Counterfactual Imagination And Imagination

The idea of people playing pretend and using their imagination may sound silly, but it is in fact not. Imagination has the potential to be used as a utensil. It can used to create multiple universes with diverse outcomes and possibilities. These are what we call counterfactuals. These thoughts are the woulda-coulda-shouldas. “What if I did…?” “I wonder what my life would have been like if…” The list goes on and on. You can use counterfactual thinking to think ahead in the future to plan out your next actions, look into your past to see what you could have done differently or to even watch your present self. In this essay, I argue that imagination and counterfactual thinking can be used as a means to problem solving because counterfactual thinking

Counterfactual thinking can be for imagining what could possibly happen in the future. Counterfactual thinking for the future is very unique in its own way because we are thinking ahead trying to see the different outcomes, and choosing the world that we want. This is something that we do in our everyday lives. You just do not notice it until now. In Alison Gopnik’s first lab experiment, she tested to see if a child can use their counterfactual thinking and see a problem before they even tried it. For Gopnik’s experiment, a child had to stack rings on top of a post, but one of the rings hole was taped over so that they could not fit it. The first test subject was a fifteen month old. The child’s method was to actually try it out before realizing that it would not fit. Obviously the ring would not fit but he kept going. Eventually, he gave up. An eighteen-month-old was the second test subject. When she saw the taped ring she knew what would happen if she tried. She did not even try to put the ring on. If children that are barely past a year old can counterfactually think into the future than so can adults, and they have before. “The most evolutionarily fundamental kind

It gives adults and children the advantage of turning a simple idea into reality. Possessing the power to possibly save the world or destroy it can come from just one simple thought that someone has in the middle of the day. Humans come up with ideas all the time. So how do you make these concepts come to life? By connecting counterfactual thinking with causal knowledge. How imagining a possible world is related to how one event causes the next event to happen. Once somebody can see how one event is triggered by another they can use counterfactual thinking to easily see into the future. Counterfactual thinking can also create worlds with the other options that they came up with and show them what kind of world that would have been like. Causal thinking allows to change the world in the way that they want. They have the power to intervene. Intervening creates a probable world and then they will take the initiative to the change the world to make their possibility real. “…having a causal theory of the world makes it possible to consider alternative solutions to a problem, and their consequences, before you actually implement them, and it lets you make a much wider and more effective range of interventions.” (Gopnik 173). What Gopnik means by this quote is that by using the causal knowledge you have on the present world it allows people to have a better intervention on the