Imaginary friends are good for you!
Pop Culture, Pop-Psychology, Psychology July 9th, 2007This was my favourite news article of the day, perhaps even of the week so far. Research from the Institute of Education in London has shown that children who have an imaginary friend (with whom they are not afraid to interact with) have enhanced creativity which furthers their communication and articulacy skills whilst boosting their self-confidence.
Contrary to previously held beliefs that such behaviour was either abnormal or escapist, educational psychologists now believe that it is a perfectly acceptable coping mechanism for a variety of challenging issues from parental break-up to bullying or lack of self-esteem.
This seems like a nice example of arbitrary beliefs* being useful.
*Beliefs without justification or evidence, (similar to faith style beliefs).
It is also the imaginary and intellectual equivalent of the transitional object, such as the teddy-bear or comfort blanket that very young children use to start their developmental differentiation between self and other, me and not me.
Another example posited in the article was this one. “But it is not just children who converse with invisible companions. Explorer Dave Mill created his imaginary friend Nobody at the age of 34 as a survival mechanism during a solo walk to the North Pole.”
July 10th, 2007 at 8:29 am
Your recent articles make a fairly good case for the usefulness of arbitrary beliefs in particular situations. But both an imaginary friend and sport are human creations and exist mainly in our own minds. I am guessing you might be defending religious use of arbitrary belief but that implies to me religion is a human invention. You might notice that truth (i.e. reflecting reality) does not enter into the argument of sport, imaginary friends or God.
AC1
July 10th, 2007 at 2:45 pm
Do people who have an imaginary friend become creative, or do creative people invent imaginary friends? Beware of confusing cause with consequence, blah blah blah.
AC1
July 10th, 2007 at 7:44 pm
Well I’m not trying to equate imaginary friends and sport with religious belief. But I do accept that they are similar and that they may have a similar usage of arbitrary belief.
I think the key here is that I do not necessarily agree with the argument that religion is arbitrary belief but I am willing to accept that in some cases it may be, or at least it may bear a passing resemblance to it.
So really my posts were more about finding situations where arbitrary beliefs may be demonstrated or suggested to be useful, as a counterpoint to our earlier discussions where you posited that arbitrary beliefs were almost always not useful.
I am not intending to imply that religion is a human creation, but it is easy to draw that inference from what I have said and I have done nothing to suggest otherwise.
On a theological note where the ‘object’ of religious belief and practise is ‘other’ it is perhaps inevitable that religious practise is man-made.
A theological speculation may ask “if nobody worships him does God cease to exist?”…
sounds similar to “what sound does a falling tree make in a forest when there is nobody there to hear it?”
This is a pertinent question that can be re-written back to me as:- “as nobody worships the ancient gods of the roman pantheon have they ceased to exist?”
The only speculative answers I could give to these speculative questions concern archetypes and the human myth-making faculty that perhaps anthropromorphises a deistic principle into God, or perhaps de-constructs a spiritiually abstract archetype into many lesser specific archetypes, the mother, the father, the son, the creator and so on.
I disagree however also with the notion that truth has nothing to do with arbitrary belief, be it sport, imaginary friends or God.
I will consider just two of many possibilities here.
1) sport and imaginary friends will necessarily use archetypal images with which we are familiar. In sport the hero figure, or the warrior, or the combat between two forces are obvious archetypal images that reflect reality (either as it is now, or as it once was). This reality is deeply imprinted on the human psyche. Imaginary friends may take the form of fictional film or book characters, they may be a combination of many real or fictional characters, they may even be completely imaginary. They may be nonsense anthropromorphic entities such as a talking animal, or as a living breathing cuddly toy and teddy bear. However it manifests itself the imaginary friend just like the different psychological dynamics involved in sport will necessarily reflect ‘aspects’ of reality.
One may take the imaginary friend perhaps as a simile for religious beings, Jesus as man-God, Avalokiteśvara the Buddha of compassion, Krishna the cowherd. Perhaps these figures part real part imaginary have been manifestations of archetypes and reflections of reality. But that is for another discussion.
2) Arbitrary belief, is defined by your criteria as unjustified and based on a lack of empirical and observational evidence. I hate to ressurect the language games hypotheses but one area where arbitrary belief is pertinent is in internal intuitions. These are by definition impossible to be empirically tested or to be observed. Likewise my dreams, my visions, my hallucinations and my perceptions of reality. To return to the brain in the vat and the solipsistic skeptic are not all my beliefs arbitrary?
Now then we should give some credence to the idea that not all is an illusion and that there is a shared reality in which we participate, but this shared reality is limited and we are often unable to objectively experience the reality of others, i.e. my pain. You can only know of it through my reporting it, through observing various signs that suggest I am in pain, and perhaps through measuring electronic impulses in the brain, but you do not know IT.
I am leading, rather laboriously to the idea of religious experience, mystical experience and the ineffable experiences. I can only recommend a look at the ideas of Rudolf Otto and William James on religious experience, otherwise this overlong post will get even larger.
What I ask is: by what legitimate skeptical authority can you an external observer pass valid judgement* on the internal experiences of my mind that I have a sense, intuition, or feeling of being real or truthful?
* we can assume that I am not manifesting signs of mental illness.
July 11th, 2007 at 6:35 pm
[...] of war. However it can be said to have had a functional value to society, much in the same way an imaginary friend provides a coping mechanism for varying [...]