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WELCOME TO IMAGINARY REALITY | Index to Imaginary Reality pages |
Every condition has its opposite. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Every Yin has its Yang. Good has Evil. Matter has Antimatter. Real numbers and imaginary numbers are separated by the square root of minus one. With the universe so constituted, it is unsurprising that the very structure of the reality continuum is itself dicotomous. There is Ordinary Reality as we experience it and there is Imaginary Reality which is the anti- structure of the reality of our every day experience.
Ordinary reality is perverse: Murphy's law is its central paradigm; what can go wrong, will go wrong; indeed, it must go wrong. In Imaginary Reality, nothing can go wrong. Instead of perverse, the underlying paradigm is one of begninity. Imaginary Reality is a segment of the universal reality continuum in which bread always falls butter-side-up -- when it falls at all. Machines work better as deadlines approach, and a 50-cent can of watery beer makes people younger and sexier than massive plastic surgery and a seven-figure bank account.
Imaginary Reality is anti-Murphian. Imaginary reality is a world in which miracles (as they appear from the standpoint of Ordinary Reality) are not only commonplace, but inevitable. It is the anti-Murphian universe in which need determines the shape of the continuum, and the Imaginarian's wish is reality's command. (see IR mathematics)
But not everyone can operate in Imaginary Reality. Only those whose vision is not bound by the constraints of ordinary reality. Business executives, politicians (and the voters who elect them), college presidents, sports announcers, electronic evangelists, all are fully cognizent of a realm in which reality is defined by their desires, not vice-versa. While the bodies of Imaginarians may have been born in the reality familiar to all of us, their brains have their origins in a reality far, far away.
In fact, the boundaries of the two realities are unidirectionally permeable (see IR mathematics) which permits inhabitants of Imaginary Reality to move freely into Ordinary Reality. The reverse is not true, of course, because, while the nature of Imaginary Reality is benign and accomodating, that of Ordinary Reality is perverse and obstructive. As we would say in Maine, 'You cahn't get theah from heah, but you cahn get heah from theah.'
And people do get here from there. In ever increasing numbers Imaginarians, inhabitants of Imaginary Reality, are contacting -- and then replacing -- the brains of Ordinarians. It is hard to see why an inhabitant of a benign reality would want to operate in a perverse reality, but it has been hypothesized that Imaginary Reality draws the energy for its existence from the chaos created by the introduction of Imaginarian operations into Ordinary Reality. It has been reported that Imaginary Reality is becoming increasingly energetic by the moment. Imaginarians who operate through brains in Ordinary Reality are probably considered heroic and courageous in Imaginary Reality.
It may be hard to consider the presence of invaders from an alternate reality, but think for a moment. Haven't you ever wondered how political, business, religous, and social leaders - - and their followers -- got that way? Haven't you, some time in your life, worked for Dilbert's Pointy-haired Boss? Do you really think Jesse Helms has any contact with the reality in which you must live and work? How about Ronald Reagan (and his supporters) to whom fiscal responsibility meant writing bad checks?
In Ordinary Reality, if wishes were horses, then beggars would ride. In Imaginary Reality, everyone rides.
Although full awareness of the realm we call Imaginary Reality is a phenomenon of the computer age and the information explosion, it has always been with us. Since the first leader of an early hominid band came to appreciate fully the fact that his preeminence was part of the natural order and that those who served him should be grateful for the opportunity, Imaginary Reality has been that higher plane inhabited by those able to get the choicest cut of meat without having to slice it off for themselves.
While Imaginarian tales are certainly known from antiquity (Where else could the real Mt. Olympus have been located?), the birth of modern speculation on Imaginary Reality dates from the great French philosopher, Rene Descartes. Reasoning from a simple beginning, usually given as "I think, therefore I am," Descartes was able not only to logically prove the existence of the universe, but also to locate it on a moral spectrum from good to bad. (Actually, some scholars believe the story to be somewhat different from that typically reported. The original of the quote may have come from one of the philosopher's graduate students who, after a long night of studying, said, "I think I am, therefore I am, I think." Decartes, recognizing quality when he heard it, appropriated the comment to himself as have thousands of other professors before and since. After all, it takes an Imaginarian to deal with concepts of that magnitude, so good ideas are only wasted on graduate students. Decartes, recognizing not only quality, but the limited attention span of the public, shortened the statement to the more pithy version heard today. )
Whichever version is true, Decartes' writing remains one of the finest examples of Imaginarian writing in existence today, riviling even the statement, 'We skipped versions 4 through 9 of our database and went directly to version 10' and 'Do you think the Japanese auto industry can learn anything from America's Big Three?'
If Decartes was one of the first and best known Imaginarians to leave us his speculations, Mark Twain was one of the most literate observers of Imaginarians. In one of the finest pieces of descriptive writing ever penned, Twain proved by examining the annual shortening of the Mississippi River and employing simple arithmetic that the river had once been over a million miles long and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a gun barrel. He concluded with the excellent observation, 'Science is wonderful. You get such a wealth of speculation from such a trifling investment of fact.'
In many instances the investment of fact has been trifling indeed. Psychologist Sir Cyril Burt spent his entire life demonstrating substantial differences in intelligence between black people and white people. Lacking real data to support his contentions, he made them up. For years he published mountains of statistics that had no source but his own imagination.
G.S. Soule used the same general technique in demonstrating the existence of ESP. Other Imaginarian efforts have been more subtle. H. J. Eysenck used real people, but devised a scoring procedure that could yield no outcome but the desired one. Even your present writer, in company with an accomplice, found that the factor analysis was such a powerful statistical tool that it could determine the underlying structure of the universe using random numbers as a starting point. Others have drawn great conclusions from factor analysis with little more data than that. Thurstone's factor-analytic definition of the general intelligence factor on which our notions of IQ are based bears about an equal resemblence to the world of Ordinary Reality.
The uninformed reader be left with the impression that what was stated above is just another way of phrasing the old say, 'Figures don't lie, but liars figure'. This conclusion can only reflect the lack of attention with which that reader has followed this treatise. 'Figures don't lie, but liars figure' is a purely Ordinarian concept. Imaginary Reality is a different segment of the universal reality continuum. The truth value of an assertion in Imaginary Reality has nothing to do with whether or not it can be observed to operate in Ordinary Reality, but whether it would be convenient if it did so.
In other pages we will learn just how this can be true. We will explorate Imaginary reality, its laws, its structures, its concepts, and its mathematics. We will find out how an Imaginarian brain can be projected into an Ordinarian body.
Rigorously following the scientific precepts there presented we will then explore the Imaginarian nature of private enterprise in the western world. We will learn what lies beneath such alphabet soup as QA/QC and why Ordinarians have such trouble grasping the concept. We will treat such specific topics and case studies as technical services committees (Ordinarians in Imaginary Reality) and what happens when the employee coffee fund falls under the notice of an Imaginarian.
We will examine our Imaginarian governmental institutions, a task which should keep us busy and out of the bars and pool halls for some time to come.
Also explored will be the famous quotation that 'There is so much Ordinarian in the most Imaginarian of us and so much Imaginarian in the most Ordinarian of us that there is no way to make sense of this statement.' We will trace writings from Mark Twain on to show that there is some Imaginarian in all of us. Otherwise, why would the American public refuse to elect a politician unless he or she makes statements that could be true only in Imaginary Reality? Those who stick to statements observably true in Ordinary Reality generally go home after the election.
Bigtime sports, computer software companies, personnel management, training for investigators into Imaginary Reality, counselling for Ordinarians trapped among the denizens of Imaginary Reality, Imaginary science, Imginary education, and many other topics will be illuminated in these pages unless some other bright pebble on the shore of the universal sea captures our attention first.
