A human being is a part of the whole, called by us the "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts, and feelings as something separate from the rest – a kind of optical illusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us . . . Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison. – Albert Einstein
“Your imagination has never been trained.”
“Huh?”
“Your ability to imagine has never been harnessed. At its worst, your imagination is merely a distraction from the monotony of the daily world, and at its best it is an escape hatch into worlds of fantasy.”
I didn’t know what to say. Before I had a chance to formulate a question, Einstein peered at me, “Don’t you think it is odd that we can imagine limitless possibilities and yet we cannot attain them? Wasn’t it Hume that said, “Nothing we imagine is absolutely impossible?”
Einstein grabbed the armrest of his wooden chair and pulled himself out of his seat. “Your imagination is extraordinarily powerfull. And yet every chance you get, you remove yourself from the most incredible present moment in order to imagine sexual encounters, to imagine being famous, or to imagine being rich.”
“Your imagination has incredible power, not because you particularly have anything special about you, but because you as a human being have the power to imagine infinite things! Everyone and anyone can imagine the impossible. The question that remains is how do we attain and experience what we know to be impossible?”
I didn’t have a clue. I shrugged my shoulders and frowned, making exasperated silent gestures to plausible pathways for attaining impossible experiences. This was the third or fourth time we had met. He was a university physics professor and I a painting student. Due to a shortage of painting advisors I had been assigned to Professor Einstein, whose duty it was to teach me painting. So far he had said nothing whatsoever about painting and spoke endlessly about some crazy, but as he repeatedly insisted, 'practical' idea of actually using the imagination to engineer a conscious experince in the realm of the imagintaion.
“Your imagination rules you. It governs everything you do and yet you don’t know how to use it. You wander from the moment into a never-never land where your mind has free reign on the ‘truth’ of what is happening around you.”
I sat there trying to ponder what he was saying to me, but I could only ask the most valid question that came to my mind. “How do you define imagination, Einstein?”
“I define it just like the dictionary does.” He reached to his shelf pulling off a current version of Webster’s. He opened it just about midway and flipped singly through some pages. He ran his finger down a page and when he found the definition he spoke quietly intoning innocence and frugality. “Imagination: the act or power of forming a mental image of something not present to the senses or never before wholly perceived in reality.”
He peered at me questioningly. “Or perhaps I should say the opposite about you.” He chuckled a bit and said, “I think that your imagination is highly trained. In fact, it is so highly trained that you know everything.” As if on cue and with a dart of his eyes he called my attention to the sound of a car driving by. I heard the muffled sound of what was probably a four-door car. It wasn't a truck or a semi. I knew that for sure.
“When you hear the sound of a car driving by your ability to make common sense conclsions about the world around you automatically interprets the sound to be that of a car. But, your ears have only detected the sound of the‘car.’ From that single sensation of sounds we assume that the sound itself is full and valid proof that a car has just driven by our window.”
“But it has. If I were to hear the sound of a car drive by my window I would most certainly know that it was a car.” He peered at me and then again darted his eyes to the left. The sound of a car began again and slowly went from one side of the room to the other.
“Your finely trained imagination tells you that a car just drove by,” he smiled mischievously.
“Well that’s because it was a car that just drove by. It couldn’t be anything else. All I have to do is jump up and go over to the window the next time a car drives by and I will see that it is a car driving by. It is not going to be some kind of sound effect or trick. It will be a car.”
“But how do you know it’s going to be a car?” He asked like an exasperated grandmother.
“From past experience!” I exclaimed. “I’ve heard that sound thousands of times and of course this time doesn’t mean that it will not be a car. It could be a truck or semi or a bus, or something. A frickin’ moped!”
“So again, let me reiterate that your imagination, which has been finely trained, is telling you that what is going by is a car, a bus or semi-truck.”
“It’s not my imagination. I am not imagining it. The sound is real. It is coming from that direction.” I was my father’s son and he had raised me to embrace the art of argumentation. I could hold my own in an argument in nearly any subject or situation I found myself in.
“But the car is not really or actually present to your senses.”
“The sound of the car is present to my senses, which is why I can detect that it is a car in the first place!”
“Yes, only a sound is present to your senses nothing else is. Even if you were to jump up and run to the window in order to catch a glimpse of the car, you still would not have enough ‘evidence’ to prove that what you saw and heard was actually a car.”
“That’s insane! It’s a car whether I hear it or see it; it is still a car!”
Einstein bowled over laughing. He clutched the sides of his stomach and bellows of laughter erupted into the room. I couldn’t tell if he was laughing at me, the situation or what.
When he recovered he said, "You’re not a scientist of perception. If we were to analyze it your common sense conclusions in a correct manner, we’d find that past experience, common sense, and reasoning join together to tell you that that ‘sound’ is a car. When it is not. Is is simply an abstract sensation that you are detecting.” He paused smiling, waving his finger at me. Then he continued, “This University is a research one institute. The means we do hands on scientific, practical research. If you are attending the university you must use all that academia has to offer you. Here, today, you and I, we are cognitive scientists who use empirical reasoning to establish the validity of our observations. You cannot base your conclusion that, ‘a car has just driven by’ on past experience. That is inadmissible at this university and for the purposes of your training - inadmissible to your mind. For instance what would happen if a friend of yours saw a UFO in the same manner you heard the car. He would report to you the details of what he witnessed, the sights, the sounds of a hugely impressive craft, obviously made by an extremely advanced civilization that has traveled either through time or space to reach our magnificent corner of the universe. But who would believe that your friend witnessed this UFO? Only someone standing right next to him! Your friend’s story is a first-hand verbal account of the events he witnessed. These kinds of accounts will always be deemed scientifically improvable because there’s not enough empirical, hands-on, practical evidence to verify his account. If we were scientists of perception the same rule would stand for simple observations arounds us.
I looked at him quizzicly and beckoned him with my eyes to add more meaning to his statements.
“Lets say that someone photographs a Bigfoot or a Sasquatch. That certain someone does not have enough evidence to prove the existence of Sasquatch because we are missing not only the five material sense of the thing in question but also any cultural or artifactual remains. Do these creatures exist in our world in our time? Not according to any means by which we reason and gather evidence from. There is no way to prove beyond the shadow of doubt that these creatures exist. All the senses must be engaged upon an object for it to be real and admissible to our minds.”
With that said his eyes darted to the left. A sound I had never actually heard before zigzagged across the wall and dimly echoed from the corners.
“What did you hear?”
I told him I heard a sound that kind of crisscrossed the walls and seemed to die slowly in the corners of the room.
“What did you imagine?”
I told him that I imagined the sound came from a gizmo of sorts. I suggested to him that the gizmoe was perhaps it was something stashed in his lab that he used for some kind of experiment that he’d forgotten about.
“Some gizmo huh?” He said looking at with me with frowning disappointment and disguised humor.
Einstein moved around the lab as if getting ready to find the gizmo, but instead he asked a simple question, “What did the sound 'sound' like?”
I told him again that the sound was an irritating electronic gizmo kind of sound.
“Gizmo,” he said shaking his head and frowning. He rummaged around and found a round bowl-shaped piece of metal. He rubbed a wooden mallet around the top of it and the bowl emitted an astoundingly beautiful sound.
“What do you hear?”
I told him I heard a most incredible sound.
“What do you imagine?"
I told him that I imagined or rather thought or experienced an impossible sense of resonance. I could hardly believe that the bowl could emit a sound that had such vibrating unity. I began to inquire about the properties of metal from which the bowl was made but he stopped me.
Suddenly a most unfamiliar sound erupted in the room. It sounded like grating sand or gravel being rolled over a hard surface. It nearly scared the crap out of me. In an instant I thought I should run. But somehow my body was gripped by the sound. I listened, acutely aware of every detail and realized the sound was coming in my direction but it was eternally slow. I could hear that something impossibly heavy was moving over tiny granules creating immense pressure and immense cracking and crushing noises. I listened apprehensively as each second the sound kept coming close and closer. Then quite suddenly something in me rearranged the world. The Doppler effect hit me and the sound became the familiar sound of a car driving slowly away.
Einstein watched me with sparkling eyes. “Instead of automatically using the ‘sound’ of the ‘car’ to come to the common sense conclusion that it is a car that lil’ sound chunk of sensory data can be used practically to convince you of anything you can imagine.. If you actually wielded the scientific method your life would take on mythical proportions. Collectively, we agree that the sounds we hear are what common sense tells us it is. And this is a great arrangement that allows us to collectively survive. But individually, and under no circumstance, are you obligatorily held to make the same interpretation with these lil' pieces of abstract sensory data. That can be the job of the imagination.
His mood seemed to change. He put the bowl down and slowly wandered back to his chair. “We make enormous assumptions about ourselves and our world when we rely upon the habitual use of common sense to determine the nature of world around us. These assumptions cause great harm to us as creative beings.
“Remember when you were a child?” He said looking at me with bright inquisitive eyes. “The world of sensory information you interacted with was completely abstract because you didn’t have any words to describe it, and you didn’t have a shred of common sense and not a single habit to guide you. That is why there was such a sense of freedom in childhood. If there were such a thing as “Imagination Engineers,” we could guide ourselves back to that true and very real sense of freedom. This can only be done by willfully choosing to acknowledge that the sensory data we interact with every day is essentially abstract. When you hear the ‘sound’ of a‘car’ driving by our window here, you are actually imagining the whole event because you are using only one sense organ to determine the final nature of the sound into the abstract and then into imaginary.
“Every time we sense the world something of extreme value is occurring. There is purity, a newness as well as an abstractness that comes with sensing the world as the dictionary definition says, ‘never before wholly perceived in reality.’ Unfortunately, as adults our imaginations’ have been trained to be the ‘glue’ that holds the everyday world together. Our imaginations’ don’t have the power to take us to other worlds, to other extraordinary experiences. Instead our imaginations’ have been taught to uphold a world of boredom and constant inequity all coupled with a constant craving for something unknown to us, the feeling of which is easily supplanted with a cup of coffee, a bowl of ice cream, a trip to the movies.” His eyes drifted to the sun-drenched window on the south side of the room.
“Our imaginations’ are languid because of habit, dull because of an unsharpened sense of reasoning and on top of that - past experience, common sense and language hinder the exquisite power of the imagination.”
“Thus,” he said standing up, “much of adult cognition becomes starved for real stimulus. The body and mind want real interaction with real sensory data. But nowadays we purchase the newness of perceptual stimuli with our new cars, new clothes, TV and movie shows. Then within weeks habit takes over, the new car is taken for granted, a scratch is seen as a disappointment instead of new unformed, raw stimuli.”
Einstein’s shoulders slumped as he slowly walked about quietly about the room for a moment. He seemed unabashedly sad and appeared old and fragile. The suddenly he snapped out of it. “But what is all this thought without practicality? A practical method for achieving any idea is of the utmost importance. You yourself are a painter. You are already practically oriented, but you don’t yet know enough about raw stimuli to journey into the realm of the imagination.”
I was aghast and couldn’t quite tell if he was senile or lucid.
“For example,” he said winking at me and simultaneously placing an object in front of me. “Examine this small area of pencil and memorize every detail of it as if your life depended on it.”
He pointed to the area of the pencil next to the eraser and I did as he asked. I imagined that my life depended upon absorbing every detail of the pencil’s surface into memory. I took a minute or two to do this and after I was done I was sure that I had every minute detail of that area of the pencil in my mind.
He then said it was important to fully occupy my mind with something else for a minute or two. He quickly engaged me in a conversation asking me what price I was paying for a dozen eggs at the local supermarkets. We went on for several minutes and just as I realized I was paying too much for my eggs he directed my attention back to the pencil. He said it was important to forget almost entirely about the surface of the pencil.
I looked at the pencil and immediately three new features popped out. There were a plethora of scratches that somehow went unaccounted for and a few seemingly new indentations appeared in the metal that cupped the eraser. And out of nowhere a thin but substantially dark shadow appeared and ran along the underside of the pencil. I couldn’t believe it. How could I be so blind? I was an artist supposedly astute and keen to observing the world around me. Einstein’s entire exercise pointed out glaring oversights on my powers of observation.
“See!”
“See what?” I said.
“The simple and abstract idea of our death is enough to render our system of interpretation silent enough to allow the power of the imagination to create new perceptual details in the pencil.”
I argued that was not the case. I explained that the perceptual details were simply unnoticed the first time I looked at the pencil and were not in anyway created out of my imagination for the simple fact the imagination doesn’t create scratches, dents and unseen shadows in pencils.
“Don’t be so sure of yourself. The imagination has been known for centuries to play tricks on a person.” He stood stiffly with his hands on his right hip and tried to walk off an obvious pain.
“And you said you were sure that every detail was rendered in your mind.” He quickly turned to face me. “How do you account for this change?”
I went on to tell Einstein about the functions of memory and attention and the limits thereof. I told him that one man couldn’t memorize the entire details of a small patch of pencil because there are too many details there for the mind to absorb. I furthered my argument by telling him that all his exercise did was tax my memory to its limits thereby making the new perceptual details in the pencil more a result of a refreshed memory than due to any occurrence in my imagination.
He laughed aloud. “We can certainly encapsulate your explanation for the appearance of the new details within the rubric of your reasoning but what we need to do in order to train your imagination to reach for and attain the impossible is to come up with an impossible explanation for why the details appeared. The more absurd the better.”
I nearly laughed aloud at his recommendation more because I was internally appalled that I hadn’t ever had the chance to say that to my father when he grilled me in the rules and logic of argumentation. I half-laughed and smiled at Einstein, but secretly, I was tickled to death with the idea of coming up with an absurd explanation for the unfounded details in the pencil. I held my delight at bay not wanting Einstein to see that I liked his idea.
“When you hear the sound of a car driving by your ability to make common sense conclusions about the world around you automatically interprets the sound to be that of a car. But, your ears have only detected the sound of the ‘car.’ From that single sensation of sounds we assume that the sound itself is full and valid proof that a car has just driven by our window. "
"The question is rather simple: Is an object and real object when it is perceived with a single sensory organ? General rule of thumb it is not a real object but it still conveys sensations in our ears to occur. This sensation is abstract because it is perceived by one sense organ and one sense organ only! Unfortunately, our minds don't know this and thus we don't know how to utilize it."
I nodded and continued the hypothesis. "Well then it's be safe to assume that perceiving an object with two senses still doesn't make them objects. They would be instead abstract sensations that the mind hasn't yet categorized into an object."
"Indeed! Perhaps an object is only an object if it is perceived directly by three or more senses. And yes, if the mind is still and silent it doesn't categorize the incoming abstract sensations those sensations go right into the imagination, or into emotion, or into the me monster. Abstract sensation is the fodder for dreaming."
Over the next week and half I puzzled over his concepts and performed his thought experiments with differing rates of success. I didn’t know what to consider a success. A couple of times the details that I had memorized didn’t change in the slightest. This made me wonder if I had failed because I didn’t fully occupy my mind with something else. And what was meant by fully? A few times the details of the small object I had memorized changed so much as to make me think I was a dolt who couldn’t even see nor memorize the most plainly evident features of the world around me.
Einstein’s thought experiment concerning a single sense organ interacting with the perceptual world that surrounds us began to intrigue me to no end. I realized that 80-90% of the interactions I had with the world used only one or two sense organs. My tacit assumptions of the completeness of objects, such as a wall, were thrown into question. When looking at a wall all I see is the wall, and it is only my sense of sight that interacts with it. Yet, how is it real? If I wanted to throw out common sense and my habitual manner of relying on past experience to interpret the world, I realized that the world around me is always made up at any given time of just the five senses and what they detect. About two weeks passed and then I went back to see Einstein and to tell him of my realizations.
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