On the imagination

My Uncle Laban lives in southern France. He’s married to a beautiful woman named Angeline, whom I don’t dare call “Aunt Angeline” for fear of being told I look like a second-rate divorce lawyer on Facebook. This past November, he attempted to find a turkey for an American Thanksgiving meal but couldn’t, so he “frankensteined” one out of a roasted chicken and other foods that included a vegetarian option so that what ended up on the table had the shape of a turkey but was definitely not a turkey. His guests enjoyed his effort—even appreciated it—but there was no mistaking what they were eating.

It was not a turkey. Just some food arranged in the shape of what a turkey would be.

Our imagination is my Uncle Laban: creative, resourceful, and visionary. But it can’t create original images. What it creates are Frankensteins: images concocted from bits and pieces of sensory experiences. The new image, then, is new in the sense of different, but the raw material of mental frankensteining is from sensory experience. 

If the person has the ability to then birth this "image" into the material world—i.e., a sculptor, painter, architect, author, bricklayer, software developer, or maker of anything and any kind—the new image may not be identifiable by all of the original sensory images used to created it. The seams in the product may be smoothed over and untraceable, but what the creator saw in their mind originally was based on sensory materials because sensory materials are the building blocks the imagination uses to create.

Photo by Susan Holt Simpson on Unsplash

This concept of the imagination isn't novel because it, too, is an image. I can’t describe it without using “building blocks” and “seams” and “frankenstein.” All these words are metaphors describing something else. Even the word “image” brings something to your mind. The concept has its origin in Plato's wax tablet metaphor, which is also built on sensory images of the writing technology of his own time. At some point, the Athenian took what he saw, used, and touched, and applied it to the mind to create an understanding of how the mind recognizes a person. It occurs in the Theaetetus where Socrates is talking to a mathematician named Theodorus and one of Theodorus’ students named Theaetetus. Here’s his explanation of the role the mind’s wax tablet plays in the act of recognizing a person:

• We see someone in the distance and wonder "Who is this?"

• Our mind reaches into its memory and pulls an image that’s been impressed on the memory like an impression made in wax of someone that it holds over the current sight of the person in the distance.

• Recognition happens when the mind detects a match: the person in the distance walking toward us is X.

• As the person ages, the imagination continues to update the current image while sometimes retaining older ones. Sometimes.

This model readily acknowledges that the mind can mistakes. The person can be identified improperly even though the memory image and the current sensory experience seem to match correctly: we think we see Bill, but it's actually Tom whom we encounter when Tom gets closer and is verified. Sometimes, we don't recognize the person in the distance, but upon getting closer we realize we do know the person after all.  And vice versa.

The mind fascinates me—particularly the role of memory and recognition—and there are many applications. When we read the news, we are encountering many images that create an image of information. Fact-checking is a process of looking at what the large image is based on what all of the smaller images—we call them “facts”—are. Without fact-checking, we’re capable of deciding foolishly that the news we're reading is correct simply because it aligns with an image of information we want to see—i.e., one that we’ve already created in our minds and believe is true. It’s like thinking we recognize someone in the distance without verifying whether that person really is whom we think they are as in Plato’s wax tablet metaphor. Keep in mind that there are more chances of us being incorrect than correct. We have to verify, measure, and check to make sure that the information we espouse and pass on to others is constructed accurately from things that can be measured, reproduced, and falsifiable—the things that make a fact a fact. 

Rorschach inkblot test image card #2

This facet of the imagination was front and center when I was having conversations with people in 2021 about COVID vaccines. Most of them were on the side of the political spectrum who believed one particular image was true—the COVID vaccines were ineffective—because of another image they first believed true—that the head of the CDC was in cahoots with big pharma—without checking the images creating that larger image. So, they discarded any image that contradicted this other image because their perspective—a way of seeing life based on images they accepted and rejected—could not bear the possibility that the COVID vaccines were effective. Science and time have proven the opposite and that some of these people were also fans of Alex Jones.

That’s a tired context, though.

A more enduring conversation for me is the imagination's role in creating understanding. That's stated vaguely, but I'll put it this way. When we don't understand a problem, the imagination goes to work to create a prototype of what we think the process entails. It consciously and subconsciously labors to build a product that elicits the kind of result we see. We then verify the product by creating it and either solving the problem or learning one more way that it doesn't work. An easy example is the light bulb. Thomas Edison was obviously not the first to conceive the idea of a light in a dark room. In the primordial past, humans saw what the sun or moon provided and wanted to create the same experience at night or in a dark space such as a cave. They imagined a light source they could transport and someone somewhere created one using fire so that each room became a universe all its own with its own tiny sun lighting the darkness. 

“I have not failed 10,000 times—I've successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work.” (Thomas Edison)

Photo by Jonathan Borba on Unsplash

I see this process as the best explanation of what several prominent religions call being "created in the image of God." We are most alive when we are creating. Creating requires the ability to imagine. Imagining—i.e., the process of creating an image using the imagination—requires sensory experiences. Perhaps that's the major difference between us and the divine: the divine doesn't need sensory experience to create. We praise our creator most purely when we imitate their activity with our own creations, whether that is creating a software program, building a house, knitting a hat, writing a poem or cooking.

We are most alive and most human when we create.