Tag: imagination

Imagination = Empathy

May 23, 2020

Humans are the only (to our knowledge) beings capable of intentionally imagining a fictitious or fabricated reality.

• Imagine you’re in a desert. There’s nothing but greasewood brush, tussocks of bramble and strange looking cactus, bulbous nodes dangling off platter sized palms like testicles on a dying mule. Overhead, buzzards like drones circle your desiccated shape, a shape barely wide enough to cast a shadow. You step aside an unsuspecting boulder to have your calf bit and pumped full of rattlesnake venom. No warning. No baby-rattle susurration before the strike. The agony hits like a hot brand. You stumble and fall, your breath squeezed from your chest. A sensation like molten mercury seeps up your leg. The beast bites and slithers off, content in the knowledge that, though you won’t be its next meal, you will most definitely feed a fellow high desert compatriot.•

OK. Did you go there? Did you read along and imagine your/their plight? If so, then it was your imagination that provided the empathy you felt for this unfortunate soul lost in the desert.

Empathy is your imagination placing you in the situation of another.

Empathy is you commiserating with, through the virtual world of your mind’s pictorial capability, another being, human or otherwise.

You can imagine, therefore you can feel another’s suffering—virtually at least.

It is due to our expansive, our far-too-large-for-our-own-good brains that we have been cursed with the ability to empathize with another creature. We can imagine their pain. Their suffering. Their soul crushing loss or failure, or shame. Our imagination gives us this ability.

Altruism is our ability to share, often to our own detriment, our personal safety, wealth and prosperity. Why would we ever do this? Dogs don’t do this. Dolphins, chimps, corvids—species with advanced intelligence, even consciousness don’t do this. Only humans go out of their way to ensure another’s survival. Why?

Because we can imagine how it feels to be that other being.

Our imagination is the source of our empathy.

Memory = Imagination

May 16, 2019

Here’s an interesting thought:

In order to remember anything, you must imagine it.

Visualize this: a black-with-white-spots bowling ball, spinning on the tip of a pool cue held on the nose of a pink poodle, wearing Elton John garb and glasses, while peddling a stainless steel tricycle.

Do you see it?

Now, recall the inside of your refrigerator.

One is a fabrication while the other is a memory. Yet both are constructed from the same mental processes – imagination. We must imagine memories to remember them. Your first car. Your first house. Your favorite coffee cup. All memories, all recreated as imagined visions.

Now, who’s to say that your memories are not fabricated from nothing — everything you “think” you experienced in the past is just a planted “imagination” — like that pink poodle and its glam antics — they never happened. You only think they did because of memories — which are…