“The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.” -Jean Jacques Rousseau
We often hear of the
boundlessness of the imagination, of the limitless ability of our minds to envisage
the extraordinary, the bizarre and the unrealisable but it doesn’t take a great
deal of thoughtful reflection to come to the conclusion that there are realms of
understanding and awareness that are wholly impervious to the supposed boundlessness
of the imagination. For instance, if the imagination were truly boundless,
envisaging just one extra new colour besides those formed by the intermingling
of the three primaries should be a matter of relative ease. If the imagination
were boundless there should be no end to the varied hues and intensities we
could imagine. Of course I can imagine that such things could exist – but, like a colour blind philosopher attempting to contemplate
the difference between red and green, I’m simply unable to bring any conscious
awareness to mind. Perhaps with the assistance of regular practice, drugs or
neural stimulation I might enjoy a broader spectrum of hues and tones than
those with which I am already familiar and very likely I would be able to
recall these intensifications of experience, but as it is I am unable either to
perceive or to imagine such wonders.
This
relationship between perception and imagination has also be observed in
patients suffering from lesions on the occipitotemporal region of the brain.
This region is responsible for colour perception and memory and it has been
found that patients with such lesions are unable either to perceive or to
imagine colour.
Whilst there is much
evidence for enhanced perception, intensity and acuity amongst individuals - not to mention species - there
is much less evidence for entirely undiscovered colours. If humans could
perceive ultra violet, x-rays or gamma rays, for example, would these be entirely
new colours or simply variations or redistributions of the spectrum with which
we are already familiar? If we could see infra-red, like pitvipers or pythons –
with the help of specially adapted facial pits - would the sensation be one of
colour or more like smell or taste? And might such an enhancement allow us to perceive
a whole new rainbow in the electromagnetic emanations of microwaves and radio
waves? Whilst we can certainly dream of such things in the abstract, the
specific sensations – or more accurately - the associated mental responses
are simply impossible to call forth. These responses and the dispositional
states that produce them haven’t yet formed and this lack of experience would
seem to impose a finite limit on our imaginings. It might even be said that the
development of technology comes as a direct consequence of an implicit
realisation of this fact: of the understanding that without tools to extend our perceptions
of the world, our imaginations alone are far too limited to peer into
the darkness of the unknown.
Rousseau may have
believed that imagination was boundless but it would seem that his optimism was
unfounded. Rousseau’s contemporary and brief friend, the philosopher of the
Scottish enlightenment; David Hume, expressed an entirely opposing view. For Hume
the imagination is bounded by the objects and events of lived experience and
our powers of imagination are firmly tethered to the bedrock of perceived
experience.
“But though our thought seems to possess this unbounded liberty, we shall find, upon a nearer examination, that it is really confined within very narrow limits, and that all this creative power of the mind amounts to no more than the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing the materials afforded us by the senses and experience. When we think of a golden mountain, we only join two consistent ideas, gold, and mountain, with which we were formerly acquainted.”
Fifty
years later, scholar Richard Payne Knight expressed a very similar view:
“We may compose, paint, and describe monsters and chimeras of a very extravagant variety of form : but still, if we analyse - them, we shall always find that the component parts, how much soever they may be distorted or disguised, have been taken from objects or qualities of objects, with which we have previously been acquainted through the organs of sensation.” -An analytical inquiry into the principles of taste. (1805)
While it may be strictly true that the imagination is
bounded, it is also the case that these bounds have two aspects: one of near infinite recombination and the
other of dependency upon the recall of experience. In other words, the more
limited the repertoire of recalled experience, the more limited the imaginative
potential.
Imagination cannot
generate something from nothing but instead requires sensory inputs and
memories upon which to draw. In the next post we will explore why this might be
the case and why it is unlikely that evolution could ever furnish us with
greater powers of imagination than the extraordinary but necessarily limited
ones we possess.
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