Reply #55: Do you think that pain is imaginary? [View All]

[Jim__]

We only feel pain in our mind (our imagination). But, a form of the pain also exists in our body, for instance in the bone that is cracked and in the nerves that carry that "message" to our brain. The cracked bone and the transport of the "message" exist outside of our brain; they deliver the message that translates into pain; but they themselves are not pain. Would you classify pain as imaginary?

In some ways, governments are similar to pain. You say they exist only in our imagination - but is our imagination imaginary? I think it is, but there are non-imaginary objects that make up our imagination - neural networks. These networks exist outside of our imagination, but they only exist as our imagination, as a compound object, within our imagination.

I think the difficulty between existence outside of our imagination and only within our imagination is seen when you consider how things exist in our imagination. If we are playing tennis, then, presumably, the ball that we are playing with exists outside of our imagination. But, what exists for us is really only the various neural representations of the ball in our brain. Our only access to this ball is to its representation. Yet we accept the ball as existing outside of our imagination. The artifacts of government (buildings, etc) and the effects of government (police departments, fire departments, etc) exist outside of our imagination. The ball is really a specific collection of atoms, or even further, a specific collection of sub-atomic particles that our imagination identifies as a ball. This collection of atoms, the ball, exists as a set of relationships between these atoms, but, as a ball, only in our imagination. The government is a collection of buildings, people, activities that exist outside of our imagination. Do you consider the ball to be only imaginary? If not, how is it different from the government?

When I look at your list, I think that all the entities on your list are compound objects that are composed of simpler objects that exist outside of the imagination, but the compound object only exists in the imagination.