picture by Stefan Keller from Pixabay
The Life of the Imagination. What makes humans different from other animals? with chimpanzees or with other intelligent mammals, for example? The measurement of problem-solving ability, usually measured by IQ scores in chimpanzees and some other intelligent mammals, shows that they are the most intelligent of all three-year-old human children.
Yes, they are less intelligent than the average adult human, but that is not what differentiates them from humans.
By the age of three, human children can already capture fantasy stories such as fairies and supernatural beings that are told to them, whereas chimps cannot.
The smartest chimps can be taught sign language to communicate with humans, but they talk about real things, about apples, bananas, rocks, or about feeling angry, happy, or hungry.
While a human child can talk about unreal things like a talking animal, a magic animal that can grant all wishes or a ghost that scares a bad boy.
Animals live in the real world and respond to what happens in the real world, while humans, apart from living and responding to the real world, are also able to capture the imagination and respond to what is in their imagination.
- How Important Is Imagination?
Is it important to live with imagination? very important. In the life of a chimpanzee, a friend is another chimpanzee with whom he gets to know personally his physical characteristics and character.
If he needs help or cooperation, then he will choose his chimpanzee friend, not a chimpanzee who is completely foreign to him. It is these conditions of personal friendship that prevent chimps from accomplishing what humans could possibly do.
In the wild, chimpanzees usually form groups to control a certain area in the forest. This group must defend its territory if another group wants to enter or vice versa, if there is another more fertile territory belonging to another group, this group may fight to seize the area from the group of its old owners.
How large is this group of chimpanzees? of the records of animal researchers, no more than 200 individuals.
They need to know each member personally, and the limit of chimps' ability to know personally is around 200, the rest they find it difficult to know personally.
About the maximum amount that chimpanzees can do to organize themselves, achieving a common goal.
What about humans? Humans cooperate not only based on their personal knowledge, but also on something abstract, which is accepting each other's imagination.
The shared imagination is something abstract, which does not exist in reality, but exists in the human mind. That imagination used to be in the form of tribes, nations, religions, gods.
With the acceptance of the shared imagination, a person who is not personally aware wants to cooperate in a common movement to achieve a goal.
For example, when Pope Urban II called for war to wrest the holy city of Jerusalem from Muslim hands, hundreds of thousands of knights and ordinary citizens set out in arms for Jerusalem to fight life and death.
Did they know each other first before working together? no, what unites them is their belief that Pope Urban II has a sacred mandate to represent Jesus and God the Father to command war, they believe they are rewarded by Heaven, they believe in the power of Jesus.
They do not know each other, but their belief, namely their acceptance of the same imagination of the Pope, Jesus, Heaven and Christianity, enables them to trust people who share the same beliefs.
Does the sacred mandate, the power of Jesus and God the Father, Heaven exist in the real world? no, it is a belief that can only be accepted in the human brain. The smartest chimps won't understand, because chimps only live in the real world.
Another example is human cooperation in creating cars. Hundreds of thousands of farmers in the tropics planted rubber trees, which were later used as tires.
There are thousands of oil refinery workers whose production will be used as car fuel. There are thousands of miners for iron, aluminum, and various metals to be used for engines and car bodies. And various kinds of material processors, craftsmen, or thinkers are needed for his services in making cars.
Do they know each other? Not. They work together with a strong belief in one imagination, namely money. They believe that money is valuable, and can be exchanged for the necessities of life, and for that they work hard to get money in return.
Does the material of the hundred dollar bill with the image of the national figure of the United States of America have a high value? Not.
Money is very valuable because we believe in the United States, we believe in the story that the United States guarantees that money can be exchanged for goods worth one hundred dollars.
If suddenly the United States dissolves or the Bank of the United States states that the money is no longer valid, is there any value? There is no.
The value of money does not exist in a material or physical form, but rather our belief in the United States, an abstract entity that lives only in human heads.
The United States or the value of currency is something abstract, imaginary, not real, but based on that imaginary something, the economy of hundreds of millions of people in the United States is running.
Again, in essence Religion, God, Hereafter, Country, Tribe, Money, Democracy, Law are something abstract, imaginary, and not physically related to nature or biologically with humans.
These are beliefs or stories that are accepted and believed as real, the more people believe, the stronger it is perceived as real.
And throughout its history, humans will continue to create new layers of stories on top of old stories and in turn make humans more capable of collaborating increasingly colossal.
The power of imagination is what enables humans to fly their robots to Mars, highly developed compared to their ancestors who lived hunting in the forest for food, while chimpanzees are in the same state as when they first existed. Because chimps only have reality, whereas humans are able to enrich that reality with their imaginations.
- About Imagination Equivalent to Reality
If imagination is a human creation, is it equal to or stronger than its creator? it can.
In the modern legal system, real humans can register imaginary creatures called legal entities into the judicial system. If the legal entity is legalized, then the imaginary creature will be recognized as having the same rights as real humans before the law.
Once passed, the legal entity can carry out transactions, own assets, sue or sue a human being before a court of law. In many cases, legal entities can even control assets and powers far beyond actual ordinary humans and are even stronger than their creators.
For example in 1976 Steve Jobs founded Apple, a company incorporated, the company then grew rapidly, but in 1985, Steve Jobs was fired from Apple because it was considered incompatible with company management. Although he will return to Apple at a later time, this fact proves that a legal entity, an imaginary being, may at some point have a power greater than a real human being, the creator himself.
In fact, at this time if the list of the richest people in the world included legal entities as equal individuals, then the owners of the largest wealth in the world would be companies like Google, Microsoft, Tesla, Apple or Amazon, not individuals like that. Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and the company's shareholders.
- About Imagination Replacing Reality
Maybe some of us have heard the news about some artists who committed suicide after being bullied on the internet. On the Internet? on social media? Isn't that a virtual world that isn't real?
For an internet celebrity, in a day maybe he will meet and greet a maximum of 15 people in the real world, but once he posts something on social media, thousands of people will respond. If he monetizes his social media, it could be that millions of dollars in money will go to his account.
It is true, social media or the internet is a virtual world that is not real, but in reality it gets more responses from cyberspace than responses from the real world. Also in terms of income.
This higher level of interaction with cyberspace than the real world is what makes some people feel that the virtual world is more important than the real world, and when thousands of people bully the internet, their lives are destroyed. Some could not stand it, then committed suicide.
- About the Future Leaving the Real World
In February 2011, Time magazine featured a provocative cover title, namely: The Year 2045, The Year Man Becomes Immortal. This magazine is not a fake class magazine that randomly displays provocative news in order to increase circulation, they must have tried to explore this topic before making it as a headline.
- What is the basis for this prediction?
First, computer development. By 2045, quantum computers are estimated to have become mature technology, and that means millions or even billions of times the capacity of today's fastest computers.
Second, the advancement of virtual reality. Currently Facebook provides virtual reality which can be accessed using Oculus devices. In virtual reality, Facebook users can explore and interact with other users in the artificial world. These interactions certainly offer more possibilities than the standard timeline display which is usually just text and multimedia information.
In the future, with the help of more sophisticated computers, virtual reality will be able to simulate nature more realistically and be able to accommodate more people.
Third, advances in brain simulation. The brain is a data processing machine, a biological computer. Experts assume that our consciousness and thoughts are the work of our brains. If we can mimic all the processes in the brain, then we can transfer our consciousness from the biological computer (brain) to the computer.
Now that scientists have been able to mimic mouse brains, with the leaps of computer technology in the coming decades, it is hoped that we will be able to completely replicate the human brain. If these three things are accomplished, then man can enter the virtual world completely and leave his biological body.
What are the benefits of all of this? By living in cyberspace, humans are no longer confined by the limitations of their biological bodies. Suppose we don't die, and we can re-elect ourselves previously determined by destiny. For example the selection of appearance, race and gender selection.
In cyberspace, humans will also not experience problems that only exist in the real world, namely natural disasters. There will be no unexpected things such as earthquakes, tsunamis, storms and so on, because humans fully control what will happen in their virtual world.
What does this mean? Humans leave the world inhabited and understood by animals, namely the real world, and live completely in a world that is not visible to them, the world of the Imagination.
- About Questions That May Be Answered
If living in cyberspace is the goal of humans, that may also be the answer to classic questions our scientists haven't answered.
If the universe is so vast, with trillions of planets and stars out there, why isn't there a single sign of advanced life out there?
The answer: perhaps every advanced civilization will go through a stage where they can re-create imaginary realities, and decide that it is safer and more profitable for them to move to a controllable imaginary realm than to survive in an unpredictable real world. MAYBE....