What If

No doubt you could reply to such a query with some degree of swiftness, because if you are like most of us then you are frequently considering such hypo-thetical scenarios. Some tend to make it a habit; others keep their feet firmly planted in reality for the greater part of the time; but we all do it. We are all continually manufacturing mental variants on various events and situations. This ability to both consciously and unconsciously fabricate counterfactuals and subjunctives is both significant and mysterious, although many would argue that it is not particularly useful. Our "what if" or "almost" situations are noteworthy because I believe they represent remarkable brain capacity. They are mysterious for a wholly different reason.

Imagine that you are watching a football game, and in an important situation the team you're rooting for makes a pass to the sidelines, but unfortunately the receiver steps out of bounds. What runs through your mind? "He almost stayed in!" "I bet he could have made it all the way!" "I wish the pass had been lower." What replays aren't generated by your mind? "Too bad he isn't number eighty!" "I wonder what would have happened if he were on stilts?" Wandering even further from reality, if such a thing is possible: "If only it was baseball." "Too bad multiplication is commutative!" "He could have caught it in four dimensions!" What makes us examine some alternative versions but not others? Why are some things easily changed while changing others strikes us as preposterous?

Those are but a small sample of the unanswered questions about the human mind's ability to manufacture counterfactuals. Why are there varying levels of impossibility? After all, if something failed to occur, it failed to occur. There aren't differing degrees of "didn't-take-place-ness." Yet some variations strike us as absurd, while others are considered normal subjunctives. It would seem that some form of indefinable parameters exist, and I dub them as indefinable because they are unstable. For example, in the football situation described above, spontaneously wondering how the play would have transpired had the ball been a alternate shape is generally rare; but what if you're playing hoops with a half-inflated ball? What we see fit to craft into a hypothetical counterfactual is quite malleable, but at the same time, everybody pounds in the same places. What I easily change is probably going to be what you and everyone else easily change, what we don't, we don't.

The bizarre relationship this distinctive, elusive ability has with the world of mathematics and computers is startling. In calculations and computer programs, different levels of stability also exist in a sort of layer format, with constants, variables, and other factors (parameters such as range). Variables, as the name would indicate, are the most easily changed, while other parameters dictate to what extent the variables do so. Constants do not alter. After setting the constant and parameters, it makes sense to change the value of the variable; It doesn't make sense to hold the parameters and variable fixed while changing the constant. In certain senses, different levels are built up by our minds when considering a situation. The constant is the lowest level of the perceived situation. In most cases it would probably represent the fact that everything you consider is going to be in three dimensions.

However, the suggested complexity dealt with in speculating upon the human mind's unconscious, virtually automatic capacity to spawn false situations that routinely "make sense" clues us in to the remarkable grandness of our brains, for two reasons. One, its something that is, despite the aforementioned relationship it has with computers and mathematics, virtually impossible to duplicate suitably via artificial intelligence (although Asimov frequently envisioned futuristic robots doing so). Two, even my ability to conjure up the unknown and counterfactual cannot seem to conceptualize many other species doing so.

I vaguely remember sitting through a lecture during which one of my teachers attempted to teach the class what set humans apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. Of the four or five items on the list, only humans possessed them all; other species only possessed perhaps one or two. I don't remember if such an ability as creating hypotheticals was on the list, but personally I have a hard time imagining a snail thinking "if only I had been a slug, I wouldn't have to carry this thing!" Anyway, due to the two reasons mentioned above, I personally believe that the ability to inadvertently visualize unrealities is a sign of intelligence. Am I saying that those with their head in the clouds are smarter than those with their feet on the ground, metaphorically? In a way. Do I think they possess more raw intelligence? Basically, yes. Do I think they possess more common sense? Not by any means. Daydreaming may be "smart," but often it is not a smart thing to do (such as when you're getting lectured by a teacher on something you might wind up writing about). Of course, this is merely my personal opinion. You are free to form your own, as I doubt there is any concrete evidence to support my view. However, if I had awakened with appendicitis this morning, I may never have formed such an conviction.

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