Conceivability Is Possibility

If something is conceivable, it is possible.  While this statement might generate controversy, it remains objectively true despite whatever misunderstanding of the involved concepts someone might entertain in his or her mind.  I will say it again: anything I can conceive of in my mind is something which is possible.  But what do I mean by this?

I am going to demonstrate that if something is conceivable--if it can be imagined by the mind--it must be possible in some way.  But I do not mean by inconceivable what some might mean.  I do not mean "inconceivable" in a colloquial sense where people call something impossible when it is not.  An example of this can be found in The Phantom Menace when Nute Gunray closes thick blast doors to prevent two Jedi from entering a room and, when one uses a lightsaber to begin penetrating the entire series of blast doors, utters "This is impossible!"  Another example would be if someone put their keys on a counter, turned around, turned back and noticed the keys missing, and asked me what I think happened to them, with me replying "Perhaps a demon is deceiving your senses", and with that person saying "That's impossible!"  Again, someone might say that it is impossible for the laws of physics to change entirely between today and tomorrow, yet absolutely nothing is actually impossible about any of these scenarios.

Whatever is conceivable falls into one of three categories: it is 1) the way reality is (I can conceive of having sensory perceptions and I actually do have sensory perceptions), 2) the way reality could have been (it could have been that when I look at grass I see the color I call blue and not the color I call green), or 3) the way reality could be in the future (I can conceive of gravity reversing tomorrow and that might indeed happen).  It becomes clear that when I say that whatever is conceivable is possible I do not mean that whatever is possible must be true in reality or that in the future it must become true--I only mean that it is, could have been, or could be true.

Whatever is conceivable is whatever is logically possible.  I cannot conceive of or imagine a married bachelor, being asleep and awake simultaneously, existing and not existing simultaneously, or what I call two plus what I call two not equaling what I call four.  It is objectively impossible for these things to be or become reality.  However, I can conceive of my consciousness surviving the death of my body (an afterlife is logically possible), a man and woman sharing intimate non-romantic friendship (nothing about the concepts of platonic friendship or deep intimacy between men and women excludes the other), and a dinosaur living undetected in some remote area on this planet (nothing logically disproves this possibility).  I can also conceive of my parents only pretending to love me, me being inside an alien simulation right now unaware, object permanence failing, and God actually being a malevolent being as Descartes hypothesized in his Meditations--each of these things is also entirely possible in any of the three ways I categorized before.

As logic establishes, if I can conceive of something it follows by utter necessity that whatever I am conceiving or can conceive must be possible in one of the three ways I have described.  Truly, to understand this is to understand what differentiates something that is logically possible from that which is logically impossible.  As such, realizing this truth is highly important for knowledge of logic, epistemology, and metaphysics.