Does the world have any existence whatsoever outside the human imagination?

Answer 1

Sure it does; the world is what it is. Imagination, however, is part of what makes the world into a beautiful place for some people. Imagination is what drives us to search for meaning, what dares us to do great things. The world exists...imagination gives the world hope :)

Answer 2

Hello!
YES! I believe it does. It's not our imagination but Gods. He's the one that created all this through Jesus. We may only be a dream that he is having. I don't know. In the Bible it said that a second to him is a thousand years to us. They say the earth has been around for 5 to 10 billion years. So if its a dream I hope he doesn't wake up any time soon.

Answer 3

Yes but not outside human experience.

Answer 4

The earth exhisted before humans evolved but the world? Nope

Answer 5

I assume you mean does the univerise exist outside of human imagination --- Likely it does, but our perceptions of it may be entirely wrong. Just like the concept of "god." "He" may exist, but is certainly much different than anything we can understand.

Answer 6

To follow through with your dreams and fly me to the Moon

Answer 7

The human intellect has the capacity to perceive *being as being|*

"Objective-reality-ness" is a fundamental moment of human cognition|

But it can be obscured in some people so that they doubt the existence of the outside world.

That is becoming quite a problem these day.

However, the 20th century Catholic philosopher addresses some of these issues|
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Mystery vs. Problem - Jacques Maritain
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Here Maritain explains the difference between *reason* and *intellect* in that reason is moving from one "problem" to another. Intellect is the penetration into being, which he calls "mystery." Problem and mystery are the two dimensions of cognition. Problem knowledge is moving from thing to thing, as in [physical] science. Mystery knowledge is staying in the same place with an ever deepening understanding of the same thing, as in contemplation - JM


"Reason" is the accumulation of *facts* through a deductive or inductive process.

"Intellect" is the penetration of the *essence* of something in simple intuition.





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Maritain says:


"The proper object of understanding is being. And being is a mystery, either because it is too pregnant with intelligibility, too pure for our intellect which is the case with spiritual things, or because its nature presents a more or less impenetrable barrier to understanding, a barrier due to the element of non-being in it. which is the case with becoming, potency and above all matter.

The mystery we conclude is a fullness of being with which the intellect enters into a vital union and into which it plunges without exhausting it ... The Supreme "mystery" is the supernatural mystery which is the object of faith and theology. It is concerned with the Godhead Itself, the interior life of God, to which our intellect cannot rise by its unaided natural powers. But philosophy and science also are concerned with mystery, another mystery, the mystery of nature and the mystery of being. A philosophy unaware of mystery would not be a philosophy.

Where then shall we discover the pure type of what I call the "problem"? In a crossword puzzle, or an anagram. At this extreme there is no ontological content [no being content]. There is an intellectual difficulty with no being behind it. There is a logical difficulty, a tangle of concepts, twisted by a mind which another mind seeks to unravel. When the tangle has been unraveled, the difficulty solved, there is nothing further, nothing more to be known. For the only thing to be discovered was how to disentangle the threads.


... In fact every cognitive act, every form of knowledge presents these two aspects. The mystery and the problem are combined. The mystery is present because there is always some degree of being, and its depth and thickness must be penetrated. The problem also because our nature is such that we can penetrate being only by our conceptual formulae, and the latter by their nature compose a problem to be solve.

The problem aspect naturally predominates where knowledge is least ontological, for example, when it is primarily concerned with mental constructions built up around a sensible datum - as in empirical knowledge, and in the sciences of phenomena ... purely ideal as in mathematics; or yet again when its object is mental constructions of the practical intellect as in craftsmanship and applied science.

... The mystery aspect, as we should expect, predominates where knowledge is most ontological, where it seeks to discover, either intuitively or by analogy, being in itself and the secrets of being; the secrets of being, of knowledge and of love, of purely spiritual realities, of the First Cause. The mystery aspect is predominate in the philosophy of nature and still more in metaphysics. And most of all in theology.

Where the problem aspect prevails one solution follows another: where one ends, the other begins. There is a rectilinear progress of successive mental views or ideal perspectives, of different ways of conceptualizing the object. And if one solution is incomplete, as is always the case, it is replaced by its successor. It is as when the landscape changes and scene succeeds to scene as the traveler proceeds on his way. Similarly the mind is on the move. Progress of this kind is progress by substitution.

On the other hand where the mystery aspect prevails the intellect has to penetrate more and more deeply into the *same* object. The mind is stationary turning around a fixed point. Or rather it pierces further and further into the same depth. This is progress in the same place, progress by deepening... Thus we can read and reread the same book, the Bible for example, and every time discover something new and more profound.

Here knowledge is not exactly constituted by the addition of parts, still less by the substitution of one part for another. It is the whole itself that grows or rather is more deeply penetrated... as the indivisible whole and in all its parts at once.


At this point we must distinguish three kinds of intellectual thirst and three corresponding means of quenching them.

In the first case, where the problem aspect predominates I thirst to know the answer to my problem. And when I have obtained the answer I am satisfied: that particular thirst is quenched. But I thirst for something else. And so interminably.

This is the water of science, useful and bitter.

In the second case where the mystery aspect predominates I thirst to know reality, being under one or other of its modes, the ontological mystery. When I know it I drink my fill. But I thirst and continue to thirst for the same thing, the same reality which at once satisfies and increases my desire. Thus I never cease quenching my thirst from the same spring of water which is ever fresh and yet I always thirst for it.

This is the water of created wisdom.

In the third case - the vision of God's Word face to face - my thirst is once again different. I thirst to see God and when I see Him my thirst will be completely quenched. I shall thirst no longer.

This is the water of uncreated wisdom ... "




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by Jacques Maritain

From "A Preface to Metaphysics" - First Lecture

Maritain was one of the foremost Catholic philosophers of the 20th century











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Answer 8

There is no way that we can ever know.

Answer 9

If it didnt... how did it get here?