"You can either be a mind in a box or a person in society. The only thing you have to do is choose."
Our minds evolved for personality, you understand. All the creative power of the human imagination derives from an evolved imperative to function in and for society, and personality is the fundamental unit of this function, making it the most natural purpose of our minds. The accompanying capacity to frame and predict the motions of benign particles and biological systems is a repurposing of our natural imperative to frame and predict the motions of humans.
This suggests some things about the character of what we produce through such reporposing, not the least of which is that concepts such as "character" will be found applicable to even plainly inhuman and impersonal phenomena. We see faces in shadows and agency in happenstance, such that the relevance of coincidence to ourselves can most easily be understood as evaluations of our own "luck."
Most easily, but not of necessity. The utility of applying our minds to impersonal phenomena is that there is not actually anyone on the far side of our reasoning to react to our judgments, let alone disagree. The mind may conjure a story about objects moving through space, about systems of friction and pressure and density, and understand reliably how that story will proceed without friction deciding to change its function partway through the drama. Such an application of our creativity, in other words, lends itself to complete understanding; though a better story, one that accounts for and predicts more, is always possible, it is never necessary.
The imagination functions differently when employed for its evolved purpose, however, because it functions in collaboration with other imaginations; the manner of approach which is so successful in predicting particles fails utterly when applied to predicting people, because Prediction Is Not Its Purpose In This Context. In society, the imagination is a mechanism of the formation of relationships, which are the linchpin of social groups(or as I shall henceforth refer to them, gods).
This difference in function may be observed in the fundamental impossibility of objectively considering another person. Any analysis of personality necessarily employs self-reference, not because this is the only available resource for such a reference but rather because it is a mechanism of relationship. We understand others, and indeed even their own relationships to third parties, only within the framework with which we understand ourselves. Where this sort of understanding departs from our understanding of physics is in that no grasp of friction ever revised how the physicist understood themselves. Our personal frameworks grow as part of the process of their application to relationship to other such frameworks. The character of this growth is to become capable of predicting the actions of others, to know them, as well as we know ourselves; a common side-effect of this process is to know ourselves better. To know better what a person can be is to know better what oneself may be.
This makes society useful to the expansion of one's imagination, but does not establish the necessity of their mutual-exclusion. Why can't a mind in a box but dabble, play in the affairs of persons and relationships, and grow from such adventures without making them a central concern?
The two applications of creative thought have, as stated, different approaches and different goals: the one uses abstract framing to produce complete understandings while the other uses self-relation to produce models of reciprocity and coincident personal growth.
To confuse these applications is to pursue entirely different goals: to frame humans abstractly is to analize the actions of an animal, and to self-relate to non-humans is to indulge superstition. To underrate and overrate the relevance of one's own imagination, respectively.
