We had very fine distinctions about things that we prefer, aesthetic things. And, yet, none of it seems to have much to do with functionalism, with staying alive and certainly not with industries I would say. So, as I say, we’re all doing it and we’re all thinking about it. What are we actually doing?
So I want to look at what children do. If you watch children playing what they’re doing mostly is ‘let’s pretend’. Let’s pretend this stick can change you into a frog. But if you have this bottle top and you shine it at me, I can’t fly any more. Something like that. Those are the kind of games that children like to play. And they play them absolutely incessantly. And everybody sort of intuitively knows that children playing is important. It’s how they learn. We also know that if we don’t let children play, they don’t develop well. It’s the process of acclimatising that a child is going through.
So, when a child is saying ‘let’s pretend’, what they’re really saying is ‘let’s imagine’. Imagining is possibly the central human trick. That’s what distinguishes us from all other creatures.
We know from quite careful study now that the amount that other animals can imagine is very, very limited compared to ours. We can imagine worlds that don’t exist. We can not only imagine them, we can imagine what is going on within them. We can change details, we can say ‘okay, I’ll make it this instead of that and then see what happens’. So we can play out whole scenarios in our head in imagination. And that, of course, makes us able to experience empathy, for example. By definition, empathy is having the feeling of what the world is like in somebody else’s head. Well you can only do that, really, if you are skilled at this job of world-building.
