Three Reasons Why Imagination is Important

In this post, I am going to offer three reasons why imagination is important: coherency, anticipation, and improvement. First, coherency. The world is a very messy place. There is randomness, uncertainty, inconsistency and endless things that we just do not understand. If we had to interact directly with the real world we would have a very difficult time. However, we reconstruct a much more coherent view of the real world in our imaginations and interact with that model instead. If it weren't for our imaginations, we would not be able to make sense out of the world.

Second, not only to we interact with the real world through a model that exists in our imaginations, we use that model to predict what might happen in the future. So, imagination is important for planing, forecasting, even just anticipating. Not only do we interact with the world through a model that exists in our imaginations, we interact with the future as well. Even simple things like planning errands occurs in the model of the world in our imaginations. But, it doesn't stop there. The most profound moral decisions we make, are made through the models of the world that we maintain in our imaginations. As we debate a moral issues we anticipate what the world would be like if we follow position A as a opposed to position B. And that brings us to the third reason why the imagination is important.

Without imagination it would not be possible to bring about a better world. Better worlds are only possible when someone can imagine a world that does not have things that we take for given in the real world of today. Not only does the imagination help us to envision a better world, it allows us to envision multiple better worlds and choose between them. So, life would never get any better without the benefit of our ability to imagine.

Our imaginations are critical in our ability to understand the world, anticipate and plan, and attempt to make the world a better place. Since the imagination is so important, a technology that provides a technological extension of the imagination must be critically important was well. So, in the next few posts, we will come off of our lofty perch where we examine the role of the imagination in constructing reality and come down to some very concrete business applications of a technology that can extend the imagination.