Upgrading our ability to imagine.

[Farroc]

It has occurred to me that it is impossible for humans to think of, or imagine, a sensation(blue, pain, flat, square, hunger, hot, etc..) that we have not experienced(because of a source outside the brain) in some form before. Instead, all our minds are capable of is piecing together already experienced "bits" of sensation, or information, to create ideas.

For example, can you picture in your head another color besides blue, yellow, red, or black(not technically a color, but lets not get into that)? No. There are other colors out there, but because our eyes aren't capable of receiving and sending them to our brain, we've never seen them. And we can't imagine them. Just like people who are born deaf could never possibly imagine what sound.....sounds like. And most psychopaths can never experience love. The can study it. They can know what causes it, and what it's effects are. But they can never feel it.

 Must people say the reason we can't imagine other dimensions is because our brain isn't powerful enough to process them. I disagree. I think our brain is powerful enough to potentially process other dimensions, but the reason we can't imagine them is simply because we've never experienced them before.

In this sense, we are really have no more of an "imagination" than computers. This does, however, open up a potentially world changing idea. If, in the very distant future, scientists were to invent an artificial "sense"(such as a mechanical eye that intercepts light from the infrared and ultraviolet spectrums and sends a signal to our brain representing the new spectrums the same way our natural eyes do visible light), it would potentially mean we could have any sense we want. And with more sensing comes a better "imagination". Just like how 62-bit computers makes more vivid images than 32-bit computers, our new, improved imagination would make more "vivid" ideas, because it would have more sensations to build the ideas out of.


Thoughts?

[Plu]

his does, however, open up a potentially world changing idea. If, in the very distant future, scientists were to invent an artificial "sense"(such as a mechanical eye that intercepts light from the infrared and ultraviolet spectrums and sends a signal to our brain representing the new spectrums the same way our natural eyes do visible light), it would potentially mean we could have any sense we want.

You mean an infra-red camera? It exists, and it doesn't really give you any options. Also, the reason you can't imagine your head being in infra-red color, is because it would be the practical equivalent to your head being invisible. Which, incidentally, we can totally imagine.

I think our (or at least, some) brains are quite capable of coming up with stuff that we've never seen of experienced before if we think about them. It's where many pieces of fiction come from, after all. Especially those of the sci-fi, horror or fantasy kind are full of people writing about things that they've never experienced before.

In a different way, we have plenty of devices that let us experience things we can't normally sense. They do help in a way to make us experience new things, but even just hearing stories of people experiencing things helps us come up with new ideas.

[Farroc]

But infrared cameras don't truly let us see in the infrared spectrum. They just convert it to a format we're familiar with. Visible light. No device actually lets us experience a new sense.


And some fiction stories may be new ideas, but the basic building blocks that make up those new ideas are all merely feelings and sensations we're already familiar with. They're just different combinations of the same colors, sights, smells, feelings, emotions, temperatures, sounds, and shapes. Ultimately, we can't come up with anything we haven't already been exposed too.

[Plu]

But infrared cameras don't truly let us see in the infrared spectrum. They just convert it to a format we're familiar with. Visible light. No device actually lets us experience a new sense.

This brings up the difficult question of "what is a sense", I guess. I don't see much of a difference between a device that shows you the infra-red spectrum through your eyes, and directly seeing it through your eyes. In both cases, the end-experience is pretty much the same.

And some fiction stories may be new ideas, but the basic building blocks that make up those new ideas are all merely feelings and sensations we're already familiar with. They're just different combinations of the same colors, sights, smells, feelings, emotions, temperatures, sounds, and shapes. Ultimately, we can't come up with anything we haven't already been exposed too.

Or rather, anything we can come up with immediately sounds familiar to us. It's kinda like asking "what is outside the universe?". The question doesn't make sense. Obviously nobody can come up with things they cannot come up with; but we definately come up with stuff that nobody has came up with before all the time. They just act like different combinations of the same things we experienced before, because that's what we use to describe things with.

I mean; you claim things are just a different combination of the same shapes, but somewhere in history there was the first person to come up with the four-dimensional cube, which is a completely impossible shape. But we still think about them, even though they cannot actually exist. And the person that came up with certainly didn't combine any existing shapes to get to it, because there are no other four-dimensional shapes.

[Colanth]

But infrared cameras don't truly let us see in the infrared spectrum. They just convert it to a format we're familiar with. Visible light. No device actually lets us experience a new sense.

We don't truly "see" visible light either.  Our brains "see" the change in rhodopsin in our retinas, and equate the firing of different forms of rhodopsin as different "colors".  (Most people have 3 forms - some women have a form that fires from blue light, so they can "see" colors that most people can't differentiate from "blue".)  We can't "see" infrared because we have no rhodopsin that changes from infrared energy.  Instead we have heat sensors in our skin that "see" (or sense) infrared energy.

But we can't see ultraviolet energy with any sensors, so science can't "give" us that "sense".  They'd have to invent a new organ, one that would work when implanted into your body, and one that the brain would understand.  And then you'd be like someone deaf from birth who gets one of the "electronic ears" - they sense something, but they aren't "hearing" the way we do.

[Jason78]

Thoughts?

Bollocks.  Not only can we imagine colours, but we can trick our brains into seeing impossible colours.

We are quite capable of imagining qualia outside of the gamut of our experiences.  And indeed, outside the realm of possible qualia.

[Jason78]

No device actually lets us experience a new sense.

Get a small chunk of magnetic material implanted into one of your fingertips.

With a little practice, you've suddenly gained the ability to sense magnetic fields and currents.  And your brain will quite happily process this new information source.

[Solomon Zorn]

I can't speak for everyone, but I can't imagine a four-dimensional anything, unless the fourth dimension is "time." Nor can I imagine a color I haven't seen. I tend to agree with Farroc. I see imagination more as taking patterns from the world and recombining them into new patterns. Not that this takes anything away from imagination. It's just not quite as unlimited as we imagine.  

[Jason78]

Nor can I imagine a color I haven't seen.

Have you tried?

[Aupmanyav]

.. it would potentially mean we could have any sense we want.

Thoughts?

Are you sure there are no limits, with computers or our mind? We know the limits when we come to them (for a possible example: inflation in the universe. The current belief is that all previous record is wiped out).

[Sal1981]

They'll remain unknow ... until someone discovers them.

But infrared cameras don't truly let us see in the infrared spectrum. They just convert it to a format we're familiar with. Visible light. No device actually lets us experience a new sense.


And some fiction stories may be new ideas, but the basic building blocks that make up those new ideas are all merely feelings and sensations we're already familiar with. They're just different combinations of the same colors, sights, smells, feelings, emotions, temperatures, sounds, and shapes. Ultimately, we can't come up with anything we haven't already been exposed too.

I'm not sure on what you're getting at.

We're basically just repetitions of up and down quarks with different spins; going further, we're mainly composed of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen with trace elements of other atoms. Just because of these basic buildings blocks, we can't have new configurations of the same stuff that doesn't open the door to something new, right? Is that what you're getting at?

Space, according to string theory, is folded in 11 dimensions, or something. I'll venture as far as to say that we might be able to re-configure future minds to account and imagine stuff happening in more than 3 dimensions.

I kinda like the hypercube example; we can't for obvious reasons not see in 4 dimensions, but we can project a mathematical 4-dimensional "cube" onto a 3-dimensional cube, and further down to a 2-dimensional plane. On that note: I remember a hack in a Descent 2 custom level that used a hypercube where you flew your ship in and around a 4-dimensional tesseract. Was very confusing at first, but you got the hang of the overlapping space flying around in the tesseract eventually.

[AllPurposeAtheist]

I live in Columbus near OSU. I'll take xray vision if you don't mind. I can sort of imagine all those hot, young ladies naked, but let's face it. Selective, adjustable xray vision would be a hell of an upgrade to my imagination. :-k