DEE WILSON CONSULTING

This article is the seventh and final article in a series, "Imaginative Worlds." Previous articles have reviewed books about the dream life of animals, the cave art of early humans, the meaning of 'human' in the Epic of Gilgamesh, as well as books and plays about personal identity, social identity and political identity. This article reflects on the strengths and shortfalls of imagination as set forth in two outstanding books on the human mind, Stumbling on Happiness (2005) by Daniel Gilbert and Thinking Fast and Slow (2011) by Daniel Kahneman. 

 

The theme of this series is that human experience is strongly imaginative, i.e., shaped by mental creations greatly influenced but not determined by biology. Even perception, as discussed below, has an imaginative element, ditto for memory. Physical acts such as food consumption, sexual experiences and dying have powerful imaginative components, while social experience largely consists of shared imaginative frameworks in which groups of people take different roles in dramas with well understood rules and norms. 

 

Webster's New World Dictionary defines imagination as follows: "the act or power of forming mental images of what is not actually present." This is a useful definition that misses some key elements of imagination, e.g., it's affective qualities, and its importance in creating coherent and meaningful narratives, stories, theories and other conceptual frameworks. 'To imagine' can be to fill in the blanks of stories that have few factual elements, to speculate, to represent physical things or phenomena or mental concepts with symbols, to fantasize, to dream or day dream, to create games, art, religious beliefs, moral values, and social hierarchies. 

 

Cultural products and meaning are developed through imagination, which, however, is limited in a number of ways brilliantly described by Daniel Gilbert in Stumbling on Happiness. a book of philosophical importance as well as astute psychological observations. Gilbert asserts: " ... while rats and pigeons may respond to stimuli as they are presented in the world, people respond to stimuli as they are represented in the mind. Objective stimuli in the world create subjective stimuli in the mind, and it is these subjective stimuli to which people react." ( p.170) Concretely, humans are often responding to the imagined meaning of events rather than to physical stimuli. It is possible to be suddenly and deeply hurt by words or actions interpreted (without conscious thought) as sleights or insults.

 

Gilbert asserts that "... we respond to meanings -- and context, frequency and recency are three of the factors that determine which meaning we will infer when we encounter an ambiguous stimulus." (p. 172) In addition, when presented with a stimulus of ambiguous meaning, it (the brain) tends to interpret it the way it wants to, which is to say your preferences influence your interpretation ..." (p. 173) There is a Buddhist  saying: "we do not experience the world as it is;  we experience the world as we are." Supposed perceptions are often projections of moods, beliefs and preferences. 

 

Gilbert maintains that perceptions and world views are mixtures of reality and illusion: "We cannot do without reality and we cannot do without illusion. Both serve a purpose." (p. 177) He argues that humans have a psychological immune system "that defends the mind against unhappiness in much the same way the physical immune system defends the body against illness," but not at the cost of complete delusion. " .... When we face the pain of rejection, loss, misfortune, the psychological immune system must not defend us too well ("I'm perfect and everyone is against me") and must not fail to defend us well enough ("I'm a loser and I ought to be dead"). A healthy psychological immune system strikes a balance that allows us to feel good enough to cope ... but bad enough to do something about it. We need to be defended -- not defenseless or defensive - and thus our minds naturally look for the best view of things while simultaneously insisting that those views stick reasonably close to the facts." ( p. 178)   

 

Gilbert endorses a version of Kant's idealism: " ... our perceptions are not the result of a physiological process, by which our eyes somehow transmit an image of the world into our brains, but rather, they are the result of a psychological process that combines what our eyes see with what we already think, feel, know, want, and believe and then uses this combination of sensory information and preexisting knowledge to construct our perception of reality." (p. 94) Our brain "is not a simple recording device but a remarkably smart computer that gathers information, makes shrewd judgments and even shrewder guesses, and offers us its best interpretation of the way things are. ... we do not realize we are seeing an interpretation. ... In a sense, each of us is a counterfeiter who prints phony dollar bills and then happily accepts them for payment, unaware that he is both a perpetrator and victim of a well orchestrated fraud." ( p. 98).

 

Imagination is powered by desire and has strong preferences that influence not just how the world is perceived, but what is even noticed and given attention. Daniel Kahneman refers to confirmation bias, the purpose of which is to strengthen core beliefs and protect them from disconfirmation.  We tend to notice information or evidence that confirms beliefs and ignore, or minimize, information that challenges beliefs. 

    

Gilbert's discussion suggests that humans' imaginative capacity has a few basic operating rules: 
 

• imagination uses fragments of reality as building material; imaginative world's that lack some familiar elements  seem "unreal."       

• Imagination has difficulty with self awareness. Historical novels and science fiction stories and novels often create imagined worlds with vastly different circumstances and technologies than our own but peopled with characters who think and feel much like the authors and persons in their social worlds. Gilbert states: "the temptation to view the past through the lens of the present is nothing short of overwhelming." ( p. 162) 

• Imagination sometimes aims at deep truths but is rarely constrained by facts in the colloquial sense of factual, i.e. statements that are clearly true or false. For this reason, myths cannot be effectively countered with factual information, which may be dismissed as irrelevant when stating a world view. In this way of looking at events, a valid worldview determines factual truth, rather than vice versa. 

• Imagination values coherence. Kahneman points out that when experimental subjects are given a couple of seemingly unrelated words, e.g., banana and vomit, they will quickly make up a story that connects them without being instructed to do so. 

• Imagination adds affective qualities to all of its creations. Just as ( per Antonio Damasio in The Strange Order of Things ) there is no affect free perception, every imaginative creation elicits an affective reaction. Furthermore, moviemakers and dramatists have long been aware that viewers can be prompted to feel positive or negative feelings about a character or event in the movie or play through music or non verbal signals  (such as a character's smoking) without resistance and often with minimal audience awareness of how they are being influenced to feel by the writer and director. 

 

Gilbert points out that one of the most difficult imaginative challenges is to assess how oneself will feel following good fortune or bad fortune. He comments that almost everyone imagines their happiness would be much improved if they won the lottery or became famous for some positive achievement; but the evidence Gilbert discusses says otherwise. He comments that almost everyone believes that some types of misfortune would make them miserable, and then proceeds to cite numerous examples of persons who expressed their great happiness with the challenges and experiences of serious disabilities or social misfortune.    

 

Gilbert maintains that humans are not good judges of how we will feel in the future after unforeseen events.  Furthermore, memory is often an unreliable guide, both because memory is continually edited, including nightly in dreams, and because it is impossible to fully remember the pain or pleasure of some experiences, e.g., child birth or childhood. Humans are mysteries to themselves; and contrary to popular belief, "the paint is never dry." 

 

Finally, a world view: imagination is not (as some evolutionary biologists believe) a by product of big brains developed to increase the likelihood of physical survival. Rather, enhancing imaginative capacities is a main purpose of big brains in a cosmos that is first and foremost creative. Every human society is an imaginative world with real  consequences in a process of creation/ destruction that does not tire of discovering its potential. 

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-- Dee Wilson

 

deewilson13@aol.com