It's very tempting to think that a mind has different mechanisms for functions that seem distinct. For example, "experiencing reality" vs. "imagination" and "memory" vs. "planning". However, I think that in many cases they are just aspects of the same thing.
In this post I discuss reality vs. imagination. I'll discuss the other aspects in some upcoming posts.
Ultimately, our mind only experiences internal representations of things. Outside events are never experienced directly; they're converted by our senses into a stream of data that is used to create detailed internal representations of the outside world.
A human mind can rarely create highly detailed representations without the help of its senses. However, it can easily generate low-resolution representations under its own steam, and this is what we call "imagination". We can create representations of things that we experienced in the past, things we might experience in the future, and strange & wonderful things that might never exist. Some representations involve time, some involve space, and some involve neither (for example, imagining excitement).
I think that a mind processes reality and imagination in exactly the same way; the only difference is that our senses create highly detailed representations whereas our imagination creates lower-resolution representations. They all occupy the same mental space however, and are processed identically.
Indeed, I think that the only way that a mind can tell what is "reality" versus "imagination" is that reality tends to be much higher resolution and more consistent. In other words, "reality" is a deduced property of an experience and is not stored or processed differently by our minds.
One argument for this hypothesis is from lucid dreams, which are as detailed as everyday reality. I've had several lucid dreams and usually the only way I've figured out that I'm in a dream is by logical deduction; some elements of the dream are extraordinary and "give away" the fact that the representations are internally generated instead of via senses.
In my next post I'll describe why I think a mind processes past, present and future in the same way, and that "now" is in fact a deduced property.
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