only read Taleb's book yesterday. To my surprise, I found myself feeling validated.

I do believe firmly that vision must be broad and imaginative. I also believe firmly that contrasting and outlying views must be fully examined before the decision is taken to reject them. There is, as many have said before, a bias against those who solve problems that haven't occurred yet, or who invent problems which might never happen. This bias favours those who solve problems that have come to be; the problem about such problems is that once they have already arisen, they are much more expensive to deal with than when they were merely imaginative possibilities.

That is why we must be transformed by the renewal of our mind. That is why we must see with 'blinding sight', with inspiration and not with the conventional wisdom. That is why we must not conform to the normal distribution of the world. We are all, in potential, far better than that; it is mediocrity that creates the curve and treats the outliers and possibilities of excellence as fantastic and irresponsible. On the contrary, it is the mediocre mind which is being irresponsible, which holds back the flowering and blasts the stalk before a bloom unfolds. How sad it is, to see the garden burn.

I'm A Jinn Nation

The world is not only stranger than we imagine, it is even stranger than we CAN imagine.

The Economist is a pretty serious and intelligent magazine, though permeated with dry wit and thus possibly combustible. However, the article linked to above is really one of those 'secret conspiracy', 'X-Files', kind of stories. Yet, who has read Neil Gaiman and not believed? You might find the jinn even in London, for the older cities are filled with genius loci of all kinds.

Ah, the power of it all. Imagination.

The Greater Trumps: (20) Imagination

The chalice hangs suspended over the lake. The lake ripples, but we do not know whether what comes forth will be the arm of a lady in white samite, brandishing a sword; or the afanc, roaring anger at being awakened in this age. Behind the chalice, or perhaps above, we see two curiously wise eyes - we cannot tell whether they belong to a man or a woman. The lake might be a river's mouth - we see it banked to the left and right, but cannot glimpse a farther shore.

The scene is too full of imagery, too full of potential, for anyone to see all the possibilities. But one thing is clear, from the wise eyes to the vanishing point of perspective, from the chalice and the ripples: this montage symbolises Vision and Possibility. It isn't the extravagant chance of the Wheel, nor the inner vision of the Hanged Man - it is the outward gaze, with too many things within its scope.

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It isn't always hardcore poetry. Sometimes, I'm affected by the power of song lyrics; especially those of Lennon and McCartney. Here are some lines from John Lennon's Imagine:

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world...

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one

Of course, it's a somewhat secular utopia which is offered to us. It doesn't convince me, but it does make me think about the ideas which frame our humanity, and what lies beyond that frame.