Infinite Imagination

Finite evidence. Unique experience

Humans are eternal.

What I mean by this is that the things that are true for humans within human experience are unchanging. But the important thing to understand are the qualifications embedded in this.

Within Human Experience
Humans indulge their imaginations, and within the aegis of human imagination is a virtual infinity. We dream things that are impossible. And those of us who dream a great deal have always hat that experience in which we suddenly wake up and find that we are not witnessing the explosion of the Bomb, or the professor looking at us naked during final exams doesn’t really exist. It was just a dream. There were probably 2000 Shades of Grey that simply couldn’t fit in one novel. Fantastic imagination is only marginally useful in reality.

We all know the joke about the girlfriend who wakes up from the dream that boyfriend was cheating, and smacks him on the back of the head. That’s not necessary. In fact, it’s toxic. The crucial difference is the matter of evidence. We’ll get to that soon enough.

My point here is that within human experience, dreams may play a role, but what you actually do in reality that produces evidence is a small subset of our imagination. So you can say that imagination is infinite, but reality is finite. You can look up at the stars, but you’re not going there. It’s very important to make that distinction.

Lived Experience
I have mentioned before that I have come to accomodate the popular concept of ‘lived experience’. Everybody has one. But nobody has experienced visiting another planet much less a star. Don’t get it twisted, the moon landing was real and the moon is not a planet. Your lived experience, whatever you claim it to be, is within the capacity of other humans to understand because we are humans. We can even understand your fantastic dreams. After all, what is watching TV but understanding the fantastic dreams of others?

So the first mistake I hear in these dark times is “I couldn’t possibly understand what it is like to be somebody like you.” Insert intersectional combination #245 here. It’s either a confession that your own imagination is crippled and that you are emotionally retarded or it is a sympathetic dodge. The sympathetic dodge is generally a vote for #245’s rage, grievance or shaggy dog tale. Of course there’s nothing wrong with that, if the sympathy is genuine. But it’s still a dodge. That is especially true what what goes unsaid is sympathy for you and those like you - the clan ahem the ‘community’ of 245s, nay the historical diaspora of 245s who have all presumably had the same lived experience.

I don’t think lived experience is so flexible. I don’t think it’s so simple for one man to walk in another’s shoes. We have to be satisfied by their story. We have to take what they say at face value. We have to understand their story. And of course we can, because we all watch TV. We all understand Luke Skywalker’s father (Vadar) telling his son, search your feelings and you know it to be true. This has remarkable resonance in the eternal human experience. But it’s also possible to take a DNA sample. That would be evidence. In the Star War’s universe when you can sit in a Bacta Tank and integrate perfect robot hands, I’m sure they know how to do DNA matching. Lived experience is not something to be shared because it is individual. You cannot speak for anyone’s human experience of you were not a party to it. Even then, stories diverge. Ask any divorced couple what exactly went wrong. Ask any fired employee and their boss what exactly happened. Ask any brother and sister who started the fight. We can be satisfied by the story, but that’s not evidence.

Yet it is easy for us to understand an individual human experience because we are humans and our imaginations work the same way. The Wizard of Oz is a great movie because it echoes a familiar human experience in our imaginations. Millions over the generations have watched the story, but how many have actually survived a tornado in Kansas that raises a house, crushes a witch but preserves the the passenger who had no seat belts? And her little dog too. Human experience is unchanging. We understand the narrative.

Natural Phenomena
On the other hand, tornados kill people. Tornados are not narrative. They are not narrative. Tornados are natural phenomena. Tornados are artifacts of the universe. They throw objects like 1000 pound telephone poles at speeds of 150 mph. Easy. We use narrative to explain that, as I just did, but there is a very specific way to determine the evidence of such an event. At this moment I am merely asking you to use your imagination, but I am not putting you into Dorothy’s shoes. You can understand this, but you will not experience this.

It is not in your nature, in your evolutionary makeup to implicitly understand what it is to be a tornado. But it is in your nature to implicitly understand what it is to smile, to grimace, to feel embarrassment or betrayal. The tornado does not kill the witch because it felt grumpy that day and decided to take it out on her.

I don’t want to spend a lot of time this morning going into all of the details of the process of scientific experimentation. But part of this process involves trust in a process that works with measurable evidence, but it starts with imagination that generates a conjecture. We can all understand stories that tell us X, Y and Z about things beyond human experience, but there are only very specific ways to begin to understand the nature of those things. How they work. Why they work. When they work. What they actually are. The reality of these things.

So I want to point out the difference between those things we cannot experience, like walking on another planet, and our imagination about that human experience if and when it occurs. But more importantly, the here and now that we do experience, whether or not we can articulate it. That is lived experience is something to share.

I say all this in the context of fitness. So here is the challenge.

Social Fitness
In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, the White Queen says “Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” In our postmodern world, we use the power of social media to put such impossible narratives into our imaginations. Since we are all capable of imagining the infinite, we might even smack our friends on the back of their heads for saying something or believing something that offends us. But did they actually do it? Do you have evidence?

We all like to believe at various successful moments in our lives, that there are thousands even millions of people who might sympathize with narratives we write. Well, who hasn’t taken lessons from Darth Vader and paid money to George Lucas? Who hasn’t leveraged that tale from a long time ago in a galaxy far far away? Shouldn’t our narratives make us successful like George Lucas, or maybe a lessor known novelist?

The danger of social fitness is that human beings are already innately capable of understanding narrative. [This is a claim you may challenge]. Therefore the infinity of imagination might make us vulnerable to believe impossible things. But what we observe of tornados are not what tornados actually are. They are just the stories we tell about tornados. This is the split between human nature and nature itself. To understand nature itself requires a special kind of disciplined process, which involves imagination and conjecture but requires evidence.

Your social bubble will collapse upon the sharp edge of speeding telephone poles. The science of physics can prove this. But that same social bubble can believe innumerable fantasies about the historic diaspora of intersection #245.

I have met in the past week, a number of people who have been smacked on the back of their heads by their utterances of ‘trigger words’. They have lost friends. They have risked careers. They have questioned their own sanity. But mostly they have been profoundly disappointed by the willingness of people they trusted to defy evidence in jumping to conclusions. Why, they ask, do you believe the impossible about me? Why do you presume to understand my individual lived experience?

Why indeed?

We’ll talk more about this. See you next time.

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PS. Thanks to the writers group who prompted me with this format idea.