Research Program / Claims / imagination-12

Without first imagining oneself as one is, an individual cannot survive in a physical sense.

若没有先想象自己如其所是，个体在物理意义上就无法存活。

Concept imagination · Domain Belief Dynamics and Mind–Body Regulation · ontological claim · interface 3/3 · testability 3/3 · status contradicted

This program treats the Seth Material as a source of hypotheses, not as doctrine to be validated. Lead dossiers are AI-compiled from the corpus with a book-and-session citation after every statement; literature reviews are AI web-search summaries whose references were all DOI-verified against Crossref; the agenda draft is an AI synthesis. None of it is Seth's original text, and none of it represents scientific consensus. English fields are machine-translated; the Chinese text is authoritative.

Seth sources (book §session)
Adjudicating experiment
Establish a cohort of approximately 300 adults with multi-sensory aphantasia confirmed by questionnaires and objective imagery metrics, and 300 matched controls; assess self-image, body ownership, interoception, daily living ability, and health data, with 12-month follow-up. Additionally analyze existing data from severe disorders of consciousness and anesthesia for indicators of life support and consciousness. No need to create life-threatening conditions: if the proposition refers to explicit self-image, reliably confirming individuals who survive without such imagery is sufficient to refute it as a necessary condition; if it instead refers to an implicit physiological self-model, the target of testing must be redefined.
Suggested paper title
Is Explicit Self-Imagery Necessary for Everyday Functioning? A Prospective Study of Multisensory Aphantasia
What it would overturn
If explicit self-imagination is truly a necessary condition for survival, it would overturn the physiological hypothesis that "basic life maintenance can persist in the absence of explicit self-representation."
Candidate labs / funders
Adam Zeman; Rebecca Keogh; Joel Pearson; Alexei J. Dawes
Specificity of Seth's formulation
Understood as explicit imagination, it proposes a strong necessary condition for survival, for which counterexamples already exist; if imagination is expanded to any cellular regulation or implicit model, it loses discriminability from existing homeostasis theory.
Note
Aphantasia does not equal absence of thought, all imaginative capacity, or self-awareness; therefore the grading here targets the literal interpretation of explicit self-image, and visual aphantasia alone cannot negate all broad mental representations.
Evidence (2, DOI-verified via Crossref)
  • Lives without imagery – Congenital aphantasia — Adam Zeman, Michaela Dewar, Sergio Della Sala (2015), Cortex
    报告先天缺乏自主视觉意象的存活成人，为“必须先有显式意象才能存活”的解释提供反例。[论文](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2015.05.019)
  • A cognitive profile of multi-sensory imagery, memory and dreaming in aphantasia — Alexei J. Dawes, Rebecca Keogh, Thomas Andrillon, Joel Pearson (2020), Scientific Reports
    较大样本显示部分心盲症者报告广泛多感官意象缺失，但不能据此断定其所有隐性自我表征均缺失。[论文](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-65705-7)

Cite: Future Mind Institute, Seth Material Research Agenda, claim imagination-12, https://www.seth.org.cn/en/research/claims/imagination-12