“Baba bear, why can I think of a voice or a song or a story but not able to actually make that voice or sing or tell the story from my mouth? Like now, I can very clearly hear inside my mind how a peacock calls out to peahens but I can’t make that sound. Why is that, Baba?”I thought this should be easy to answer: Just because you can imagine it does not mean you can do it. But when I started to articulate the ‘why?’ behind that, I am unable to explain it to an ‘almost-seven-years-old’. It seems I am facing the exact same issue as the one she wants to know the reason behind.
As they say, if you can’t explain something to a child, you don’t know it yourself.
So, my friends, help me out here. What should I tell her? Indeed, what the reason (and it needs to be arrived at from first principles) that I can’t do everything I can think of, because at the end of it, reality is something my brain is modelling and interpreting on a real-time basis. That’s why dreams feel so real. So, if my brain can see/hear/smell/feel something so clearly, why can’t it reproduce it in a way to fool my…well, brain?
