Chapter
Fourteen
Reality and imagination
“Justice” was done, and the President of the Immortals, in Aeschylean
phrase, had ended his sport with Tess. And the d’Urberville knights and
dames slept on in their tombs unknowing. The two speechless gazers
bent themselves down to the earth, as if in prayer, and remained thus a
long time, absolutely motionless: the flag continued to wave silently. As
soon as they had strength, they arose, joined hands again, and went on.’(Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles: A pure woman faithfully presented,
1891)What do you feel when you read this passage? How do you imagine the two
scenes, with Tess and after her death? Do you notice any changes in your body or
your awareness of your surroundings as you imagine? Do they come in response
to particular phrases or sentences? Maybe you have read the whole novel, and
many other memories of Tess and Angel come to mind. Maybe you have experi-
enced shame or bereavement in ways that heighten your emotion now. Or maybe
the passage seems too sentimental and this description leaves you cold. But for
us at least, the imaginative experience has a visceral reality. We know none of
these characters exist; and their situation may have little outwardly to do with our
own lives. And yet, what we imagine is real in the sense that it has effects on us:
reading creates an experience, and the experience is real. Thinking this way can
make us deeply confused about the difference between reality and imagination.
Perhaps we should be confused. Let’s take another example. Suppose you walk
into your kitchen and see your black cat on the chair. You look again and real-
ise that it’s actually a friend’s pullover, left in a heap, with one arm dangling. The
strange thing is that if you had not looked again, you could have described how
the cat was sitting, which way its ears were pointing, and how its tail hung down
off the seat. You may say that the pullover was real and the cat was imagined, but
now consider the same thing happening when the cat is actually there. In a brief
glimpse you could not have taken in all those details, and yet they were mostly
correct. You noticed no gap corresponding to the blind spot on your retina (Chap-
ter 3). You saw a whole cat even though its hind legs were half hidden by the back
of the chair. Was what you saw real or imagined?
Other examples that confront us with this question include apparently simple
perceptual events like ‘watching the sun go down’ at ‘sunset’. You know that the
earth is moving relative to the sun, not vice versa, and yet your experience is of
the sun sinking down beneath the horizon. Or take a well-known case of a social
illusion: ‘the dress’. The most popular internet meme of 2015, generating 840,000
views per minute and 4.4 million tweets in 24 hours, was a photograph originally
posted on Tumblr of a dress that to some people looks like blue and black stripes
and to others white and gold. The actual colours were eventually confirmed to
be black and blue, though the manufacturer produced a one-off white-and-gold
version for a charity auction. Vision scientists became intrigued by this striking
example of a bistable colour stimulus with a very low switch rate. The Journal of
Vision has an ongoing special topic (Allred et al., 2017) devoted to exploring the
phenomenon: a full-scale twin study was used to determine the contributions of
genetic and environmental factors, and other articles investigated the effects of
sensitivity to contextual cues about the illumination of the scene, and the relative
contributions of stable traits of the visual system versus one-shot learning effects.