Real and Imaginary People

Just because something is imaginary does not mean that it does not exist. It would seem absurd to say that thoughts do not exist even though we clearly experience them. Perhaps more surprisingly however, just because something is real does not mean that it exists either.*

People, grown-ups in particular, have lived in and experienced reality the way they have for so long that they forget, or don’t even understand how to question and interpret through questioning what they experience anymore. General consensus of belief makes this even more difficult.

Let’s say the people who we perceive in real life every day - friends, family, strangers on the street - we can all agree that they are “real”, that is, they “exist”. And now lets say I decide to create certain “imaginary” people in my mind, that I know are not “real”, but that I know exist because I can think about them. In both cases, I can attempt to communicate my thoughts with them and also receive responses, but in the real case, I hear a response concretely through sound waves, through my ears, and in the imaginary case, I hear a response through the form of “my thoughts”.

“My thoughts”. What does this mean? Yes, any lay person could simply dismiss all of this as ridiculous because I have obviously “made up” in my mind all of the responses from my imaginary people that I have created, and they are not the ones that are communicating with me; I am communicating with myself, they don’t exist. Sure, but what really is a “thought”? Yes, I perceive it through my head. Yes, it seems so be associated with intention, and I seem to be the underlying reason why they are appearing, but how do I know that? I perceive them, but how do I know that I’m not also just perceiving intention as well? That there is actually no underlying causal relationship between what I perceive as “intention” and what I perceive as a “thought”? So there is indeed no way of knowing whether these responses that I get from my imaginary people are from the imaginary people who do exist, or I “made them up”.

Now, there is a more fundamental difference between real and imaginary people that does not have to do with whether I can physically perceive them and their behavior or form of communication, and that is their own underlying intentions and thoughts. We perceive the behavior of real people, but we do not perceive their thoughts. We believe we may know what their thoughts and intentions are, but we do not and cannot perceive that.

But - it seems like we do and can perceive the thoughts and intensions of our imaginary people. We perceive their consciousness directly from the inside as if it were part of our own. It most certainly “exists” - we may not know how exactly it exists, but we know it does because we can directly perceive it, rather than just infer it. Well, shouldn’t this make the consciousness of imaginary people be more “real” than “real” people? And yet not at all - this is exactly what makes them imaginary. That is, you can only be “real” when you don’t directly perceive it. And when you do directly perceive it, you somehow… are no longer “real”.

So, which do I choose to be the “real”? Which one is really the “imaginary”? Obviously there is no answer because there is no “truth”, there is just what I believe in - again and again it’s the same answer, it’s so obvious, just because of the nature of unfalsifiable things… But how am I supposed to know what to believe? Well, I wouldn’t know. I wouldn’t know, again. I’d be worried if I knew, wouldn’t I? Yes, Indeed.

It is 5:08 am again, and I can never find myself living in the reality that “everyone else” does.

*We could go into the definition of existence and raise books and books of arguments, but they would only be arguments based on definition and language, devoid of actual meaning, so I don’t want to go into that.