Do fantasy creatures really exist?

Yes

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by A. Henriksen

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We have gone through an age of strong faith in objectivism, which started as a philosophy seeing nature objectively apart from the subjectivity of religions and existential philosophy. The branch of philosophy turned into our current natural science, which has brought us great advances in many areas. Unfortunately the systematic use of objectivistic methodology has for many turned into a dogmatic faith - a faith in an independent reality of objects 'out there' as a primary cause of secondary subjective experience.

A lot of discoveries are now pointing in the direction of objectivity being only half of the picture, and subjectivity an equally fundamental aspect of reality. Of course an old system of institutions, careers and prestige can't be turned around overnight and admit that its foundation is starting to seem like a muddy swamp.

During the age of mechanical objectivism the brain was seen as a machine passively observing outer reality. Other functions were viewed as more or less problematic by-products, like imagination and fantasy. Today the brain is discovered to be much more plastic than previously believed, forming itself according to our imagination. The key phrase of brain plasticity is "Neurons that fire together wire together, and if you don't use it you loose it". So when experiencing and interacting with physical reality we do so through the lens of habitual usage of our brain. Imagination has shown to be able to make or break such patterns in the brain. Often a subject is taken to a state of consciousness where imagination works more freely in order to implement new ideas and beliefs.

Some people demonstrate extraordinary abilities by creating and maintaining unusual neural connections, like tasting words, seeing numbers, hearing visual input, controlling body temperature etc. One person who sees numbers can easily remember Pi to the thousandth decimal because experiences it like a familiar landscape that he can associate back to numbers. Another one who struggled with math at school one day woke up as a human calculator, able to do any complex calculations in seconds. There are also cases of people having lost big parts of the brain, but rewiring it into functioning normally.

Children have not restrained their imagination's control over the brain into the habitual patterns of most adults, and can experience a much wider range of the brain's abilities. Later beliefs and habits are implemented into the brain for reuse. Unicorns are usually confined to the sub-consciousness, and can only be fully experienced in dreams. The habitual patterns have become the sense of reality.

What is reality? The relativity theory of physics showed us that no absolute reality can be experienced from any single perspective. It's all relative. When looking further for independent building blocks of outer reality they always seem to elude researchers. Is there anything out there' except how we try to see it? Light is electromagnetic waves if we try to observe its wave nature, but it is particles if we try to observe it that way. Particles are even only potentiality until they are observed. Schrodinger's cat is neither alive nor dead before observed. A lot of serious physicists lean to the theory that what we experience as out there' actually is only one manifestation of many worlds. The worlds are potential to a subject until the one is observed into actuality. What is the reality of the brain in this except its own idea about itself? Did I hear anybody say feedback loop?

So why shouldn't unicorns and other fantasy creatures exist somewhere in our multiverse, as real as any horse we can experience? They just don't fit into our conditioned framework of reality. May be we need to become like children to experience reality more like it really is; with deceased people among us, fantasy worlds and creatures, previous lives, you name it? It seems to me that more and more and more people do, to loud cries from people who obviously depend on it for cheaply seeing themselves among an intellectual elite.

In many writers' experience fantasy worlds do exist. They use their imagination only to reach into their realm in order to be mediums between the worlds. The old idea of imagination seems outdated and restrained to them, like it does for children. It is rather the old mechanic, objectivistic and materialistic concepts, beliefs and ideas that seems less real to many of us today, in contrast to a more fundamental imagination that make us experience the outer separate from the inner in the first place, matter as more than our projections, and some ideas having external representations but others not. It was fun for a while but may be it's time to move out of the little sandbox into a bigger one.

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