Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to Imagining something doesn't make it real.

Really?
Robert — (archived)

I would invite you to stare straight ahead, and notice what surrounds these words. The term "Web page" will come to mind, and that sounds real enough. But lean in close to the monitor, put your nose right up against the glass, and the reality of the Web page is shattered when it resolves into a pattern of brightly-colored dots. You're engaging in perceptual imagination to make the Web page "real".

But you're talking about creative imagination. So where did this page come from? It came from my imagination, in two senses. In addition to the words that I imagined and you're reading--making real--now, several years ago I imagined www.habitablezone.com, and proceeded to write down a series of intricate instructions for two computers--my Web server and your PC--enabling them to collaborate to reimagine The HabitableZone upon request. That done, the HabitableZone can be imagined and made real even when I'm asleep or thinking about something else. The HabitableZone is very real--ask anybody who's ever taken it seriously enough to get mad or feel happy--even though it is entirely imaginary.

(Interesting metaphysical question: If nobody's currently connected to the Zone and viewing its pages, does The HabitableZone continue to exist?)

But that was only a beginning. Once I constructed a shell of a building for the HabitableZone, several hundred people went to work furnishing it, constructing the interior out of millions of words imagined over five years. Right now, I'm imagining words, and do these words seem real to you? I would hope so--you're not hallucinating these words, I really did write them, and yet they're entirely a product of my imagination.

Look back at your message to which I'm responding. That message was created by our two imaginations collaborating. The words you recently imagined were recorded and reproduced by the software I imagined some time ago. Did you really post that message? I think so.

What this all has to do with religion is that I believe that you're terribly underestimating the power of imagination in human affairs. While we're not quite at the point of being able to imagine matter and energy into being, most of the world we live in is either an artifact of imagination or a pure construct of human imagination. An election is an intangible thing; the ballots and ballot boxes etc. are evidence of its existence, but you can't hold the election itself in your hand. Yet elections tend to have major impact on our reality. They are indisputably real even if intangible.

Similar to politics, faith has the power to move mountains, they say, and if religious belief, imaginary though it may be, produces real consequences, who can claim that it isn't real?

To be a human is to live in a world that, today, is only partially physical and tangible, and "real" in that old conventional sense. Most of our world is the product of imagination, sustained by ongoing imagination--belief--in its reality.

God is real to many people, and because they act on that belief, their imagination has a degree of reality even for nonbelievers. We can't escape that fact simply by declaring that imaginary things aren't real.

Never tell a programmer that imagining something doesn't make it real. I make my living constructing realities out of pure imagination.

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