this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2023
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Asklemmy
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I feel like this is content for hypotheticalsituation sub from reddit. Not sure which lemmy equivalent is.
I think there needs to be some clarification to the rules. By imagination, is it an active process? Or is it a passive process like day dreaming?
By parallel universe/multiverse, is it known that it is only 1 consistent one every dream? Or is it random universes every dream, without guarantee of visiting the same ever again?
How long and short is each “view”? I’m assuming for simplicity it is passive viewing without being able to act upon anything.
Is it only me who can do this? Or is it everyone? Is it only a random subset of people (eg genetic mutations)? Am I the only one in the multiverse able to do this? Are all versions of me capable?
What am I seeing exactly? Am I only seeing through the eyes of my parallel selves or just random snapshots of people? If I only dream of mountains and random people, how do I ever know that this is just some generative biological process inside my brain rather than a link to another world?
Even if the premise is that there’s no details of how it works, I think I need to first convince myself I am not insane before trying to convince others or use any of the information in these dreams. Acting upon information from unreliable sources (how/why unreliable? cuz I can’t even convince myself) can cause harm not only to me but the people around me.
(Yeah I don't know of any other suitable communities either, this seemed the most appropriate.)
In my hypothetical this would be the reality of everyone. Apply it to the world you know, but where you believe your imagination/dreams/whatever are creating new ideas, what you are really doing is seeing the possibilities of other realities. Except for that change, everything else is exactly as you know it now.
The way I see it, we would never know if the imaginative ideas that come into our head develop from the random crossing of neural pathways, or from a peek into a slightly different world. Maybe that peek is enough for you to piece together your own solution, but even in that case did you really just invent something or did you just happen to view a reality where a random set of occurrences caused something happen and it only feels to you as if you thought of it. The whole point of this thought experiment is that we really don't know where our imagination comes from.