Life: "real" vs "imaginary" experience

[lillo9546]

Hi! (sorry in advance for my bad english! I am not a native speaker, I've tried my best to translate).

For all the artists out there, who work with their own mind, sitting at a desk, looking at a blank sheet, tracing the lines of their drawing or the verses of their story, how do you evaluate the "experience"? Let's explain ourselves better: in life, experience of something could be of two different types: real and Imaginary.

## Experience

Real: the experience is lived, you go on a journey, you stay with people, in a certain place, where you experience real sensations, and all this, which we enclose in the word "real experience", is a an experience that truly remains within us, and that we recall through nostalgic memories. This makes us a person who grows through these real experiences and enriches their lives. Just think of a traveller, or a farmer: both make their life a "real" experience, even if they live their lives differently.

Imaginary: the experience is virtual, one sits in a real place, still, making the mind to work, which through the processing of images, manages to create the "imaginary experience". The process is sometimes very exciting, fast-paced, and sometimes the opposite, frustrating and slow. Sometimes we have the idea of having had an enlightenment that we must put on paper as soon as possible, and otherwise, we feel like we want to die.



The main difference between real and imaginary experience is that man enriches his life in two distinct ways: actively or passively.

A creative person choose the "imaginary" experience over the "real" one, to live his life immersed in a world he created, rather than living in the real one. For example sitting at a desk for 8, 9 or 10 hours throwing out the world that you have created in your head, rather than going to live the real world, have the experience of making friends, discovering new cultures, languages, traditions, it's a really different thing, and it brings home a totally different baggage.

With this, there is not saying that one way of life is better than the other, not even criticizing those who live one way or the other, but we'd like to better understand what is the reason that drives some people to prefer one to the other? What kind of weight do these different baggages have on our life? How can they enrich it differently?

## Reason

Here we are not trying to find an economic reason for it, but rather, we are trying to understand why some people prefer, encourage, and live, for most of the time of their life, in the imaginary experience, instead of the real one, therefore rather than being active, resourceful, open-minded, they cut themselves off in a certain space, and use their time on this planet passively.
In the case of a writer - sitting or standing makes no difference as long as it is a case of writing the words for a story, on a support, whether it is paper or not - same thing goes for a drawing artist, like a comic artist, a painter; it's a diffucult question, that at my young age, I haven't been able to answer on my own, but which I have repeatedly tried to do so, being a creative too and having had the opportunity to have lived both real and imaginary experiences.
There are times when our life tells us to sit and have imaginary experiences, and other times when we are seated, that we should get up and have real experiences. But you don't necessarily have to be creative to be able to understand a little what is meant by the speech; just open a book and wander through the hobbit lands, or feel that adrenaline rush when you are taken into an imaginary tale. On the other hand, going to your most favourite beach or mountain place, will make you feel the positive sensation.

Furthermore, it would be impossible to strike a balance between the two; so in our life, it's about doing one, or the other. Be a real or imaginary person. But even if it were, the question would fit this particular circumstance: which of the two gets a "richer" life: the traveler, occasional creative, or the creative, occasional traveler?


(let's consider applying this to a comic/manga artist, painter, writer life, which even if they are doing some little phisical activity, they still sit at a desk working with their mind mostly.)

[xmj]

I'll leave you with this quote from Anathem, which takes what you describe as "real" vs "imaginary" to a whole new level as the thinkers are clustered mainly in monastic orders.

Emphasis mine

Orolo had caught wind of this and turned around to get a look at Dath. “It would be easier for you to understand if you could see one of the pinprick maths,” he said.
“Pinprick maths?”
“Some are no more than a one-room apartment with an electrical clock hanging on the wall and a well-stocked bookcase. One avout lives there alone, with no speely, no jeejah. Perhaps every few years an Inquisitor comes round and pokes his head in the door, just to see that all is well.”
“What’s the point of that?” Dath asked.
“That is precisely the question I am asking you to think about,” Orolo said, and turned back round to resume a conversation with Jesry’s father.
Dath threw up his hands. Arsibalt and I laughed, but not at his expense. “That’s how Pa Orolo does his dirty work,” I told him.
“Tonight, instead of sleeping, you’ll lie awake wondering what he meant,” Arsibalt said.
“Well, aren’t you guys going to help me? I’m not a fraa!” Dath pleaded.
“What would motivate someone to sit alone in a one-room apartment reading and thinking?” Arsibalt asked. “What would have to be true of a person for them to consider that a life well spent?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they’re really shy? Scared of open spaces?”
“Agoraphobia is not the correct answer,” Arsibalt said, a little huffy.
“What if the places you went and the things you encountered in your work were more interesting than what was available in the physical world around you?” I tried.

[jacob]

I prefer the terms "inner world" and "outer world". The "inner world" is what goes on inside you and your mind. Only you can experience that. The outer world is what the rest of us can observe you doing.

When you travel to other cultures and listen to their languages and hear about their history and eat their food (a food-channel favorite ), you're experiencing this subjectively. This new outer world is projected onto your inner world.

For example, lets say you're tasting a new wine. Now, if you know about as little about wines as me, pretty much any wine I objectively drink will only register as "red" or "white", and "alcoholic". I lack the richness of the wine-part of my inner world to experience objective wine beyond this. Whereas someone who has a rich inner world when it comes to wines can spend a lifetime enjoying making these connections between the objective and the subjective. The objective wine will trigger their inner world in terms of color, acidity, nuts, tobacco, orange, blabla, ... up to vintage and what valley the grapes were grown in---possibly including the history of the region and whether the wine maker who stomped on the grapes had washed their feet that day.

Every time a human subject is involved, there's an inner world involved. Even if you're building something objective, this [objective construction] is a reflection of your inner world as all decisions are routed through that. If I ask you to draw or build a house, you'll be moving stuff around objectively, but these are based on your understanding of what a house is. A cat would not be able to build a house because it does not understand what a house is.

And so ... now I can answer your question of what makes some choose to spend more of their life on one than the other. (This in part reflects xmj quote with the last bolded statement.)

Namely, the inner world can also be reflected and projected unto itself. This means you can think thoughts about thoughts without actually doing anything objectively. I can't objectively see what you're thinking or even if you're thinking in the first place if you're not telling me.

There are plenty of things in the inner world that do not exist per se in the outer world. "Time" is a good example. You can not see time, you can not taste, smell, or touch it. You can only see its effects and subjectively infer that "time" exists. "Numbers" is another good example. You can't see those either. You can see 5 apples, but you can't see "5". Yet you can think about "5", so "5" exists in your inner world and so does time. As such there are things that exist in the inner world that DO NOT exist in the outer world. The amount and complexity of such things is potentially very large.

If you reflect back on numbers, you get mathematics. Start with 5+3=8. Realize you can keep adding. Note that 5+5+5=15. This can be generalized to multiplication 5*3=15. At this point the inner world in terms of math is already richer than a 2nd grader's.

Thinking is by no means "passive". The brain uses 20% of the body's energy which is more than it uses to digest the food you eat. Thinking is a mental activity that often requires one to be open-minded and resourceful. Thinking hard will increase the brain's consumption of calories by about 30%-50% compared to someone who is just out taking pictures of Eiffel towers or making small talk with friends or strangers over a meal. Making those neurons fire burns glucose and increases blood flow. Think hard enough for long enough and you can feel this effect in the skull. It is NOT something that happens passively like reading a book about hobbits or watching Seinfeld.

Just like there's a difference in experience from standing on a local hilltop and Mt Everest in the outer world, there's also a difference in terms of which "mountain tops" are available in one's inner world. For example, a 2nd grade or a 5th grade inner world in terms of math is not terribly rich or exciting. There's only so much do to there. The inner world of a mathematician is much richer. Indeed, it is most likely substantially richer than the experience of standing on a mountain top or eating a filet mignon as far as they're concerned.

In conclusion: I evaluate an "experience" in terms of how rich or deep it is for me when I relate to it.

[7Wannabe5]

I spend a good deal of time "visiting" the inner world of 5th graders in terms of math. It's actually fairly terrifying!

[chenda]

The hard problem of consciousness:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_pr ... sciousness

Philosophical idealism - that matter is an emergent property of consciousness - solves this problem.

[lillo9546]

Really an interesting talk!
This is a completely subjective view, and I realize that it may not be like this for everyone, but when you do something "active" with your body, i.e. you move, experience sensations, etc, it's like if our person were rewarded in another way.
Let me explain: Let's compare real travel and mental travel. In addition to your examples and discussion, It has ever happened to you to come out extremely exhausted from a real journey, but to be absolutely "happy" with the experience? Like so that something in you has grown, you have overcome an obstacle, etc etc.
While, on the other hand, going trought an imaginary journey with the mind, but be rewarded, with the feeling of feeling depressed, streamlined, listless, completely empty, most of the time? So why do the two different experiences, even if with the same activity, give different levels of "well-being", or treasury about an "experience"?


ps: When i intend "traveling", I'm not including the inflation of life, a steak dinner in a chic restaurant, but a real experience, traveling with friends or family, or alone, to discover places, cultures, nature, traditions.
I think that ERE people understand very well what I'm talking about here .

The hard problem of consciousness:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_pr ... sciousness

Philosophical idealism - that matter is an emergent property of consciousness - solves this problem.

Which is the specific thing you think about this topic could bring in our discussion?

[Ego]

If the musings of the imaginary world never inform action in the real world then it is a pass-time, a game providing the illusion of engagement with the real world while actually distracting from it. The moment the real world is engaged is the moment things get real.

If action in the real world is never informed by musing in the imaginary world then it is a pass-time as well. A game providing action for its own sake. A distraction that does not consider the direction of motion.

Change is happening faster than we can grasp. We are moving from a real world, action-oriented society toward a virtual world, imaginary-oriented one so quickly that we are struggling to connect the dots of consequences it causes. For many being divorced from reality is seen as a virtue.

An increasing number are going so far down the imaginary-oriented rabbit hole that their reality suffers and they must alter their perceptions of reality to cope.

[daylen]

Go deep into either and come out with neither and both, all at once all around.

[jacob]

Let me explain: Let's compare real travel and mental travel. In addition to your examples and discussion, It has ever happened to you to come out extremely exhausted from a real journey, but to be absolutely "happy" with the experience? Like so that something in you has grown, you have overcome an obstacle, etc etc.
While, on the other hand, going trought an imaginary journey with the mind, but be rewarded, with the feeling of feeling depressed, streamlined, listless, completely empty, most of the time? So why do the two different experiences, even if with the same activity, give different levels of "well-being", or treasury about an "experience"?
ps: When i intend "traveling", I'm not including the inflation of life, a steak dinner in a chic restaurant, but a real experience, traveling with friends or family, or alone, to discover places, cultures, nature, traditions.

I generally experience the opposite effect from "travel, people, places, nature, culture, tradition", but your experience is perfectly valid too. It comes down to whether the set point of your neurotransmitter reward system (dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, acetylcholine) is a good match for translating the objective experience into your subjective experience. That's another way of saying that different people like different activities.

Personally I think it's a bad idea to force oneself to through experiences that aren't personally rewarding. "If it doesn't feel good, don't do it"---at least not without a cost-benefit analysis. Don't conclude that you have to like something just because everybody else insists that it's fun even if you may have to do it anyway and "go along to get along".

[7Wannabe5]

Or maybe the virtual world in which you swim with glitter dolphins is just a distraction from the unreality of the other thoroughly human technology/thought mediated world where you run along the machine groomed trail in barefoot-running-shoes.

[Lemur]

It’s seemingly counterproductive, but I try to remember that experimental psychology shows that someone can use their behavior to alter their attitudes as opposed to waiting to be in a right mood to take action.

The stories we tell ourselves play a big part of our identity. Instead of studying art to learn about how an artist would think, perhaps consider just painting instead to become an artist.

Both are important of course as noted above by Daylen. I think what influence my thinking here was at some point I decided studying philosophy and ethics was a useless endeavor unless I applied the principles in my real life.

[xmj]

Go deep into either and come out with neither and both, all at once all around.

Yes.

Both are mediated by perception and their representation in the brain. So they're essentially the same thing.

The game then is a matter of finding the right mix in your life that satisfies your value function.

And maybe trying to tweak that value function to be more in the here-and-now, and in the distant future.

[lillo9546]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ij84DoCEmdI
as expressed in this short video, it can also be seen that staying seated, thinking, doing some "mind traveling", could give the impression of not "advancing on the path of life", while, taking and walking, travelling, having experiences with our body, gives us the opposite impression.

This is because man views the act of physically moving as different from the act of mentally moving. But what are the factors that influence this impression? The physical effort? So feeling tired, and then, after a rest, coming back strong? So, not being able to justify tiredness after a period of "mind travel"?

[Henry]

Yes.

Both are mediated by perception and their representation in the brain. So they're essentially the same thing.

The game then is a matter of finding the right mix in your life that satisfies your value function.

And maybe trying to tweak that value function to be more in the here-and-now, and in the distant future.

Iain McGilchrist - The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the western world.

[jacob]

This is because man views the act of physically moving as different from the act of mentally moving. But what are the factors that influence this impression? The physical effort? So feeling tired, and then, after a rest, coming back strong? So, not being able to justify tiredness after a period of "mind travel"?

In order to realize how someone else is "mentally moving", one has to be able to "mentally moving" at a comparable level. Whereas in order to see someone else physically moving, one just has to have eyes. Try to imagine how a blind man experiences visiting places to see the sights of famous buildings, mountain tops, etc. What about Helen Keller who was both blind and deaf? Now imagine the experience of a couch potato running as fast as possible---a slow and heavy struggle and not the feeling of being alive having the wind in the face like an athlete. In each case they experience these things very differently. Now imagine the experience of someone with an average complexity of mind trying to understand society, politics, science, ... or in the case of the video, the meaning of life.

As seen in the video, the typical approach is to copy some script. "We find our meaning copying the characters in movies...", she says. Not all of us. In terms of internal development, this is the shallow end of the pool, where most humans swim around, but there's also a deep end. There's a distinction between so-called "live players" and "dead players". Read this: https://medium.com/@samo.burja/live-ver ... 24f6e9eae2 ... A "dead player" may be compared to an NPC in a computer game. However, some humans being entirely predictable are indistinguishable from dead players. However, whether someone else appears to be a live or a dead player depends on one's own ability to predict THEIR behavior. If you understand enough about their behavior to see it as a script, then they are dead players to you. Nothing about their behavior will surprise you. When the girl in the movie talks about going outside to "do something and take risks", she's trying to take the next step to go beyond the movie-scripts she knows. There are many steps beyond what she's proposing---she's essentially following another script of traveling to learn about herself, substituting airports, restaurants, and foreign cultures for her movies, just like any other first world twenty-something year old---but it's a step up in complexity in terms of deciding where to travel compared to which movie to watch and where to put the TV.

To summarize, the factor that influences this impression is basically the "eye of the beholder" and the ability to "see". For example, if I look at my book reviews, some see it as a "a well-organized and insightful work of genius" while others see it as a "rambling mess with a few tips". It can't objectively be both at the same time. However, subjectively, it is possible to be both as some readers had a mind capable of comprehending it and some did not. You will basically never be able to convince anyone who has never had to mentally solve a hard consequential problem just how much effort it takes. As far as they're concerned, it's a kind of magic that should be easy "if you're so smart". For what it's worth, this also happens the other way around when a couch potato asks "a strong young man" if they could kindly move 10 tonnes of boxes out of a storage unit. They have no idea what they're actually asking.