Could imagination in fact be memories ?

[Absolute Spirit]

Anyone else has ever thought that we haved live this very life (and plenty other before / after it) an infinite amount of times and that our so called creativity / imagination is nothing else than memories of previous cycles ?

All our ideas wouldn't come out of nothing but would be in fact vague / dim memories of what we have all experienced / seen / heard an infinite amount of times before ?

For example : myths, legends, stories from the past, even the idea of god or gods could be memories of motion pictures from the future of previous cycles.
So writers / authors in reality wouldn't invent anything as such, there would just think they do but in fact they would just unknowingly remember things from the future ? Eg : The "character" playing leonard da Vinci imagining / drawing, way ahead of his own time, tanks, planes, etc. would have just unconsiously "remembered" reality from the future of previous cycles... Or the "character" playing Tolkien imagining / writing about trolls, goblins, dragons etc. would also just unconsiously remembered motion pictures from previous cycles...

Thoughts ?

 

[Hadoblado]

Where did the initial ideas come from?

What causal mechanism allows ideas to trickle from one reality/time to another in a meaningful way?

 

[TheManBeyond]

so u think my imagination is like a highly efficient portal that connects different realities? like a telescope to parallel universes? u think if i imagine myself becoming a president it's because it's happening in another universe?

 

[EyeSeeCold]

I like to entertain the thought that our ancestors' knowledge and photographic memory are carried over through dna but I'm not sure if that's been disproved already. People who have visions would be those sensitive to such ancestral memories.

so u think my imagination is like a highly efficient portal that connects different realities? like a telescope to parallel universes? u think if i imagine myself becoming a president it's because it's happening in another universe?

I think that would make you mentally divergent.

Spoiler

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9ya6G5S8MA

 

[Nebulous]

I like to entertain the thought that our ancestors' knowledge and photographic memory are carried over through dna but I'm not sure if that's been disproved already. People who have visions would be those sensitive to such ancestral memories.

Oh I was thinking about souls
Like you subconsciously remember things from other lives that your soul has lived.
For example, some of your dreams could be snippets of memories from a past life.
Seems more probable to me than memories being passed on via DNA, but I'm definitely not an expert on that.

 

[TheManBeyond]

what happens if you give a monkey in a cage who has never seen the light of sun a banana? do you think he will destroy it or peel it and eat it? or find out little by little that is good to eat bananas but it's better if you peel them before?

 

[beautifulies]

Seems to be based on a spiritual premise-- One would have to make the assumptions that,

a.) Multiple lifetimes exist
b.) We are somehow connected to our "past" and "future" selves through some kind of spiritual link

Since all this seems like hocus pocus, I cannot say I agree at all. Furthermore, in using fMRI to observe brain activity, researchers found evidence of two separate pathways in the brain: One involved in storing memories, and the other one in storing imagination; from this, one would assume memories and imagination cannot be the same as pathways to process them seemingly differ.

Tackling this from another angle, from a Jungian perspective, S is representative of the past and therefore a tendency to rely on memories to gather information; whereas, N is representative of futuristic thinking as it relies on patterns and meaning to create possibilities about the future. To some degree, this idea seems to be repetitive of the study mentioned above.

Nonetheless, regarding multiple people "remembering" similar entities from "past lives", one cannot help but allude it to Jung's idea of the "collective unconscious" src:

(in Jungian psychology) the part of the unconscious mind that is derived from ancestral memory and experience and is common to all humankind, as distinct from the individual's unconscious.

Jung considered the collective unconscious to underpin and surround the unconscious mind, distinguishing it from the personal unconscious of Freudian psychoanalysis. He argued that the collective unconscious had profound influence on the lives of individuals, who lived out its symbols and clothed them in meaning through their experiences.

This, I believe, was what attributed to Jung's more intuitive patients [specifically, "Ni" intuition] than those who used their five senses, or sensation. A well-known example is a patient Jung had who insisted he remove the golden snake from her belly, and he thought her crazy. Yet it intrigued him to know that in another part of the world, there did indeed exist a golden snake in Yogi theory, which resided within the base of the spine of all human beings.

 

[Rook]

In other realities, if plastic chairs take to the sky and bludgeon humans to death with shovels held in their legs, then imagination is trickle-down memories from these past incarnations.

If not, the contemporary structures of biology and neurology still apply.

 

[The Gopher]

Wow the parallel universe me is living a horrible life.

 

[Nebulous]

I don't think all dreams are snippets of other lives. But I bet some are.

And I don't think you'd get 'memories' from things in the future. The arrow of time, bro. I think even souls are bound to it... I mean, probably..

But I think that other beings can 'communicate' with humans via dreams. Other beings not from our future, but from different planes of existence. So we're not seeing things from the future, but from the same time, it's just from a different place so it might seem like it's the future.


So like
Souls can't time travel
If we think we're seeing snippets of the future it probably isn't the future because that can't happen. If anything it's from beings in different planes who are at the same point on the arrow of time as us.
Unless I'm wrong and it can~if souls are not bound by the arrow of time.



i'm not crazy I swear

 

[Urakro]

Not sure. I've heard that our memory isn't a perfect video-camcorder, but takes a few snapshots of the timeline, then later when recalled, it interpolates the missing pieces and gaps. Or maybe, it 'imagines' them.

Perhaps imagination is nothing more than a flawed memory system. There's all this stuff about how imperfection is beauty and all that.

 

[Nebulous]

I tend to remember things I've imagined more than actual things that happened
Idk if this has to do w your topic tho

I guess I used to imagine I was flying a lot when I was little, because in a bunch of my memeories from then I'm levitating

 

[Haim]

Well there is one theoretical way for other dimensions to influence our imagination/memories.
The brain works with electrons, electrons have a thing which they disappear and reappear at other positions(without traveling between), now it is possible that while they disappear they actually move to another dimension(say a movement in the 5th dimension) that another dimension might have influence on the electrons, these influences might make up some common ideas humans have and might even be the sole responsible for their random position of reappearing.

But more likely it is just humans that look at the same things as another humans, and with the same input they make a similar output.
And no imagination is not memory, imagination is taking an input and making a new output with it, like completing an image.

 

[Hadoblado]

Okay so there might be a technical possibility of one reality or time trickling into another. By what mechanism does it manage to be meaningful?

By this I mean, how does the information know to go to the appropriate person without agency?

How does it end up in the right place in the brain?

How have we adapted to somehow make use of this information when our brains are closed systems when it comes to information? Throwing gas over the windscreen of a ute won't make it go.

Why do we bother having sensory faculties when we could just remember the way everything is through this trickle mechanism?

 

[Ex-User (9086)]

The idea is both circular and trippy, I found it in some fantasy novel I read (so it means that sometime in the past the origin of it had to influence the author of that book, lol this is so infinitely post-modern). I can see authors using it to seem fresh with their repackaging of overused comments about the meta.

Assuming you want to talk about reality, the way memories and thought patterns emerge is quite procedural and involves filling in themes of gaps using the currently available cultural and factual memes that the individual has acquired during their life. What makes some writers so great is the way their imagination processes what they think, not what they actually know or can think of.

Tolkien was strongly influenced by Norse and neolithic myths as well as Finnish and Scandinavian language groups, he was very studious and thorough, he had his own algorithms for creating cohesive systems of new cultures using historically existing fairytales and legends as inspiration.

Trying to neatly organise it into a continuous pattern seems forced and unnatural. Ideas repeat and appear cyclical because humans operate on similar principles and because they have access to past information through much more mundane means.

Ultimately I find it too boring and unfalsifiable to entertain it further atm.

 

[Artsu Tharaz]

so u think my imagination is like a highly efficient portal that connects different realities? like a telescope to parallel universes? u think if i imagine myself becoming a president it's because it's happening in another universe?

yes here is how you activate the portal

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pifQm3IZ1tc

 

[crippli]

The general premise is a bit far fetched for me. But if braked down. I've heard ideas that say water, h2o can hold memory, although not studied/seen evidence. If so, and memory can exist on a molecular level. Then if not destroyed on a molecular level, some parts of you may remain, for a while.

 

[Absurdity]

Anyone else has ever thought that we haved live this very life (and plenty other before / after it) an infinite amount of times and that our so called creativity / imagination is nothing else than memories of previous cycles ?

All our ideas wouldn't come out of nothing but would be in fact vague / dim memories of what we have all experienced / seen / heard an infinite amount of times before ?

Plato or one of those guys beat you to it by a few thousand years (or is that the point)

Back it out far enough though and it's an endless incoherent regress

 

[Ponderer]

I doubt there are multiple lifes. Our conciousness is just a brain process, I don't think such thing as a soul exist.
I think what you are saying is true, except the multiple lives part. When we are creative, we just apply something we have already seen somewhere else, or use some concept in unusual manner. The more intelligent someone is, the more creative they could be. When you are thinking how to solve a problem, you remember some analogy from somewhere else, and the bigger your internal library of knowledge, the more solutions you can think of.

Myths originated from the stories of the people ages ago. Back when people weren't educated enough and were easily fooled. They probably witnessed something unusual and something which couldn't be explained at that time. Quite possible people saw some animals in the dark which looked like small humans, or witnessed a birth of a midget and made up stories, how the mother was impregnated by gnome or troll.

I think Da Vinci was pretty smart guy and he probably could envision, how such devices would look like if they are ever built. Right now scientists are also trying to predict what the future will look like, and I wouldn't be surprised if some of them will be right.

 

[Pressure's Spring]

I like to entertain the thought that our ancestors' knowledge and photographic memory are carried over through dna but I'm not sure if that's been disproved already. People who have visions would be those sensitive to such ancestral memories.

Most probably in the form of internal predispositions, certain drives, habits, instincts, inclinations, and so forth, in our interaction with the world.

For example, inherited emotional qualities or instincts, increase the likelihood of certain thought patterns (re)emerging.

Picture data being diluted before being carried over, and then gradually being (re)concentrated during development.

 

[Terran]

An assumption not based on evidence, more scientific theories exist in our evolutionary need for imagination.