If you were ever to doubt that you live in and through your imagination, that you are always -- not just sometimes when you need an escape -- experiencing things as being real that are not, just ask yourself where you are feeling that doubt. In your mind, perhaps. Where is that? Inside that pretty skull of yours? Let’s take a look and see what’s there. If we can get past the brain mass and focus on the specific neural activity that correlates with your doubt, we would find nothing but the biochemistry of axons, dendrites, glucose metabolism, ubiquitous electrical happenings, etc. Perhaps some playful fellow would say that that specific neural activity, joined perhaps by other yet to be specified neural events, is in fact the experience of doubt we seek. If so, that would support the idea that your experience of doubt is not what it is or that the nature of our biochemistry is much stranger than we previously thought. It is almost as if the most accurate description of human reality is that we are not what we are and are what we are not, a twist of Jean-Paul’s description of consciousness. The fundamental mistake is to think of the imagination as just one among a variety of mental capacities (memory, perception, rational thought, etc.) rather than the very ground of our being. Perhaps we can set up camp here for the night and discuss these questions further.
Some time later beneath the "dingle starry":
She: But what if someone were to say that doubt is not just the neural activity itself but the meaning of that activity?
He: That meaning would have its own neural correlation, I suppose. Would we next be talking about the meaning of meaning?
She: Perhaps it goes on indefinitely, this meaning of meaning.
He: Are you saying that meaning is not what is and is what it is not?
She: I suppose so. What's next?
They sleep, they wake and find each other,
the night all aflower as in a dream.
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