An imagined world--it's own thread

[huckelberry]

I think Msnobody make a good point. Her experience should not be lightly dismissed.

Many years ago I spent some time working as an aid in a nursing home. There was a woman of faith who spread a caring spirit. I was in her room late in the night when she died. I heard the angels come to get her.

Hey Huckelberry. I didn't intend to dismiss it. I meant to try and glean more from it by my questions. On that, I don't know what you mean by you heard angels come to get her. Anyone could hear anything at night, seemingly creeping around, but each time I've experienced it, I realize it's nothing supernatural. And if angels came to get a kind old lady, why doesn't that happen for others? Why can't such a thing ever be demonstrated? I was with my mom when she passed. She was a kind old lady too who spread caring. When she died, I sat and cried by her bed side, yelling how much I loved her. She heard me. But no angels came and took her. But again, I don't know what that is. Perhaps I wasn't spiritual enough to hear the angels? You see, the big problem I have here, is we hear angels only if we first assume angels. And if no one else hears angels, why is that hearing nothing more than us thinking we're hearing?

This is not meant as an attempt to dismiss it's meant as an attempt to explore the claims. If angels can be heard, what does that mean? How does immaterial make noise that can be heard by the material? Or if their noise was only in a spirit realm and only those in or close to that spirit realm can hear, how is that any more real than someone who claims an invisible dragon is in the garage?

Dasterdly stem, I was with my mother when she died and was not made aware of any angels. It does not mean there were none.

The experience I reported was about forty years ago. It for me was one of a kind. I met death multiple times at the nursing home. I had no reason to expect angels, death can be a pretty blunt physical reality. I do not have a clear explanation of what I heard, it was more closely related to music than anything else.

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an addition.
I think if there is reality to peoples experience of spirits or angels it is perhaps something that happens with special enablement by God. It could be something beyond our normal awareness or perceptual abilities or an enhancement of our awareness.

[Kishkumen]

I don't really mean to get back into this with you, but of course the motivation is clear. It's an attempt to explain why explanations such as a spirit world are implausible. They are not probable on the data we have. Its a leap in reasoning to think any particular "spiritual experience" (like that described by Philo) means there's a spirit world. We're better off accepting our spiritual experiences are simply our imagination. There's nothing wrong with that. But, I'd say, if people are thinking there's a spirit realm all because they really want it and they live for it rather than for this world...well, I think there is risk there. And that's what I'd like to call out.

Stem, a "hypothetical" situation is not based on data. It is something Pinker made up.

[Philo Sofee]

Dastardly Stem
We're better off accepting our spiritual experiences are simply our imagination.

Yet my imagination is not in contrast to something "real" as if imagination is unreal. Again, I point to every single actual human invention ever produced. It was imagined first. Then it was built. And it was improved on with someone else's further imagining of just how to "improve" it. But an "unreal" imagination produced veritable objective reality. To say the unreal produced the real is pure magic, and yet, there it is! If the imagination is placed in the mere fantasy or unreal world, yet it can and does ALWAYS come first in order to actually produce "objective" reality, then imagination is the vastly more important realm than a putative "objective, real" world we live in.
Pick any invention you would care to, skyscrapers? Automobiles? plows? iphones? Super sonic ballistic missiles? computers? Dish washers? fences? green houses? books? the alphabet? curtains, tuxedos? chairs? hair conditioner? paint? air compressors? refrigerators? Interstates? tanks? airplanes? reading glasses? matches? tin cans?
ALL began in imagination of someone first. That very subjectivity is the ground, the actual basis for getting to an "objective fact" of the thing in a real physical world. It didn't and it won't happen until it is first subjective in a human, then made objective. You cannot have one as real the other as unreal and phony and therefore to discard. I can't physically prove my imaginal world is real anymore than I can the spirit world. Yet I am comfortable in knowing that it is, in point of very fact, quite real.

[Dr. Shades]

Pick any invention you would care to, . . . Interstates?

Who invented the interstate, and what does an interstate look like?

[Philo Sofee]

Pick any invention you would care to, . . . Interstates?

Who invented the interstate, and what does an interstate look like?

Yeah, usually they are paved, like I-15 beginning in Montana, which then runs south through Idaho into Salt Lake City, Utah all the way through Cedar City to St. George, and then on into Las Vegas, and dodges off to the South West into L.A. California. I am not sure who invented Interstates, but the Blackfeet Indians didn't have them when they were hunting the buffalo.

[dastardly stem]

Yet my imagination is not in contrast to something "real" as if imagination is unreal. Again, I point to every single actual human invention ever produced. It was imagined first. Then it was built.

That you have an imagination is real. It's a real occurrence. That I agree with. But I can't swallow that whatever you imagine is real. Inventions start out as imaginative ideas, sure. But where do those ideas come from? Other previously invented things. Just because I can imagine a god that doesn't make him any more real, then someone imagining the Loch Ness Monster, or big foot or aliens. All of which could potentially be real. They are real in people's imaginations, apparently. But that doesn't put these items in the world where we can measure them, identify them, analyze their behaviors and their biology. Its silly to think whatever anyone imagines is real simply because people can imagine. Remember Sagan's dragon.

And it was improved on with someone else's further imagining of just how to "improve" it. But an "unreal" imagination produced veritable objective reality.

I'd imagine there are billions of more things imagined than invented. How that means whatever we imagine is real, is beyond me. I imagine right now, a 12 legged skunk who stinks worse than a real skunk and eats people, swims more adeptly than any marine animal, flies higher and faster than any bird. Can do calculus, dig holes like moles, and treats worms as God. Sure I can say I imagined it...and it's real, I'm mean, I imagined it. But, really, I can't say that thing is real simply because I imagined it and be rational.

To say the unreal produced the real is pure magic,

ALright I think you already have started reading the Bently Hart guy that Don recommended. Me too. I'm only about 150 pages into it. I'm finding his position, regurgitated from Tillich and others, well, problematic. I don't have a clue why he's condemning nearly everyone else in the world as completely stupid, as often as he does, then he posits a non-god which can never be anything at all as a necessary being and we simply can't question that thought (anyone who does is stupider than stupid, apparently). I'm feeling like, "Alright...I mean whatever. Have your imagined God who doesn't do anything and isn't found anywhere, basically doesn't exist at all, but really has to exist if anything exists and is better than anything we can describe because we can't see it or hear it or understand it." That seems to be nothing more than an imagined invisible dragon. It's calling nothing god and pretending nothing is everything, it seems to me.

Anyway, saying imagination is part of this world, is not saying the unreal produced the real. What it feels like he's saying, in part, is we can only make things we can imagine. If so, then everything first has to have someone imagining it to hold it in existence. I don't buy his presuppositions. I"m happy to finish reading. I"m just revealing some of my early impressions. Each time he makes these loud sounding dogmatic claims and says he's going to explain them, I get a bit excited, intently paying attention to his next lines and then he flops and just offers another assertion as if that supports his claim. I hope it gets better and it wraps up nicely. We'll see. When I'm done I'll give more impressions I think. If I'm convinced or find more merit in what he's pushing, that'll be cool. And I have no idea why Don, a Mormon, is pushing for this Hart guy's work. everything he says is an argument against Mormonism, it seems. Ah well. We'll see.

and yet, there it is! If the imagination is placed in the mere fantasy or unreal world, yet it can and does ALWAYS come first in order to actually produce "objective" reality, then imagination is the vastly more important realm than a putative "objective, real" world we live in.

Couldn't disagree more. If this were so then every religion, imagined and then invented by man, each contradicting each other in at least one way, would be purely more representative of reality than all others. That doesn't make sense, does it? Objective reality is far more important than whatever it is people imagine. That doesn't mean imagination is not important. It means imagination is unpredictable, is all too often proven to be a waste that is thrown away, and is far more garbage than it is useful. That doesn't mean imagination doesn't help. Or isn't a great thing or necessary part of our world. It simply means whatever we imagine is not real, simply because we imagine it. We don't imagine curing all disease and then all disease is cured. We imagine it, then work within reality to try and find cures.

Pick any invention you would care to, skyscrapers? Automobiles? plows? iphones? Super sonic ballistic missiles? computers? Dish washers? fences? green houses? books? the alphabet? curtains, tuxedos? chairs? hair conditioner? paint? air compressors? refrigerators? Interstates? tanks? airplanes? reading glasses? matches? tin cans?

I can't help but wonder how what you are saying isn't proving my point. There are perhaps billions of things imagined that exist nowhere at all, as far as we can tell. When the iphone was invented it was not imagined to be what it is now. That goes for everything you just mentioned. It is imagined based on other things that are seen and experienced. The iphone came about after cell phones, after computers, after gps, after cameras, after all phones. That a phone took a hundred something years to become an Iphone 13 max plus doesn't mean the first time a phone was imagined, it was the iphone. I like how Shades called out interstates. I mean the first path ever trod, started the invention of the interstate. It wasn't invented out of nothing. It was an evolved thing (I know that Hart dude hates that idea and finds it really really stupid, but I mean, I don't know what he means by that complaint.)

ALL began in imagination of someone first. That very subjectivity is the ground, the actual basis for getting to an "objective fact" of the thing in a real physical world. It didn't and it won't happen until it is first subjective in a human, then made objective. You cannot have one as real the other as unreal and phony and therefore to discard. I can't physically prove my imaginal world is real anymore than I can the spirit world. Yet I am comfortable in knowing that it is, in point of very fact, quite real.

Aright. Again, I couldn't disagree more. Because god is imagined doesn't make him real, no more than someone imagining bigfoot, or King Kong. We're not fleeing from a giant ape because someone imagined that happening. We're also not flying to distant galaxies because someone imagined it happening. I'm not a cartoon ball with pencil thin legs able to go from rolling to walking because I dreamed last night that I was. A tarantula is not going to eat me alive. I'm not going to swim to the bottom of the ocean without any aids. I'm not going to fit into my wife's pants because I imagine doing so. I'm not going to pick a bear up over my head and throw him across the lake. Ok. I'm overplaying my hand here. But hopefully we get the point.

I find Hart and Tillich largely academic. They quote Jewish and Christian scripture misapply it for modern philosophical reasons wrangle through the philosophy a bit more, claim there has to be a ground to all being and voila! there's god--nothing like the god imagined for millennia. "oh that's what they really meant this whole time". Arguing nothing is god is silly to me.

Hart's first 150 or so pages:
"God is real. He exists...But he doens't exist as you think of existing. He just exists as the only necessary being...But he's not really a being as you think of. He's just something that exists that has to exists if we exist. But not really exists exists. You see we exist, so he does. But we can't find him. I mean he's not somewhere. But he has to be. He's just not there, there. And even though we're just describing nothing when we describe god, he's really there anyway. Because anyone who can't find him is just really irrational and foolish. Those atheists...my god they don't know anything at all. This god, whose nothing, I mean, he's not nothing nothing, exists, but again, doesn't really exist, like we think of exists, but that god has to really exist because without him nothing could have ever existed. But he's a being...well not a being but being. Without him we wouldn't exist...And again atheists are really stupid. Descartes and Aristotle and Avicenna, Aquinas, Anselm, Kant, that guy from India...I mean come on. God exists, but I mean, doesn't really exist exist...and you can't find him anyway, but he has to. We must have a ground of all being. And we can't just call that ground nothing or I don't know. He has to be intelligent. He has to be god."

Ok. I said too much. But come on, man. You have a show in which you go on for hours on. So...whatever. I'm just shooting from the hip so my foolish ideas can be taken down by the sharp people here and I can learn.

[Physics Guy]

Imagining something doesn't make it real, but real things can be imagined. So just because my only perception of something has been in imagination doesn't mean that the thing is only imaginary.

I think atheists are on pretty solid ground if they assert that believers' perception of God has only ever been in imagination. That's not actually a very telling point, though. I mean, what else would a perception of God be? Even looking at a flower gives me a heavily filtered and processed representation of the flower, a representation that is far more tightly constrained by my own neural hardware than it is by any properties of the flower itself. It's not as though I'm somehow going to see ultimate reality more fully and directly than I can see a dandelion.

If some theistic evangelist is insisting that they really experienced God, and that proves that God must be real, then okay, the point about imagination is a good rebuttal to that. Whatever that person experienced doesn't prove anything. It could have been all in their head.

For atheists to harp on at length about how "God is imaginary", though, is poor communication at best. It's sound enough, if all you mean is that people's experiences of God have all been all in their heads, but since that's a truism, it's kind of weird to keep saying it as if it were something much more than that. Emphasising it as if it were a weighty point does suggest that one is committing the fallacy of begging the question—that is, merely assuming what one pretends to be proving. God certainly could be only imaginary, but that doesn't follow at all just from our perception of God being imaginary. The assertion that God is only imaginary is the positive assertion of atheism that has to be supported just like any other positive assertion. If you're not trying to weasel out of that burden, then you shouldn't thump the table about imagination and God without qualifying more carefully what you mean and don't mean.

(To beg a question is not to invite the question, though that would be a reasonable enough interpretation of the phrase. The idiomatic phrase "begging the question" means arguing by begging: "C'mon, just give me this one".)

[dastardly stem]

Imagining something doesn't make it real, but real things can be imagined. So just because my only perception of something has been in imagination doesn't mean that the thing is only imaginary.

100% with you there.

I think atheists are on pretty solid ground if they assert that believers' perception of God has only ever been in imagination. That's not actually a very telling point, though. I mean, what else would a perception of God be? Even looking at a flower gives me a heavily filtered and processed representation of the flower, a representation that is far more tightly constrained by my own neural hardware than it is by any properties of the flower itself. It's not as though I'm somehow going to see ultimate reality more fully and directly than I can see a dandelion.

If some theistic evangelist is insisting that they really experienced God, and that proves that God must be real, then okay, the point about imagination is a good rebuttal to that. Whatever that person experienced doesn't prove anything. It could have been all in their head.

For atheists to harp on at length about how "God is imaginary", though, is poor communication at best. It's sound enough, if all you mean is that people's experiences of God have all been all in their heads, but since that's a truism, it's kind of weird to keep saying it as if it were something much more than that. Emphasising it as if it were a weighty point does suggest that one is committing the fallacy of begging the question—that is, merely assuming what one pretends to be proving. God certainly could be only imaginary, but that doesn't follow at all just from our perception of God being imaginary. The assertion that God is only imaginary is the positive assertion of atheism that has to be supported just like any other positive assertion. If you're not trying to weasel out of that burden, then you shouldn't thump the table about imagination and God without qualifying more carefully what you mean and don't mean.

(To beg a question is not to invite the question, though that would be a reasonable enough interpretation of the phrase. The idiomatic phrase "begging the question" means arguing by begging: "C'mon, just give me this one".)

The point here is we're addressing the question of does God exist. If we can't show he exists, then the claim of he does exist is not validated. And in our world, there are far more people claiming they know God exists then not. When every attempt to verify his existence refers to the notion that they imagine that he exists, or comes down to that in some way, then we can safely assume it may be imagination and no god existing at all.

Seeing as we imagine things that do not exist all the time, why is it not more likely that an imagined entity, poorly defined if at all, without any verification in reality for it's existence, is more likely an imagined idea rather than a real entity? As I see it as soon as the believers claims they know God exists and fails to give good reason for that claim, they are establishing it is far more likely he is imagined then real, and your claim that the assertion is not supported is at that point supported. There'd be no weaseling out of a burden at all. It is simply more likely that an imagined character who is not found anywhere is nothing more than imagined. That's how we handle questions about big foot existing too.

[huckelberry]

"The assertion that God is only imaginary is the positive assertion of atheism that has to be supported just like any other positive assertion. If you're not trying to weasel out of that burden, then you shouldn't thump the table about imagination and God without qualifying more carefully what you mean and don't mean."

For better or worse Physics Guy's above comment brought to my mind some old saw about extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence.

[Physics Guy]

Lots of people say they believe in God, but not so many assert it as a proven fact. Most religions I know acknowledge explicitly that their tenets are unproven. To speak of the religion I know best, mainstream Christians have recited their creeds in unison each week for centuries. The statement is, "I believe." Nobody would say that if the claim were really, "I know."

We may safely assume that almost anything may be only imaginary. Electrons might be fictitious. It's unlikely but possible, in brain-in-jar kind of scenarios if nothing else, so the assumption that it could be true is a safe one.

Whiskey costs money. If you want to advance a positive statement with more than "could-be" probability, you need definite positive evidence for it.

Is it really more likely that an imagined character that is found nowhere is purely imaginary? It depends on how narrowly the imagined character is defined, compared to the range of possibilities. Bigfoot is one example of an imagined entity; here's another.

Dark matter is unlikely to be any particular model that I can construct, but quite likely to be some kind of real something, which will turn out to have the minimal properties that I expect any kind of dark matter to have, even though we have no evidence (yet) for any particular form of dark matter.

In the same kind of way, the chance that some kind of ultimate being responsible for reality might exist is not so obviously low. Most people who believe in God don't claim to know exactly what God is like. They're believing in a wide class of possible Gods. I really find it unreasonable to say that the odds of that are a priori much less than 50/50.