A post by Clas Weber

Imagine that not just the words you are reading right now on your screen are generated by a computer, but that everything you see, hear, smell, and feel is part of a hyper-detailed simulation created by a giant supercomputer. More shockingly, imagine that the stream of consciousness you are experiencing right now is itself generated by that computer. You yourself are part of the simulation.

Next, imagine that you wake up one morning and find yourself lying on an armour-like back. When you lift your head, you can see your brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections. Your many legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of you, wave about helplessly, as you think: I have been transformed into a giant Kafkaesque beetle.

Finally, imagine that you are Napoleon riding a horse, looking out on the battlefield at Austerlitz, surveying your troops. You feel confident that you will win the imminent battle. In the next moment, you find yourself standing over Donald Trump, and next to Theresa May, Shinzo Abe, Emmanuel Macron, and other heads of states. You are no longer Napoleon. Now you are Angela Merkel, negotiating with other world leaders during a G7 meeting.

These prompts elicit a special form of imagination where we picture a scenario from the first-person perspective or from the inside. We simulate what it would feel like to be the subject at the centre of the scenario. They also show how flexible this form of imagination is: we can, it seems, imagine being avatars in a computer simulation, being members of a different species, or even being two different people successively.