According to your comments, yesterday’s post was my worst ever. Most people seemed to think I was beating a dead horse with a stick made entirely of my own condescension. I was preachy and boring and the lack of penis references bordered on irresponsible. So what the hell got into me?
Sometimes I think my main motivation in life, after survival, is curiosity. Yesterday I was wondering about imagination. Specifically, I was wondering how many people could IMAGINE being wrong about a major perception.
Based on the comments, I’d say not many.*
Imagination is important. Arguably, every major problem on earth can be attributed to a lack of imagination, or an excess. Terrorists have too much imagination about the afterlife. Our leaders have too little imagination about everything from energy policy to health. And the economy works only to the extent it rewards imagination in the form of innovation.
I wonder if imagination is like most other talents and can be developed through practice. Could researchers use hypothetical questions to test people’s baseline willingness to imagine things that violate their beliefs? And could our powers of imagination be improved with practice?
People who are well-traveled seem to have enhanced imaginations, in the sense that they can better imagine the world through other people’s eyes. And interior designers who have seen lots of different homes are better at imagining how to furnish your empty house. So I think it’s entirely feasible to change people’s skills at imagining.
If I could add one required class to every school, it would be a class on imagination. The students would learn the tools of critical thinking to curb excess imagination, and they would learn to recognize and suppress their own biases so they can imagine things outside their social box.
It won’t happen, but imagining it makes me happy.
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*To be fair, a few people answered my hypothetical question yesterday about evolution and extra dimensions, noting that the number of dimensions of reality might affect the quality of our perceptions, but not the underlying mechanism of change that defines evolution. That’s true if, by analogy, the shadow of a duck is a bad perception of an actual duck, as opposed to a guy making hand shadows of a duck. Since we don’t know what it means to have an extra dimension of space and time, there’s no way to know from the shadow that the duck exists, so to speak. If time doesn’t really move forward, or objects only appear to move through space but don’t, I have no problem imagining that evolution is a faulty perception.
One answer to my hypothetical question yesterday might have been “I can imagine the discovery of extra dimensions invalidating our notion of evolution, but I think it is highly unlikely. And even if it happened, we are only equipped to deal with the world we perceive, and within that world, evolution is the best model we have.”