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If we can imagine that something is real than can't it be?

Owl's picture

 Listening to the Original Broadcast of War of the Worlds felt like a great Halloween booster. Although I was predisposed to the fact that it was non-fiction or not real in the sense of it actually occurring, I actually started to believe that it could happen. I once heard, that if one can imagine something, than it could possibly happen. I mean how is it that we can imagine something that we've never seen, heard, or touched before? It seems almost impossible that we could imagine animals talking (as seen in Disney movies), mermaids living in the sea, or robots that run police departments, without there being some hidden, unknown knowledge in the back of our minds of such things being in existence. It makes me wonder whether we do exist in other worlds and not just the one we believe to be real. 

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kgould's picture

 It's really interesting to

 It's really interesting to think that maybe we do live in other worlds than the one we ascribe to be real. 

Not physically, perhaps, but what is physicality anyway?

Look at people who play MMORPGs like World of Warcraft (WoW.) This is maybe a little more literal than the examples given above (mermaids, robots, talking animals), but I think it paints a similar picture.

A character is constructed. That character is developed, used to play in this virtual world, for hours, days, weeks, months. Communities of players are forged together, not based off of the person behind the character, but off of the character itself. The character, for all intents and purposes, is real. It is another facet of that person's personality, of their reality. 

That isn't to say that every WoW player sees their character as a facet of themselves, or feels that invested into the game-- but if you've ever played a video game before and you've lost data, accidentally deleted a file, destroyed a character, then you might have felt the anger and the loss, the sadness, that comes with the loss of that information.

How is that not real? How is that not a world?...

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